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In La Paz we booked a trip to Rurrenabaque to do a three day pampas Tour. We had heard great things about these trips to the pampas in the Amazon Basin where there was an abundance of wildlife to be seen. The landing strip in Rurrenabaque is grass and there was heavy rain fall on the morning of our flight so it was cancelled. Our flight was rescheduled for the next day but unfortunately it rained again and the flight agin did not go ahead. So after sittying around for two days we reluctantly decided to cancel our trip to the Pampas and continue on our travels to our next destination.
Our next stop was a brief two day visit to Potosi, La Paz. Potosi is a small city in Bolivia and is most famous for the silver mines in the Cerro Rico just outside the town. While the mine is most famous for the silver extracted there, Zinc, lead and mercury are also mined there now. There are approximatley 15,000 miners working in the mines. As we were to find out out the miners work in the harshest conditions. The guide told us that the average life expectancy of
the miners is 45-50 years old and that the main illnesses suffered by the miners are respiratory. Unfortunately there are still boys as young as 8 years old working in the mines. A visit to the mines was our main reason for stopping at Potosi so we booked a tour with Kaola Tours (recommended to us). We were fully kitted out in miners protective clothing for the trip. The tour bus stopped in the miners market where we purchased some gifts for the miners. We purchased dynamite and softdrinks which we gave to the miners when we arrived.
Our visit to the mine was quite a shocking experince. We scrambled and crawled in very narrow and dirty tunnels , down four levels to where the miners were working. It was not a place for the claustrophobic as you needed to be on your hands and knees a lot of the time. Oxygen was at a premium in the mine and was a very uncomfortable place to be, even just on a tour. We met and observed lots of miners working in the confined spaces of the mines. Very primitative work practices are used here with hammers picks and shovels
being used. The guide told us that due to the quality of the minerals being mined here, there is good money to be made mining here and that professionals such as teachers are working in the mines because the money is better. Most miners work very long hours (14-16 hours) a day.
While most of the miners are christian, once inside the mine ancient beliefs still exist and the miners still make sacrifices to the gods, the devil tio, in the hope they will find high quality of minerals. We were glad to crawl our way back out of the mine to the fresh air again and when the guide asked did anyone want to stay and work for the day , needless to say there were no takers. We had kept some of the sticks of dynamite so before we left the mine we carried out a few controlled explosions and then went back to Potosi for a well earned cold drink before taking a rough 7 hour bus journey to Uyuni.
Uyuni was our starting point for our trip to the Salar De Uyuni (Salt Flats). The town of Uyuni was quite desolate and did not
have much to offer so after a brief and unmemorable stay we headed off on our three day trip to the Salar De Uyuni. On the first day of the trip we visited the salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flat at 12,000 square km. It was an amazing and surreal experience to see the pristine white expanses of the dried salt lake, nothing but white as far as the eye could see, coupled with the dazzling blue sky. We stopped at various points along the salt flat to take pictures and just marvel at the most unusual of environments. We stopped for lunch at the Isla de los Pescadores with its giant Cactus trees which seemed somehow out of place here. We spent the rest of the first day on the blinding white dessert that is the salt flat before spending the night in a guest house made almost entirely from salt. It had floors covered in grains of salt and the beds and bedside lockers were of salt, it was a very cosy place to spend the night and stayed warm inside even though it got bitterly cold outside.
On the second day of the trip
we got up in time to see the sunrise on the Salar de Uyuni. Then we headed off in the jeep in a south west direction towards the lake and volcanic area. We vistied a number of spectacular lakes and saw an abundance of wildlife. At the magnificent Laguna Los Flamingos (turquoise in colour) and Laguna Colorado (bright red in colour surrounded by white salt on the shore) we saw a number of different types of Flamingos feeding in the waters. There were many other birds circling the skies and native foxes happily running around in groups just metres from where we ate lunch. Moving through the desert in the afternoon we passed some amazing rock formations which our guide told us had previously been beneath the sand on the earth surface but as the sand is swept away more of the rocks become visible.
We spent the second night of the trip in very basic accommodation beside Laguna Verde. it was very cold (-20degrees C) during the night with no heating or Electricity. At 5am the following morning we departed to see the Geyser basin. The bubbling earth surface and steaming mud pots and the earths random expulsion
of gases high into the sky was like what I would have imagined planet Mars to be like. We had never seen anything like it before.
We spent some time in the lovely Termas de Polques (hot springs) and had breakfast before crossing the Chilean Border to San Pedro de Atacama. We continue our trip here.
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