La Paz

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Hey everybody😊


i've only just discovered the joys of travelblog. definately gonna upload the pictures of the last few weeks in south america as soon as i find a usb cable..could be quite a mission but i'll keep trying😊

so far you can have a look at carineries.bebo.com, loads of pictures but without comments...well i guess sometimes that's not a bad thing!

here for now a little summary of what i've been up to so far (some of the parts might look familiar to you but hey...copy paste function is quite a useful one when a bit in a hurry!)

I started off in SANTIAGO DE CHILE. thought i should go there to see what i'm gonna miss out on by not studying there for a year. and i can confidently say: i'm happy i'm gonna be in leeds with all my mates. don't get me wrong, it's a nice city but not really the place where i'd wanna be for a year and at the same time miss out on seeing my friends in europe. so i stayed there for a week,....well a few days longer cause i got stuck...you know, one day people complain that it's a shit skying season cause there is no snow and then the next day when you wanna leave they have to close the mountain pass cause everything is snowed in.....tsss.... so i went to the station 3 days in a row to be sent home again every time... luckily i had met some very special and cool people.
We discovered the city together but above all had some very funny "pisco sour" adventures...all started off by some of us thinking that this drink comes in shots. all wrong and it really didn't help that i ordered 2 of them at once, accompanied by a piña colada. just because i didn't wanna queue..and then there I was, with my massive glasses of pisco sour and piña colada...trying to finish them off before they got warm...
that followed by some sort of beer drinking challenge ended up in an apparently unforgettable night, which I personally can't quite remember😉 details have been recovered the following day by carefully reconstructing the events with all the people involved. but at some point i thought i need to get on with the travelling and finally booked a flight. kinda brought my budget slightly out of balance but to see my "family" in BUENOS AIRES it was sooooooooooooo worth it. I love those guys so much!! there are also gonna be more pictures here soon, just need to find a way to transfer them from phone to pc...


i was there for a bit more than a week. definately not enough time but at least we spent as much time together as possible. at the same time i felt quite sentimental about going to all the little corner cafes i'd been to with jo last year. all good memories and part of what made me love the city so much. anyways, manu took good care of me, although he was supposed to study for exams. or maybe because of that? we all know the powers of procrastination... in the end he passed them all, so congrats for that. either very clever or easy exams 😉 (y manu, ahora no te enojes, si?😉 ) i saw some good concerts and also some theater...my hostmum took me to a really funny puppetplay about typical porteños. couldn't have been more accurate😊 actually felt really cultural the whole time. but not touristy. really feels like home. so wanna go back already!!! it was really hard to leave with that thought in mind that it's gonna be ages before i can actually go back...if i hadn't had my ticket from lima i would have been very tempted to stay... although i know i actually wanna see new stuff.

so off to SALTA in the north of argentina i went. saw some ammaaaaaazing canyons in the andes...so calm up there. and also the people are very different. really doesn't have anything in commun with buenos aires. the city is very european compared to the rest of the country. many more indigenous people up there in salta and their way of living also is very different. much slower and way more traditional. To really appreciate the calmness of the mountains i walked along on a mountain road for 6 hours..with breaks here and there to explore the "GARGANTA DEL DIABLO", the devil's throat in the "QUEBRADA DE CAFAYATE". In the end i took a bus all the way up to a little mountain town called cafayate.


Up to then i had already spent an impressive amount of hours on buses but the best was yet to come! from the moment i left argentina everything got slightly rocky. the roads literally and the buses kinda too😊my mistake that i looked things up on a map and thought everything was kinda closer....i was to be proven wrong already on the first part of the trip😊 i thought, salta was just about on the border. reality: 8 hours. doesn't seem much now but still was quite a mission. drove there over night on a dodgy bus to LA QUIACA at the border. then the bolivian police didn't open the border until 2 hours later so me and 2 other lovely english tourists where standing around there in the freezing cold until they thought we had suffered enough...my fingers were actually about to fall off...all purple and blue... and i was already wearing all the jumpers i have with me. really looked hillarious...like a punch bag😉 at least they had this place with some dodgy "cafe con leche" and meat empanadas... thanks for that😊 and the national sport seems to be table fusball...wonder how they can even play in those temperatures..
then finally in VILLAZON on the other side of the border i had to wait for a connecting bus...at least buy the time the sun came out everything looked slightly less dodgy... once on the bus i realised how for away from la paz i was and decided to change the route slightly. so spent some hours on a reaaaaaaly smelly bus, by the way everything here smells, hygiene awareness and conditions are terrible, and then got off.....not to relax but to do a 5 hours horse trek😊 was soooooo beautiful! through the canyons of TUPIZA. Just the guide and me so we actually got to talk quite a bit. very fascinating. i mean the landscape😉 also met some of the nicest people in that town. had lost my travel diary in the horse agancy and the owner spent 2 hours walking around town to find me to give it back. just because he thought it must have been really important to me..... i had to hug him, couldn't hold it back! so with that energy (and without food cause they don't like vegetarians here) i was on the road again the whole night. second night in a row on a bus, with 60 snoring people....got to POTOSI, the highest city in the world, just to stop there for an hour and then onwards to ORURO..... that's exactly when i ate the only vegetarian empanada i could find and what happened?! FOOD POISONING!

I'm not really gonna go into detail with that one..all i can say, the only thing I've really seen of that city is the toilet, from very close😉 After 2 days in bed and a lot of sh*t Tv it was time to move on to COCHABAMBA anyway...This is one of the bigger cities in Bolivia. Warm climate since we're on the way out of the Andes into the jungle!

It seems like a lot of sitting on busses..i'm not gonna lie, sometimes it's a bit of a pain but at the same it's a great place to meet people😊 if you have to sit next to somebody for 20 hours you'd better get talking, otherwise it could actually get boring. and people here seem to be very talkative..or i just don' t let them any other choice.either way, had some very interesting conversations with all sorts of people😊 have lost track of how many times i had to explain what luxembourg actually is...had many guesses from "a little town in africa" to "some sort of island" and a few closer ones like "oh yeah i know, part of germany"... well, i've spread the word that we're a strong, little, independent country with actually no mountains, beaches or real armee 😉
Cochabamba is one of the bigger cities in Bolivia. Warm climate since we're on the way out of the Andes into the jungle!
And that's exactly where the next stop took me. A quiet place called VILLA TUNARI, about 5 to 21 hours east of Cochabamba. 5 hours when you're lucky, 8 hours in most cases and up to 21 hours when buses break down or when somebody decides the road should just be closed so they can actually get on with the works they are doing there😊 definately one of the things i learned: travelling on bolivia just takes longer than expected. and actually most of the things, not just travelling. takes a while for a european "i'm gonna squeeze 30 into a day" person to get used to the way thins work here. but in the end it's fun!
The reason i went to Villa Tunari was not because the lonely planet guide suggested it, but I helped there as a volunteer in a great organisation called "fundacion angeles de esperanza".
. It's not quite as christian as it sounds but more about the whole project in the next blog!
So keep on checking for new pics and detailled maps😊

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Comments

[Chicken]

Salut Cari
Hey Cari, wei ech gesin hues de eng flott an interessant vakanz. Pass gudd op dech op an sich mol no engem USB Kabel. Kann dach net sou schweier sin weis du emmer sees. Dass mer endlech och Fotoen kennen kucken well liessen ass unstrengend hehe. Viel Spass doennen an klau der een Kessen fier wanns de Bus fueren muss :P Stéphane