Blogs from Potosí Department, Bolivia, South America - page 143

Have just completed my first week in Bolivia and to say that getting around this country has been eventful would be an understatement!! After crossing the border without the slightest hitch, I boarded a bus to head north to the town of Tupiza. After hearing horror stories about the state of Bolivian buses I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the vehicle - an assigned seat and a reasonable amount of legroom - although there was a definate whiff of piss coming from the aisles!!!. However, this was all to change as, after narrowly missing a fish-tailing truck heading the other way, we proceeded to have a blow-out at top speed. Luckily we ground to an unceremonious halt on the road, rather than in the scary looking ditch!! Anyhow, the conductor hitched a ride back ... read more

In the middle of the Altiplano is the Salar de Uyuni, one of the biggest salt lakes on earth. I spent some days in the town with the same name visit the salt lake and to acclimatize to the high altitude conditions around there and the passes to come. With a group of mostly spanish speaking guys I had a guided tour of the lake. We drove in a run-down jeep across the extensive white, visited a salt producing family (Well, is more packing than producing, since the salt is already there. It just has to be dried and filled into plastik bags.), visited Isla de pescadores, a cactus island, had fun with salt crystals, and in the evening stoped for some pictures at the old train cementery. It was one of the best places I ... read more

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile We caught a Pullman del Sur bus from Santiago to Calama (20hrs overnight) for $30000p each for Salon Cama, downstairs on the bus, very comfortable. In Calama, we caught a TurBus bus to San Pedro de Atacama (fairly regular, about 1 hr trip, $1300p). The Atacama desert was extremely barren in places along the bus trip, sometimes absolutely nothing resembling life at all. San Pedro (2400m) is a nice little village in an oasis with adobe buildings everywhere. It has all the amenities a tourist could want but that also means the place is crawling with tourist. Still a very nice place to hang out for a few days, particularly if you are acclimitizing before heading up even higher. We did a good tour of the Valley of the Moon and ... read more

On 20th Feb at 7.30 a.m. we got a bus from Puno in Peru to La Paz (3660m) in Bolivia. The views of the barren mountains, some snow capped, were really beautiful. We arrived in La Paz at 5.15 p.m., and got a taxi to a relatively nice hotel in the heart of the city. It was really chaotic, with loads of traffic and every inch of pavement occupied by stalls and people shouting about what they were trying to sell. We were still with George and Em (Rein and Char had decided to stop for a few days at Copacabana, a small town on Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian side) and we all had a good feeling about La Paz, which seemed really exciting and entertaining. Of course I wouldn’t want to live there it ... read more

The rest of yesterday in Potosi was basically spent taking it easy. We all needed it. It was nice to just drink tea, take naps, read books, surf the internet and do NOTHING. Of course we did go back to our favorite bathroom errr..café and then we partook in some traditional Bolivian music and ate traditional Bolivian food at a local restaurant for dinner. The instruments used here, besides regular guitars, are several different lengths of pan flutes and fifes, and an instrument called a charango, which looks like a small guitar with 5 sets of double strings (that’s 10 strings for all you non-mathematically incline friends of mine!). If you pull out your old Paul Simon CDs and play the song El Condor Pasa, you can hear the sounds of these different instruments. Apparently Simon ... read more