Advertisement
Published: April 8th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Well Bolivia turned out to be a lot less daunting than the Lonely Planet guide promised it would be! We travelled with a really great group of people from Salta in Argentina, over the border at La Quiaca and Villazon (tiny back arse end of nowhere kind of places) and finally arrived in Tupiza after experiencing the craziest train ticket fiasco since the great train robbery! In Villazon to buy train tickets you have to take a ticket (like at the cheese counter in Sainsbury's) and wait in line... if you're Israeli however, you join with other massive groups of Israelis and push to the front getting angry at any Bolivian who doesn't speak Hebrew (no bitterness intended to those Israelis we love... you know who you are)! We finally got almost the last seats on the train after a member of our group was surrounded by angry Bolivians trying to get our tickets... or kill her, we're not sure! The train actually turned out to be quite nice... we watched a cheesy Christmas film and some Abba videos - what more could a person desire!
Someone from our hotel in Tupiza met us at the train station and
Salt flat
A whole lot of not very much! took us to the hotel pointing out the local attractions on the way - like the hole in the road, the smelly Bolivian woman selling coca leaves, the leper etc! The hotel was like something out of the 1980s with black and white flooring and the most ornate purple shiny headboard you'll ever see in your life (very bling)! The next morning we left on a tour of the salt flats and the lakes in southern Bolivia. It was a four day, three night tour of everything the south has to offer - mostly altitude sickness, which a few members of our group got pretty badly. The tour started at 3440m in Tupiza and climbed to a whopping 5000m at some really smelly geezers (geysers for those of you without a sense of humour)!!! From the comfort of our ´brand new´jeep (it is amazing how quickly things decay at altitude) we saw the green lake, the red lake, the white lake and the salt lake! It was a three day bonanza of riding the bumpiest roads in the world, seeing lots and lots of flamingoes, llamas and alpacas and drinking copious amounts of coca tea - it helps with the
altitude don't you know!
The slat flats were the definite highlight of the trip, even if we did get up at 5 in the morning to see possibly the most boring sunrise in the whole entire universe EVER! We climbed up a small hillock covered in cacti and had to rest on more than one occasion... you'd be surprised how climbing even a hillock at over 4000m can turn a healthy person into a jibbering asthmatic! Countless silly photo opportunities were taken of us standing on apples etc (photos to follow... no USB excuse this time, we forgot the camera)!
At the end of the four days we were unceremoniously dumped in Uyuni where we toyed with the idea of going to Potosi (the world's highest city 4070m with the world's most backwards silver mine) but eventually we settled for La Paz and the comfort of our travelling companions, who we have now got very attached to (that's what being dirty in a jeep for four days does to you...that and communal weeing)!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.1s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 11; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0466s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Aldo43
non-member comment
Hair!
Simon you hairy W***ker! While it may be (genuinely Alison) funny that Adam is crawling up your arse, the fact that you cant tell your a human in the photo is very disturbing. You look like a cross between a deck chair and a long-hair guinea pig! Looks like its a fun time tho. Genuinely silly time is the best way to do anything and remember it, cos there are always people to remind you then. Kangaroo pie.