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Published: December 4th 2005
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It didn´t take long for Uyuni to live down to our very low expectiations for the place - Emer´s description of the place implied that we wouldn´t want to spend long there and found nothing to contradict that assessment. However leaving wasn´t as easy as we had hoped. Our plan was to take the ´luxury tourist bus´ to make the notoriously unpleasant journey to La Paz more bearable and not likely to break the bank at $25 for the 12hour journey. However after waiting for several hours for the agency to open we were told that the bus was cancelled that day (Friday) due to protestors blocking the road (something to do with some elections due later this month) and we would have to wait until Sunday. Not really what we wanted to hear!
However when we checked a few of the local companies we found that their services were running as normal. So we were stuck between a rock (2 days in Uyuni) and a hard place (a 12 hour bus journey that, on a local bus, was reported to be cold and uncomfortable at best). We decided that the bus was probably the lesser of two evils and
so booked our tickets for that evening and headed off for some pizza. These were tasty and enormous so we took the leftovers as take out for when we got hungry on the bus.
The bus journey was better than expected as it wasn´t cold and we arrived in La Paz somewhere near on time about 8am the following morning. Toni thought this was a result but then she did sleep through one of the 2 stops to repair punctures and didn´t have a smelly Bolivian guy sitting on the ground in the aisle next to her (or sometimes standing over her or even trying to sit on her armrest).
On arriving in La Paz we were a bit nervous about having bags stolen and in our preoccupation with our bags we left our remaining pizza behind (gutted!). We found a recommended hostal easily enough and headed out into La Paz. Our good intentions to go for a walk on Saturday afternoon went to pot when we (or Toni) found the markets. After a few hours Andy was unsurprisingly flagging after his fun night on the bus! The witch´s market in La Paz was fascinating and sold all
sorts of horrible creatures (the ´highlight´ being llama foetuses) but otherwise we mainly found plenty of nice/quirky items amongst the usual tat! We took Kim and Ricky´s advice and headed to Oliver´s Travels for dinner - the 100% authentic English pub (served by a 100% American girl). We keep hearing stories of people getting dodgy bellies in Bolivia so we´ve been playing it safe with Pizza and then Curry but hey.....
Sunday morning we woke early to go to Tiwanaku to see an archaelogical site near Lake Titicaca. Although neither of us had heard of this before we were pretty amazed by the stone carvings and partially excavated ruins. Seeing these ruins have certainly raised our hopes for what we will see in Machu Pichu and around Cuzco. Although we had obviously heard of the Inca civilisation we were surprised to learn that the Tiwanaku empire spread over 600,000 sq km and lasted approx. 2,700 years (many times longer than the Inca´s) with sophisticated architecture, astronomy and agricultural techniques.
Unfortunately many of the Tiwanaku sites are still buried as raising the estimated $6million it would cost to fully uncover this site alone is not as easy in Bolivia
as it might be elsewhere in the world! The Universities of Chiago and Mexico both have teams working on the site and I can only imagine that in 10 years this will be absolutely incredible. The monoliths stood over 7m tall and the stone carvings in the walls of the temples distinctly showed the knowledge these people had of races from all over the world some 2000 years ago.
The journey home was almost indescribable. Vehicles travelling in both directions chose to drive the wrong way down the dual carriageway as they felt this would speed up their progress. Needless to say this only added to the chaos of a road where ´lanes´ seemed to appear and disappear. Allowing another vehicle to merge in front of you was clearly a cardinal sin and was to be avoided at all costs even if this meant bumping into the vehicle in front of you (that was us). Having escaped this first experience we were confronted by even more chaos. We felt sorry for the single transit police officer trying to control a crossroads between our 12 lane highway (that only had lanes marked for six) and another road from which the drivers were determined to exit. Frantic beeping drowned his whistle blowing as he ran from one side to the other of the gridlock waving his arms in the hope that some order might be restored. If you can imagine a large vehicle filled area where every other vehicle is perpendicular to the next you might start to get the picture!
Now back in La Paz, we are currently debating what unauthentic food we can eat tonight in preparation for our trip down the ´WMDR´ mountain bike trip tomorrow. We´ll elaborate in our next update.....
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Karen
non-member comment
I¨m Canadian
Hey just for the record you were actually served by a 100% Canadian girl at Oli´s