Mines, Salar de Uyuni and Aussies

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Hello all

So we´re back in Chile! In San Pedro de Atacama which so far we love, but more about that next time.

From where we were in Putre we managed to flag down a bus headed for La Paz, and luckily they had just enough room! And a hot meal which was a first. Crossing over the border wasn´t too exciting other than there seemed to be quite a bit of land in between the Chilean border control and the Bolivian one...no man´s land? Who knows, but it was true what everyone had told us about Bolivia. The landscape just immediately got more interesting, as you (might) see from the photos.

Arriving in La Paz was slightly disorientating, since we were forced against our first instinct when we got off the bus (retrieve the bags) and ushered away to a medical room where 3 women were having fun playing doctor because of swine flu. We started to get slightly nervous due to the fact I´ve been coughing and Tom´s been sniffling for the past 3 weeks, but we were examined and sent away with a prescription for ibruprofen....(?)

We had a hectic half an hour in La Paz bus station trying to find a bus to take us to Potosi, and when we eventually did get on one, we were almost stuck sitting next to a local thief who pretended to only speak French. The bus staff then set about checking peoples tickets when they were already on the bus and causing lots of unnecessary commotion (and we thought Peru was bad.)

Our 11 hour journey wasn´t too bad for a night bus although there was the slight issue of the absence of a toilet on board. And just 1 toilet stop.

So we arrived in Potosi with no book and no idea of the exchange rate. This really bit us in the bum when we arrived at the hostel I´d quickly scribbled down the name of from the internet at 4 a.m and he charged us 120 bolivianos. That could be really cheap, we thought, so we went to sleep and thought nothing else of it. When we woke up looking for breakfast and exploring the town we decided to find out what the exchange rate was, and realised we´d paid 12 pounds altogether, not too terrible. However, we then discovered the going rate for other hostels was 40 bolivianos and cried alll the way home.

Potosi is a charming city though extremely polluted and the main attractions are its many churches. So we spent 2 days there 1 of whch was spent on a tour of the local mines, which during once-upon-a-colonial time was a silver mine and is now just a poor quality zinc mine, though about 5,000 people till work there (including children.) Our guide was an ex-miner, and though only in his early 20s, had obviously spent a lot of time doing the things that miners do. As a gift, it´s expected that you give a miner a bag of coca leaves when you visit. This is because they spend about 8 hours a day in the mine, chewing coca leaves constantly in a ball in their cheek. On Fridays they also like to drink a bit of 96% alcohol after offering a bit to Pacha Mama.

We got to dress up like miners and go down into the mines for a couple of hours (not claustrophobic at all..) and see how they still work today. Tom even got to push the cart full of rock!! We also got to see what happens when you put some dynamite in a watermelon...which was alot of fun.

It wasn´t my personal favourite thing but Tom was really interested especially after having read "The Road to Wigan Pier" and it was the only thing we´ve done really that gave us an insight into regular people´s every day lives.

Such was the situation of little to do in Potosi that we went to see a film, thinking it would have English subtitles (if you were the cleaning staff, why would you tell someone that?) but sadly it didn´t. El Che will have to be watched again when we get home!

The next day we got a bus to Uyuni which isn´t an exciting town but is necessary to go through if you want to see the Salar de Uyuni (the biggest salt flat in he world.) It was a fantastic bus trip with the most diverse and exciting landscape we´d seen yet...some of the ground actually looked like a rainbow. Nothing like losing your phone to bring you down though. Tom was listenng to the music on my phone and left it on his seat, but by the time we´d realised it had probaby fallen onto the floor it was gone (theiving Bolivians....) Oh well, that´s what travel insurance is for!

We were staying in Uyuni one night before starting our 3 day 2 night tour to see the salt flat and some of the interesting things in the area the next day, so we had dinner but my glass of wine didn´nt go down too well with my cough mixture so it was an early night for me.

Our tour was slightly held up by our presumptous notion that a shop might have an electronic way to pay by VISA, but Tom got his jumper and the shop got their money and we drove away in the end. In our tour group their were 4 other people, 2 Korean people from New Zealand and 2 Aussies, all in their 20s, and our driver and guide Juan, who didn´t speak any English apart from "full". Since I had the best Spanish I totally got to sit up front and be translator! Very exciting at first but it slowly transpired that Juan didnt like speaking slowly, and didn´t seem to care that I was obviously having trouble understanding his pronunciation, so many explanations were half explanations.

On the first day we went firstly to the Cementerio de Trenes (Train Cemetery) just outside of Uyuni, where all the super old steam trains have been left to rust, although many are half destructed now due to people stealing parts for recycling.

We then visited the town called Colchani whch is a town on the edge of the salt flat, whose inhabitants all work in the salt industry connected to the Salar. They showed us how they dry it and bag it up to be sold, after adding yoda which we still have no idea about.

It might seem slightly worrying that people are just hacking away bits of their national treasure to sell for food but we were told that each time it rains the salar gets bigger, since the minerals in the ground dissolve the rain water then crystalise to form salt when the water evaporates. The salar is now 12,000 km2, and it used to be 10,000, so the bolivian people can keep using it as much as they like. Millions of years ago there was an ocean where now the Salar de Uyuni, Lake Titicaca and 2 other places now are, but after volcanoes and earthquakes the ground was elevated and split up into lakes, however the salar didnt have any water flowing into it other than rainwater, so it all evaporated and thats why we´re left with the salt flat. It is very impressive, and quite exciting to be able to look one way and see nothing but white in the distance.

The next place we visited was a really strange mass of land in the middle of the Salar known as fish island because of its shape. Its covered with cacti, and thats about it. A strange place! We then went to the part of the salt flat which isnt broken up into hexagonal shapes by the earth underneath, where its just flat. This is where the workers cut the salt out in blocks for the various salt hotels in the area and also for cattle licks.

We stayed in a salt hotel that night which sounds incredibly exotic but was very basic inside, but we were attended to well by our guide and had a nice evening and an early night.

The next day we got up super early on request so that we could watch the sunrise over the salt flat, which was a very cold experience. We did a lot of driving on the second day, we visited lots of lakes with flamingoes and strange rock formations due to the volcanoes around, one of which we saw fuming, and we also say he famous "rock tree" which is a rock sticking out of the ground in the desert which has been eroded by 100 mph winds to look like a tree.

We spent the night in a refuge in the desert with all the other tour groups of the day in dorm rooms. Much frivolity was had in the way of card games with the australians all evening, and we hadl ots of fun.

Waking up the next morning was the coldest time of our lives as we woke up at 5.00 to get to the geysers in time. They were cool! But incredibly smelly of sulphur. We then continued on to the hot springs where many crazy people were bathing. We both wanted to but were incredibly scared of how cold it would be when we got out (given we were both already frozen) so settled for just paddling instead. From there we went to see another lake and then were taken to the border because we were taking a bus straight to San Pedro. After saying goodbye to our group, we witnessed the worst feat of organisation in the history of organising things. The bus company clearly preferred to send out how many buses it wanted to rather than actually look at how may tickets theyd sold, so after about 15 minutes of waiting round in the cold they decided to move the bus to a slightly different place, and then proceeded to, "in an organised" way, load bag and people onto the bus. It seemed to be the rule that if you spoke to the driver you´d be on next. Somehow we ended up at the end (too nice and english for pushing past people) and there was just us and this Irish girl who didnt have a seat. So they "organised" for us to go with another gentleman on his bus, and after a while, once the bus had gone (along with our tickets) he started asking us for money. By this point I was pretty much fuming so after shouting in Spanish for a while we all came to the agreement that the bus company would pay this freelance man, and we got accross the border, with only a mild amount of shouting at the other end.

All in all, a very good time in Bolivia though mixed experiences. Will have to come back again to do it properly!!

Ciao for now,

Tom and Connie x

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Comments

[Mr The Murphy]

Great outfits!!!

[Vicky]

Dust, dust, dust
Tom, are you looking trimmer in that rather fetching yellow outfit? And glad you've both been passed as not having Swine Flu; the world is going mad !! xx