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Unlike Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Tom & Gem managed to survive their trip across Bolivia on route south towards Patagonia. Mind you we didn't rob any banks or shoot any local bandits. We did spend another day in Sucre and a couple more at various bandit towns, before crossing the Salt Flats and Attacama Desert and onto Chile.
Our last day in Sucre saw Tom at his happiest. Gemma left in the morning to visit a ‘must see’ market with the rest of the GAP group, which left Tom alone in the hotel to watch West Ham’s ‘must win’ relegation battle at Old Trafford live on Fox Sport. The market at Torobanc, by all accounts, was a let down with only the bus drivers reckless driving and the poor lunch being talking points. West Ham on the other hand performed heroics, beating the champions elect 1.0 in a tense game on their own turf. There is a new prophet in the East End and that man is Carlos Tevez.
Now with only a potential court case standing between West Ham and Premiership football next year, Tom was keen to give the hammers all the support he
could. Roaming the streets of Sucre he went looking for a Shaman (witch doctor) that could shrink the heads of Dave Whelan, Kevin McCabe, Sepp Blatter and all the other enemies of West Ham. Tom didn’t have any luck with his quest but he did manage to get a perfectly (un)cooked fillet steak (easily over 600g of meat) for 33 Bolivianos (2 pound). Could this day get any better!!!
In the evening we went to the Cinema to watch the film ‘300’ - a story about 300 Spartans who fought bravely to the death against tens of thousands of soldiers from the Persian Empire...not too dissimilar to West Ham’s heroics earlier in the day. Just before the film started a big dog came into the auditorium and sat in the aisle next to Tom. As the credits started rolling he looked suitably unimpressed and turned and walked out. He must have seen the film before.
The next day we took a bus to Potosi. Tom was starting to regret not finishing off his antibiotics and spent the next couple of days getting acquainted with various Bolivian rest rooms again. Gem, when not telling Tom ‘I told you so’,
was out with the rest of the Gap group. She visited a working silver mine high in the Bolivian mountains but found the experience to be a little depressing. Gem met workers as young as 12 who had a life expectancy of only another 20 years. Each miner would earn 50 Bolivianos (3 pound thirty) a day for wheel barrowing out 1 tonne of minerals.
We spent a day in Potosi before starting the 6hour coach journey to Uyuni at the edge of the Salt Flats. We took great comfort in the fact that our Bus Drivers looked 14 y.o. as this meant they were too young to be drunk!!! We stopped at a ‘one road’ town for lunch which had four shops selling the same 3 packets of biscuits and 2 bottles of Bolivian Cola. The two Cafe’s in town had a similar wide selection on their menus. We declined the offer of either an Egg Roll or Rice Soup and just ate the pringles we had stocked up on in Potosi. We knew we had made the correct choice when we saw the carcass of a cow hanging up on the washing line behind the cafe. During
the day we witnessed a couple of sand storms and what looked like little tornados.
Uyuni is a purpose built tourist town for the salt flats. Therefore the only businesses are tourist operators, pizzerias, alpaca jumper shops and hotels. Although the town did have a train cemetery at it’s edge. We spent one night in Uyuni before meeting up with our guides for the 3 day crossing of the salt flats and Attacama Desert.
On the first day we visited the salt flats which cover an area of 12,500 square meters and are up to 10 meters deep. We spent the morning taking ‘comedy’ photographs, using the blinding whiteness in every direction to alter the perspective. At lunch we stopped at a hill in the middle of the flats that was covered in massive Cacti, which happened to look like soldiers standing guard. The view from the top was bewildering as in every direction the salt flats merged with the horizon. Our chef rustled up some T-bone steaks before we drove off towards the horizon and on to our Salt Hotel (made entirely from salt..well almost!!).
We spent the evening drinking wine and playing cards (or in
Tom’s case cheating so he won nearly every game....Tom believes there is no shame in cheating, only in getting caught). By the morning the toilets in the hotel were in a bad state but got worse when the cleaner tried to flush a basin that was blocked and nearly overflowing already. The contents covered the bathroom floor and washed into the hallway just as Tom was about to enter. Double dropping some Imodium, Tom thought it best to wait. The incident helped explain why the salt hotel wasn't entirely white!!
The second day took us across the Attacama Desert. We spent most of the day in our 4x4’s but did stop at a couple of lagoons to see the flamingos. The views as we crossed the desert were amazing as we sped between volcano's (one of them smoldering!!). The landscape was very similar to that in the film Tremors. We could only speculate at the fate of some of our GAP colleagues when their 4x4 went missing. Tom’s assertion that they’d been eaten by giant worms was proved wrong when they turned up late to lunch after engine trouble. The volcano's and mountains that we drove past were a
kaleidoscope of colours, ranging from browns, reds, yellows, blues, greens, whites and oranges.
Like the Colca Canyon the landscape was beautiful and imposing and our pictures just couldn't do it justice. That evening we didn't have the luxury of a salt hotel and stayed in mud shacks where we were crammed in 6 to a room. Outside the temperature got as low as -20 degrees Celsius (apparently) and it certainly wasn’t snug inside. Tom woke up with what looked like frost bite on his lip and being the conscientious person he is...picked off all the scabs so his lips are now bloodied and swollen.
By the third day the scenery was failing to impress us as much as it had the previous two days and the groups attitude descended to contempt and sarcasm when driven to another lagoon. ‘Wow its green!!’. Luckily we only had a couple of hours before we left the tour to enter Chile. It cost us 15 Bolivianos (1 pound) each to leave Bolivia and to date that has been our best buy.
It didn't take long for us to realize that Chile was a lot more civilized than the other South American
countries we’d been too. The Bolivian side of the border has a dirt track as a road, where as the Chilean side was gleaming tar mac...something we hadn’t seen since Sucre (and that wasn’t gleaming). In addition our Chilean driver used his indicators when changing (dirt) lanes on the Bolivian side of the border (despite there being no other car within a mile of him) and religiously kept to the speed limit once in Chile. No one in Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia ever uses indicators, observes speeds limits or cares what is approaching in the on coming traffic. They just use their horns to communicate. In Chile you hardly ever hear a horn and the difference is very noticable.
The Chilean’s do have rather an unusual border patrol system though. After leaving the Bolivian border (a hut in the middle of the desert which contained two border patrol men armed with just a stamp and ink pad each) we drove for 50km before reaching a town. At the entrance to the town was the immigration and customs building. Here we had to show our passport and fill out visa forms before having our possessions searched.
By searched we
In Tom´s hat
la salar tripmean putting our bags on a table and a bloke saying ‘have you got clothes in your bag’...‘er yes’....‘do you have any fruit or veg’.... ‘er no’.... ‘you are free to go’. Do they expect drugs traffickers to go ‘er yes and 10 kilos of the finest bolivian coke’.
If you did want to take any illegal fruit & veg over the border or even enter illegally you could quite easily have taken the first right turn into town just before the border control building. The system was so comically flawed it seemed like monty python were running the show.
When we got into town we realized that a more civilized society meant everything cost a lot more...almost london prices. We haven’t paid more than 3 pound for our poshest meal to date. Now we were being asked to pay 5 pound for spaghetti. Tom & Gem got better acquainted with supermarket shopping and making sandwiches for lunch to cut down on costs.
We like the look of Chile as it has a much more European feel to it and you don’t feel like you have to watch your back 24/7. However we don't plan to spend
too long here as it’s pricey and they still dont sell proper bacon!!!
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Benny Delo Boy
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Regards
Once again needless to say but excellent blog - loving Si's observations below lol ... And Tom , that picture with the cactus funniest thing I've seen for ages! How does it feel to finally have a big willy?! With everything going in here it's easy to forget you are thousands of miles away having such an amazing time, miss you man, and fair play to the Irons for their houdini act - must admit I was gutted that you pulled it off - especially given the 4-3 at Upton Park... still you got what you deserved in the end. Gem... the standard of blog writing is very good - which leads me to believe that it is YOU with the pen in your hand ... it's the lack of generally abusive language and references to 'punani' 'daego's' and 'large breasts' that leads me to believe so... Keep it coming Take care of yourselves, and each other, loads of love from us to you from English shores x