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Published: September 1st 2009
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The mine mountain in PotosiHola Amigos and Amigas,
Our second week in Sud Americano took us from Sucre to Potosi and then onwards to the salt flats and deserts surrounding the particularly unattractive southern town of Uyuni.
It would remiss of me not to mention that I turned 34 (and 35 - more to come) on August 13 (thank you to all of you who sent well wishes via email - this is my thank you reply). You see, we had heard that Potosi was “not much of a town” and our travel plans had us hitting Potosi smack bang on my special day. In order to circumvent celebrating my birthday in such a place, we celebrated on our last day in Sucre. Now we didn’t actually celebrate early, it was the 13th of August in Australia at that time so the big “three four” rolled in with a few cheap beers in a sunny happy environment.
We pushed onto Potosi the next day (now my birthday on Bolivian time). Getting to potosi from Sucre is as simple as jumping in a taxi with 2 others and sitting quiet for 3 hours ($5 each).
It’s about time that I explain the
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All geared up before the mine tour in Potosi “roads” in this country. You see calling them roads is being kind. They are really nothing more than dirt tracks to be honest. I read somewhere that only some 5% of “roads” are sealed in Bolivia. I’m surprised it’s as high as that! Anyway, when you consider the mountainous landscape with an endless number of landslides, the ongoing road “repairs” and the attempts to seal roads (usually with inadequate technology and machinery), ALL journeys are uncomfortable and VERY slow. You generally average about 30kms - 40kms an hour. It’s a crawl that you just have to get used to.
Back to Potosi. We roll into town and again it seems like all others we have been to. It’s a town sunken in a basin with mountain views all around, rubbish is scattered on the outskirts, it is mildly dirty (or maybe worse as I am probably getting used to the shocking living standards) and the buildings all seem incomplete. We are told that Potosi whilst under Spanish rule some 300 years ago was one of the richest cities in the world due to the booming silver mining in “them there hills”. Whilst extremely (extremely!) hard to believe, Potosi was
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A very weary miner after the Potosi mine tour! compared to Paris and New York back then!
We had booked a hostel called, wait for it.....the Koala Den, on the recommendation from our close friend and travelling companion Lonely Planet and it turned out to be a great little find ($12.50 each) one of our best stays yet actually. We immediately met some fellow travellers in the common area and booked our tour of the silver mines ($16.50 each) with them for that afternoon. Maybe Potosi could be a good place to celebrate a birthday after all?
One of the guys we met was Noel from Tasmania. If you say “Noel” reeeeeally slowly, you will be pronouncing his name correctly. Now Noel only wears blue button up long sleeve shirts, tight and high denim jeans (complete with big belt buckle), boots and of course a big cowboy hat. Noel tells us that he also has a green button up long sleeve shirt with him and a leather vest. I am taking the piss as you can probably guess, because Noel was a really nice honest guy but gee he is unknowingly determined to showcase Australians in a somewhat unattractive light. He was just a bit too Crocodile
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Half way there and finally a wee stop - bus trip from Potosi to Uyuni. Dundee for my liking.
I should tell you at this stage that Potosi is something like 4,100m above sea level. It is in fact the highest city in the entire cosmos! At approximately 1,500m higher than we were in Sucre only 3 or so hours earlier it surely was a test for our lungs. I was relatively unaffected - just some heavy breathing every now and then but Chris had a headache coming on and also needed some heavy breaths. We were undeterred though and jumped aboard the bus for the mine tour. They clothed us in rubber boots, pants, jackets, hard hats with head lamp (see photo) and tried to sell us a bandana to cover our mouths. We did the obligatory stop on the way to the mine at a market place to buy the rudimentary gifts for the miners (soft drink, cocoa leaves and naturally.....dynamite - what else would a miner want?). Ironically we were told not to buy them cigarettes as cigarettes are bad for respiration in the mines! Ha ha...what a gag, only a few minutes into the mine shaft we could hardly breathe! The dust inhalation coupled with the high altitude and lack
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Fun photos on the Salar de Uyuni. of oxygen in the mountain was ridiculous. We walked, crawled, climbed and slid our way through 3 putrid levels of the mine where it must have been at least 40 degrees. To top it all off, they then let off dynamite whilst we were down there (without notice) which scared the living begeevers out of us!
We were both knackered to say the least (see photo of Chris)......and we’re pretty fit! Two others on the tour didn’t make it all the way down and an unfit Irish lassie almost didn’t make it back - she looked very ordinary. At the exit of the mine our tour guides then packed some more dynamite and let it off after we all held it (with wick fizzing) and took photos. Noel loved it! Chris vomited out of the bus onto some unsuspecting local on the way back down the mountain which wasn’t good.
The tour was a massive reality check. Amazingly we would both recommend for anyone going to Potosi to do the tour as it is a great demonstration of the poor working conditions that the miners endure. We have vowed to NEVER complain about a bad day at work
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Jump girl! Jump! Uyuni salt flats. ever again!
So with Chris tucked up in bed and a well earned shower behind me, I headed off for a night on the town with my new friends for dinner, beers and bad Spanish Karaoke to celebrate my birthday again...was I turning 35 now? It was good night in the end.
A 6 hours journey south west to Uyuni was our next adventure. A big bus this time (see photo) which was comfy enough but the roads again were just outright terrible. The outskirts of Uyuni sparkled however as we entered at dusk. Unfortunately the sparkling turned out to be the sun reflecting off a million plastic bags scattered across the plains surrounding the town. Put simply, no one would ever consider going to Uyuni if it wasn’t for the nearby salt flats - it is just a very ugly town.
We immediately found our pre-booked hotel although the hotel knew nothing about our booking on arrival. Fortunately for us the sour cow in reception could still find us a room which turned out to be $20 cheaper! That’ll teach her. Our hotel turned out to be the worst one yet and the most expensive! That
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It was hard to get that big bottle to the salt flats but it was worth it! aside, we set sail to find a tour company that would take us around the salt flats and desert for the next 3 days.
We were really fortunate at this point to bump into some fellow travellers that we had greeted on a bus trip somewhere previously. Mar and Alex are from Barcelona and you guessed it speak Spanish! Yay! We now had some negotiators with us! It proved valuable on 2 counts...1) they got us on a tour with them at a great price ($100 each) and ....2) they translated everything our guide said for 3 days! We understand that there are no English speaking guides so we were very lucky. It certainly made our tour more enjoyable.
Salar de Uyuni (salt flats) are a sight to behold. Plains of wind drenched pure white salt meet the horizon only occasionally interrupted by barren mountain ranges severely populated by 1000 year old cacti. You can just sit and watch the white flats for hours, it is just breathtaking.
The chance to take some crazy photos on the salt flats is a highlight of the tour (see examples). All perspective is lost and you can let you imagine
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900 year old cactus and a very short looking German lass. fly. We have seen some amazing photos which are far better than ours but it was awesome fun trying to get the right angles. We have heard of some people that brought along props such a cricket bat just to liven up their photos. Some people take it far too seriously!
Our first night on tour was spent in a “hotel” constructed from salt bricks in a room with our 4 fellow travellers. It was far from luxurious but it was comfortable enough. With 3 blankets, a sleeping bag and a well planned bottle of red to help keep us warm, the cold didn’t get to us. Wait until tomorrow night they told us.
An amazing sun rise greeted us (see photo) for day 2. Lying ahead of us was a lot of driving through the desert plains of southern Bolivia. The driving was plentiful and not always comfortable but the scenery astounding and ever changing. We would be driving over very rough terrain of stark oranges and browns and then suddenly we would be cruising smoothly on light coloured sand almost always under the back drop of volcanoes and or snow capped mountains.
The lakes and
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The classic cactus shape - 9m tall! lagoons we visited served up some highlights of the tour which naturally ran the battery low on the camera. The landscape is unbelievably barren. Small shrubs make up the most of the flora but somehow there is an abundance of wildlife. Primarily birdlife but also saw llama, deer, rabbits, wolves and morphed version of all of these. We even saw an emu type of thing running crazy. The pink flamingos were the best though. They make funny noises and smell to high heaven but their bright colours contrasting against the browns of the desert and their awkward movements was enjoyable to see. I think Chris managed to take individual portraits of every flamingo (ala school photo shoots). There were even a couple of group photos taken too!
Our final day started at 5am with news that the temperature had dropped to below minus 20 degrees that night and to us it seemed that the mercury hadn’t risen. We passed hot geysers and stopped at a natural hot spring for a quick morning dip (see photo) to watch the sun rise. At 30 degrees the springs were certainly welcomed. The run back to dry off change clothes was certainly not!
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Dusk night 1 of our salt flats tour. In true Bolivian style there were no change facilities it was just a quick free-for-all in the sub-zero conditions.
We also managed a quick stop at the Chile-Bolivia border (see photo) to bid farewell to one of our crew. Then 9 hours of driving laid ahead. The scenery was again breathtaking but there were some tired souls in the 4wd.
The tour is a “must do” for anyone planning a trip to Bolivia. The train trip (7 hours $14 each) north to Oruro though could probably be given a wide birth. A 1:20am come 2:00am departure in the freezing night of Uyuni was hard to handle but still probably better than the longer and no doubt bumpier bus trip that was the alternative. A short 3 hour bus trip ($4 each) from Oruro landed us in the nation’s capital La Paz - the world’s highest capital city at 3,660m. More from that crazy place in my next blog. I have used way too many adjectives for one blog entry!
For now though I will leave you with some more of my Bolivian observations:
• Dogs do not have owners in Bolivia (so it seems)
•
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Our trusty steed at sunrise on the salt flats. You can start to build the second story of a house before finishing the first
• Drinks, ice creams, jelly and yogurt can all be purchased from a street side vendor that does NOT have refrigeration
• Vehicle horns MUST be used when in a traffic jam (even though they will NOT alleviate the congestion!)
• You can always fit one more person on a Bolivian bus
• 2wd vehicles CAN go through deep mud and water (although it sometimes takes more than one attempt!)
• A traffic cop is nothing more than just a person standing in the middle of an intersection
• A pedestrian crossing is nothing more than just white paint spilt in lines across a road
• Restaurant menus (English versions that is) have not been run through the spell checker.... but even if they had been, fish spelt “FIZZ” (can you believe it?) would not have been detected anyway!
Adios.
Ryan
P.S. Here’s some vital ongoing travel statistics to enlighten you further:
• No. of countries visited since leaving Aus: 7
• Cheapest beer to date (calculated on 100mL conversion): $1.30
•
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Hot geysers at sunset - day 3 salt flats tour. No. of hours spent on public transport (inc. taxis) in SA: 15.5
• Cheapest room (double room shared bathroom, breakfast included): $8.33 each per night
• Cheapest dinner meal: $3.00 (meat, salad, fresh OJ, bottle water, coconut and toffy coated strawberries on a stick)
• Highest altitude reached: 5,000m
• No. modes on transport used: 10 (foot, plane, taxi, taxi-bus, coach, ute back, car, 4wd, mini-bus, crawling)
• No. kilometres travelled in SA: approx. 1,574km
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Jon from Tas
non-member comment
Nooooel
Mate, Noel was from NSW, there is no denying that (the fact that he can only acquire gainful employment in Tassie is a seperate issue). I ran into him in Cusco again - he had been smoking more than his share of some of he local plants and donated his West-Tigers jumper to the wall of the pub (after signing it)