Northern Arentina and the start of a Bolivian adventure!

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Hello again!

When I last wrote we were in Beunos Aires, from here we took another long, 22hour bus ride North to a town called Salta. Salta was bigger than we expected and had few outstanding attractions within the town, we spent several hours sitting in the handsome plaza surrounded by old colonial buildings drinking amazing coffee and people watching. However, after my initial impressions of the place by the end of our short stay there I was beginning to warm to it, the Plaza pretty, leafy and relaxing, the back streets had a bustling, frenetic atmosphere and there were several huge, beatiful, empty cathedrals. However, after two short nights in Salta, we made a soggy departure for Tilcara in the midst of an aggressive thunder storm!

Tilcara is a small village of mostly mud brick houses set among amazing reddish mountains and huge cacti, I imediately loved the tradditional feel of the place. Our Hostel confirmed my warm feelings with goats bleeting in the yard of the next door house, amazing views of the mountains, huge steaky BBQs and lots of singing, guitar playing and wine drinking. We spent 3 nights in Tilcara and did lots of walking there, we also explored some caves in the mountains by candlelight, one of the caves was tiny and require scrambling on our bellies, however htis cave was a corridor straight through the mountain and when we scramled out of the small crevice on the otherside we were perched on a dizzyingly steep cliff with breath taking views of the jagged purple mountains in the next valley. From Tilcara we visited Pumermarca, anoter tiny village the main draw of which is the setting, it is nestled bellow a famous mountian that looks as though it has been painted by an artist´s brush, a vivid technicolour of greens, purples, oranges and reds.

Following a bonding session over several bottles of wine and hilarious stories of unfortunate bird poo incidents, we set of to the Bolivian border with some new friends. As soon as we crossed the border into Villazon it was clear we were in a new country, one much poorer, more frenetic and in my opinion more fascinating! There were dozens of old ladies with fantastically furrowed faces, wearing long pleated skirts, bowler hats, with 2 long plaits trailing down their backs. There were babies lolling precariously from their mother´s backs and numerous young boys with tooting horns to attract attention to the ice creams they were selling. There was one playful old ice cream man with a cheeky, toothless grin who crept up behind us and tooted his horn right in our ears causing me to inhale the peice of watermelon I was eating and then collapse into a fit of helpless, choking giggles. We got a taxi from Villazon with our friends to Tupiza where we stayed 2 nights. We spent our day in Tupiza horse riding through deep canons, red mountains, cacti and impressive needle like rock formations. We arrived back at the ranch hot, sweaty and exhilirated but with painful, violated bums!

From Tupiza we took an incredible 4 day tour accross the south east of Bolivia. In a jeep with 2 Danish girls, our Bolivian guide and his tradditionally dressed mother we sped along rocky roads and careered round hair pin bends! On the first day we drove through Pampus land full of inquisitive, commical llamas and speedy ostrich, we stopped for a picnic lunch of tradditional Bolivian Saltenos and sweet, spicy llama meat wrapped in corn. We stopped in a small village of mud and straw houses to visit our guide´s grandmother, a tiny lady of 90 with no teeth, living all alone in the mountains. As we left her house we drove on into a ferocious thunder storm, the sky was black and huge forks of thunder were tearing up the sky. Indeed when we got to our village for the night, the house we were meant to be staying in had been struck by lightning! The second day, we visited several spectacular mineral filled lakes of reds, pinks, whites and greens where comical flamingoes paddles in their hundreds. We had a soak in hot springs looking accross a lake whilst hail pummeled our faces. We visited the Desierto de Dali, a fantastic surrealist landscape of multicoloured mountains, flat expanses of flawless sand and queer rock formations of petrified lava. After a bone shaking ride we arrived at our bed for the night, dumped our bags and then set off again for a curious red sliver of colour in the distance. After a few minutes we arrived at the breathtaking Lago Colorada which gets it´s name from the fiery red waters, a result of the micro organisms that live in it. White mineral deposits contrast starkly with red waters, steely grey mountains and yellow grasses. After another fantastic day on the road we arrived at our salt hostel, a beautiful building made entirely of salt bricks, with sparkling salt crystals as a carpet! Yesterday we woke up in darkness at 4am. The stars were fantastic, so numerous and bright and in the east was a milky smudge of light, the first signs of sun rise. As we stopped to watch the sunrise, the salt flats grew around us as the sky became brighter, they were magical, silent and shimmering in the new days light and seemingly limitless, stretching off into the horizon for ever! The low cone of a volcano in the distance was mirrored perfectly in the surface water of the flats. Mountains in the far distance seemed to hover above the ground and it is impossible to see where the salt ends and the sky begins. What struck me more than anything here was the feeling of infinate space in 1,100 square km of whiteness!

After 4 days on the road we reached Uyuni, and after saying goodbye to our Danish friends and our lovely guides we got on a bus for Potosi. Potosi is the highest city in the worls at 4070m! It is a frenetic place with narrow streets where the contents on shops pours out onto the pavements and street vendors fill every spare space! Last night we went in search for dinner, we stumbled across a busy central market and seated ourselves in the foodhall there where we were unashamedly scrutinized by the locals! After our bellies were full of spicy soup we set off to explore the market, unaware of what strange and interesting things we might find. After passing the usual fruit and vege and women sat amongst huge bags of coca leaves, we stumbled accross a tradditional medicines stall. The stall contained bags of all sorts of unidentifiable and brightly coloured substances but the most alarming were a large pile of llama foetuses complete with umbilicle! As we walked further into the bowels of this intrigueing market we came accross cows tongues hung around stalls like festive bunting, disembodied cows noses neatly lined up like a little nasal army and furry ears protruding from plastic buckets. This made for a rather enlightening evening walk!

Tomorrow we brave the working silver mines!

Goodbye until next time!

PS. ounctuation may be lacking because I can´t figure out the Bolivian keyboard!

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