Bolivia begins... San Pedro de Atacama - Uyuni

---

Hola otra vez!

OK, so I told a little white lie about the nest blog coming very soon, but I will start where I left off in the last entry and bring it up to date,if that is possible in one entry!

The bus journey from Antofagasta to San Pedro de Atacama, desert oasis town, was incredible. We went overnight, as we did very often in Chile and Argentina in order to save paying a bus fare as well as a night's accommodation, but from the moment the sun began to rise at about 6am I could see that the landscape was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Rocky desert of various shades had opened out all around us. For a little while we travelled along the rugged coast and we passed one relatively large coastal town, but then nothing more than a few random industrial plants for hours, and I contemplated how strange and cut off you would be living in the middle of the desert.

When we got off of the bus in San Pedro de Atacama, a wall of heat hit us, and we immediately changed out of our walking boots (which we always have to wear on buses to save the hassle of finding a corner of our bags to stuff them in to!) and exchanged them for on our flip flops to walk across the dusty sand to our lovely relaxed hostel, Iquisa,which was 10 minutes out of town. We soon found that everything in San Pedro was dusty, there was no way of avoiding it, just like when you holiday in a cottage near the beach in the UK! It was a different kind of sand though. Although at times it had that familiar sandy smell just like a beach at home, the heat and the dust and the "fluffiness"of the sand made it a completely new experience. We were glad that our hostel was out of town, as the centre of San Pedro was a tourist hub comprising of a shady plaza next to the church with a cactus-wood roof and a few streets bursting with restaurants, tour operators and internet cafes which doubled up as bike hire outlets.

We spent a while in San Pedro, as Mark got a tummy bug and was ill for almost our whole time there, unfortunately when we left he still wasn´t completely better, but we'd booked our 3 day jeep tour crossing to Bolivia in the hope that he would be, and we were only able to delay it for a day. Before we left, we vistited the famous El Tatio geysers at 6am, which were fantastically beautiful and a strange experience- it was surreal to watch bubbling, boiling hot water shooting out of the ground, and trails of steam emerging from holes which resembled mini-volcanoes. Some of the tour groups used the (very) hot pools of water to warm milk for hot chocolate, or to hard boil eggs to eat. From San Pedro we also visited the "Termas Puritamas", a set of 7 natural, warm thermal pools which sprang from an underground source in a "quebrada", a big crack in the landscape giving way to a small gorge. We spent 3 hours in the pools and were lucky enough to have them all to ourselves as all the tour groups go in the morning, and that afternoon they were deserted apart from us and our guide, Jose, who left us to it and came to find us when to was time to go, with some drinks and chocolate incase the altitude was getting to us - we were at 3500 metres.

When we left San Pedro de Atacama to embark ono ur 3 day desert and salt flat tour, we were excited about moving on to Bolivia as we'd heard that it was amazing and completely different from Chile and Argentina. Statistically, Bolivia is the poorest country in South America and there is a large indigenous population,larger than in Chile or Argentina, which is very obvious from the moment you step foot in the country. Our group of 6 set off in a minibus to the border with Bolivia at 8am, and by 11am we were at the border crossing eating our breakfast from the back of the minibus. Luckily it turned out that we had a fantastic group for our tour, Mark and I, a couple called Maru and Ravi, Maru from Mexico and Ravi from the US, and a cheeky french couple called Jean-Yves and Benoit who were loads of fun and reminded me of two cheeky schoolboys,plus they gave me the opportunity to attempt to interchange between english, french and spanish throughout the 3 days, which had me constantly tripping over my words and getting tongue-tied. When I asked if there was toilet at the border, our guide, driver and chef, Ever, flashed me a bemused grin and waved me in the direction of a rusty old bus wreck a few hundred yards away. No problems, I thought, ever since I joined the uni kayak club I became a pro at peeing in many an outside location, and confidently marched over to the bus wreck. On arrival, I realised that many a desperate person had made use of this location,bearing in mind we were in the middle of a wide,flat desert plain, and the most fitting word I can think of to describe it is a cesspit, quite literally. However, not one to be defeated, and knowing that I really couldn't hold it any longer, I did my business and got out of there as soon as I could. I had to repeat this experience a fair few times during the trip as there are very few toilets in the midst of the Atacama desert or the Uyuni salt flats (actually,you're lucky to find a rock to pee behind) although nowhere as bad as the first time. It did upset me sometimes to be in the middle of such a breathtakingly beautiful place as the desert and to see that irresponsible tourists had left mountains of dirty toilet paper all over the place. In the heat of the desert, nothing deteriorates, everything remains perfectly preserved. In ten years time, their toilet paper will still be there. I really feel that the sort of people that will do that should not be on a desert tour, they should stay at home and litter their own garden with their toilet paper.

Anyway, rant over, the tour was incredible. We saw sights that we couldn't have imagined. On the first day we passed a huge lake set against grey mountains, decorated with hundreds of pink flamingoes. It was very windy,we almost lost our hats a few times! We saw the laguna verde (green lake) and the laguna blanco (white lake) which are so called as they are right next to eachother, so the coliur difference is startling. Later on we bathed in the polque hot springs in the middle of a flat desert plain with a mountainous backdrop,which at 38 degrees was like getting into a warm bath, incredible! We lunched on salad and frankfurter sausages and moved on to the morning sun geyser basin, where the land was so many different shades of red, pink, blue and green, forming beautiful craters out of which grey bubbling water up to 200 degrees was spurting, it looked like the surface of another planet. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Soon afterwards, we sighted the Laguna Colorada and I changed my mind about the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen! A special kind of algae turns the water red in places, and the lake is set against a dazzling white salt flat, so the incredible swirls of colour set against more mountains was breathtaking. We sat beside it for ages, transfixed. The only time I've ever seen colours and shades like that before are in photographs of the gases surrounding the planets in our solar system. I took lots of photgraphs despite being sure that they wouldn't do it justice and I was right, nothing can compare to being there and seeing it. We felt very lucky.

We stayed the night at a hostel called Hualla Jara. The six of us shared a teeny little room with 6 beds squeezed in and barely room for our backpacks, but we were all good friends by that point so being cosy was fine! We had a dinner of vegetable soup and more frankfurters- this time on a bed of chips and fried onions- and went to bed. We were sleeping at 4200 metres above sea level and were all wondering whether the altitude would get to us. I had a headache but luckily I'd come prepared and brought some coca leaves along. I poured some hot water over them and a cup of coca tea sorted me out. In San Pedro, Mark had woken one night with what seemed like quite serious breathing problems, but after an hour or so of sitting outside in the cold they eased, and he went back to sleep and seemed OK. The morning after our first night in the desert, everyone in our group except Mark and I reported waking up in the night struggling to breathe, feeling like they couldn't fill their lungs. Luckily, that was the extent of our altitude troubles, nobody was sick or had anything worse than a headache after that. The next morning we were the last group to leave the hostel and we spent a while scalding Ever and being cross that we'd been ready to eat at 7am as he'd asked ... later we realised that not one of us had clocked that we should have put pur clocks forward an hour at the border, so we were actually ready to eat at 6am,but we all thought it was 7am ... we hadto apologise to Ever,although we didn't feel too bad as it turned out he had been up all night drinking anyway as it was another guide's birthday, apparently! He was obviously pretty hungover and Benoit was a tad worried about him driving until we pointed out that we were after all in the desert... Ever would manage well to hit anything on those wide open desert plains! There was one thing which upset us all,when Ever had an argument with one of the girls who ran the hostel, refusing to pay her. We don't know what for, it could have been some private arrangement between the two of them and nothing to do with our tour, but it made us very uneasy and upset as the poor girl had to fight to get anything out of him, and there was a definite underlying feeling that if the girls weren't afraid of the guides then they just didn't like them, we all felt like the girls were being taken advantage of, probably in more ways than one, but we also knew that there was nothing we could do and for the first hour or so of our journey we sat in contemplative silence,until Ever asked for some of Maru's funky mexican pop music.

On our second day we saw the arbol de piedra, or stone tree, which to me wasn't anything special. It did resemble a tree. There were some other huge, interesting rock formations though, and I went for a wander and found a brick structure hidden around the back of some rocks which had been built there by narcotraficantes - drug smugglers- as there are few controls in that area. We followed on to four different highland lakes, which were very beautiful, all dotted with pink flamingoes. We stopped for a while to watch some graceful vicunas, which resemble a cross between humpless camels and deer. In the afternoon we saw the ollague volcano from a distance and had fun climbing on some rocks. On the Chiguna salt flats we got a puncture but we all mucked in and within 15 mins we were on the road again. We were glad that we'd chosen Estrella del Sur, a reliable tour company, because we saw many jeeps broken down and we had to give other groups some of our reserve petrol and oil. One group stopped us to ask for a wrench, as they had a puncture and a spare wheel, but the wrong sized wrench for the wheel! Unfortunately we couldn't help out there and had to leave them to flag somebody else down. Our room for the second night was in the house of an old couple in a town, where we had a hot shower and good dinner and went to check out a fiesta, which turned out to be a secondary school dance celebrating the end of exams!

On our last day we saw the sunrise on the uyuni salt flats which was incredibly beautiful. Little by little the sun rose over the horozon and crusty salt, sparkling white, stretched out for miles around us. We breakfasted at the Isla de los Pecadores (fishermans island) where we toured the island taking pictures of the hundreds of towering, odly-shaped catci which covered it. The bins and signs were made from cactus wood. The island was incredible, with lots of fossilised coral from when it used to be completely submerged by the sea, thousands of years ago. Our next stop was the salt museum and salt mines, which were a let down really as the museum contained some fun sculptures but nothing informative about the salt flats or mines as we'd hoped. Our last stop in Uyuni was the train cemetary, which is a bit of land where all of the steam and coal engines were dumped when diesel engines came into use. It was fascinating and Mark really enjoyed climbing in and out of all of the bits of train. The rounded fronts of the engines reminded me of Thomas the Tank.

And so, we were in Uyuni, our first stop in Bolivia. We checked into a hotel where the "hot" showers barely made it to lukewarm and the toilet flush was a bucket of water which we had to collect from a tank in the hall, but for under 10pounds a night we weren't to complain. The six of us went for a goodbye dinner before we all made our way to our next destinations, and that was the end of our desert tour ... and this is FINALLY the end of this blog entry.

Next one to come soon, love to all, Amy and Mark xxxxxxxxxx

---

Photos

San Pedro de Atacama desert
I didn´t expect the desert to be quite so rocky, guess i'd seen too many pictures of huge sandy plains with a few cacti dotted around!

Termas Puritamas
The amazing hot springs

PB200385
Amazing scenery on our desert tour

Polque hot springs
like a hot bath ... lovely!

PB220611
Sunrise at the salt flats

PB220721
Mark in a train at the train cemetary