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After a short bus ride from Sucre we arrived in the highest city in the world, Potosi. We could definitely feel the altitude up here at 4080 meters above sea level. Just walking up the road was as struggle, especially as everything felt up hill, we'd start walking at normal speed and then realise that we couldn't breathe... The altitude also makes for even cheaper nights out in Bolivia as after a couple of drink you really wouldn't need to have more as the alcohol goes straight to the head!
We visited a few museums and wandered around the shops and sat in the main square, people watching. We stumbled across a really interesting market that sold pretty much everything, one stall would sell clothes and next door was a butchers with the whole cow on display. Quite disturbing were the Llama foetus hanging in most shop doors, which they use in Bolivia as offerings to Pachamama, the Mother Earth.
While Elaine was wandering around Potosi, I went off to do a tour of the infamous silver mines up on the Cerro Rico mountain. The mines had originally been opened by the Spanish back in the 1500s, and apparently
One of the many children still working in the mine
Amazingly he had a smile on his face while we were there... roughly 8 million indigenous people have died in the mines from either forced labour or some kind of accident or poisoning. We knew it was going to be a tough visit as we had seen a film in Sucre called 'The Devils Miner´which followed the story of a young boy working in the mines. The tour was a pretty standard one, starting off at the miners market to buy gifts for the miners, including coca leaves and dynamite, just your average store! We then made our way slowly up the mountain before getting into our protective clothes and making our way into the mine. It was a pretty shocking experience, as it was so obvious there was no real thought for safety, and the working conditions were very hard. We met a couple of the miners while we were there, including another young boy, and a 60 year old miner who had been working there for over 40 years, amazing! After over an hour of scrambling around, we finally made it out into daylight again, to be given a quick demonstration of how powerful a dynamite explosion is... so powerful if shut someones camera off and flung rocks into the
air, hitting someone on the head from our group... luckily they were wearing a hard hat! Overall, it certainly was a memorable experience, and we were all pretty thoughtful that evening trying to come to terms with what we had seen...
From Potosi we took an incredible journey to Uyuni, the bus journey took about 7 hours in total but it has to be one of the most scenic journeys in South America. We drove passed huge canyons, strange rock formations, vast plains... the landscape was just stunning. We also passed a bus stuck down a ditch on the side of the road... with everyone trying to push it out. Apparently the driver had not being paying attention and veered off the side of the road into the ditch...
The town on Uyuni is really nothing much to write about and it is mainly used as a base to travel to the Salt flats, where we were heading to. We stayed 1 night here and then headed out the following morning in a 4x4 for our 3 day trip and with us, lots of warm clothes that we had brought in Sucre and Potosi. Everyone told us that
the Salt Flats are freezing at night and could possibly go down to -20c, no one had prepared for temperatures that cold!!
We first stopped at the train cemetery just outside of Uyuni, which was truly weird! There were a few trains just in the middle of nowhere all rusting and derelict... still, made for some interesting photos! The next stop was the actual salt flats, the Salar de Uyuni which are the largest in the world. It was just incredible to see such a vast expanse of blinding white salt flats, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. This was certainly one of the highlights so far! After a quick bite to eat, we spent a couple of hours trying to get some of the famous photos where people jump over cars, hold each other in their hands etc. but we could never quite get it perfect... we had fun trying and managed to get some good ones of our names, but that was about it!
The rest of the 3 day trip was spent visiting some of the high altitude lagoons and lookouts across some of the active volcanoes in the area.
Volcano near the border with Chile
We had seen this from the other side in San Pedro! It was pretty cool to see smoke coming out of the top of one of the volcanoes as we all stood for photos... it does make you think that it could blow at any time! The last morning we had a very early wake up call to get over to the geyser field, apparently one of the highest in the world. It was pretty spectacular to see the sun rise over the steaming geysers, we all had a cheer as the sun hit us and warmed us up... it was well below freezing before the sun had risen! The last main stop we had was at Laguna Verde, which had a perfect mirror image of the volcano behind the lake. We had almost come full circle here, as this was very close to the border with Chile and we had actually seen the other side of this volcano from San Pedro de Atacama almost 2 months ago!
We had a great time on the Salt Flats, definitely one of the highlights of Bolvia, the scenery was truly amazing and luckily the temperature at night only dropped to about -9c so not too bad considering! We now return to Uyuni
and then on to La Paz to try and warm up a bit!
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