Advertisement
Published: January 22nd 2011
Edit Blog Post
Wow! Bolivia has been amazing! The people the culture and the sights! For a small poor land locked country, it sure has blown us away.
After Santa Cruz we took the bus to La Paz where we hung out for a few days checking out the sights. La Paz is a very neat city situated at 3600m above sea level. Nothing in this city is flat. Which makes walking around all that much harder. In fact most of the houses the foundation is the most expensive part as they have to build it so sturdy to not fall down the hill. There really is a bolivian culture that has survived through westernization. You can see it in how they dress, eat and socialize. It is truly different to our culture. While many Bolivians are very poor by our standards they are still pleasant people.
While we were in La Paz we were doing a debate about whether or not to take the 12 hour bus ride to go down and see the salt flats. In the end we decided to go as so many people raved about them and i´m so glad we did. Salar de Uyuni was amazing.
We took a tour with Red Planet Expeditions. This was a 3 day tour which takes you through the entire area. We actually had to do a lot of research for the tour company as many were said to be terrible (of this we witnessed on the trip).
The first day of the tour we went to the train grave yard and into the salt flats. The salt flats were created from being the bottom of the lake. There are islands on the flats (well what used to be islands) which are the only places where plant life grows. I have to say that the salt flats were so spectacular. They were completely flat and never ending white. At one point we stopped and did a funny photo shoot with the white back ground. That too was a lot of fun.
One of the islands in the salt flats had the biggest cactus´s i´ve ever saw. I think the tallest one was 9 meters! That night we stayed in a salt hotel. This was very neat to see and it was very practical as it didn´t get very cold at all!
The next day we saw tons
of lagoons, flamingos and rock formations from volcano´s. One of the volcano´s was semi-active and we could see smoke coming out of it. We also saw sights of huge rocks which were coral covered with petrified lava. We stopped and saw the famous arbol tree rock (a rock shaped like a tree). However we couldn´t stay long as the wind was so fierce and sand was whipping into us. Driving away we witnessed a trucks dust trail traveling faster then the truck!
The last day we got up at 4am to go out and see active geysers and fumaroles. To do this we went into a semi active volcano crater. We jumped through a geyser which wasn´t very hot then went and walked through the fumaroles. Fumeroles are holes in the ground where heat is coming up from the earth. It´s heating the ground so much that it bubbles. The range of tempreature was from 30-200 degrees. When we were walking on the narrow path between the pots we often had to stop to let the smoke clear so we could safely find out step.
After this we went to some natural hot springs and chilled out. This
was the last signifigant stop on the tour. We are now back in La Paz.
After that trip we don´t know what can beat it. However we are going to try as we are going to tempt our fate and mountain bike down the death road tomorrow. This road is called it due to it being so dangerous to drive down, much safer to bike. Here´s a page with info on it:
http://www.ssqq.com/archive/vinlin27b.htm
Times like these I wish I let Jason teach me a thing or two about mountain biking when I was at home.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0402s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb