Perfect birthday in Potosi and around

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For my birthday, I was really lucky: I wasn’t alone on that day, I had a friend to share it with. Only this was already the best gift life could have ever made me. Being alone while travelling isn’t an issue for me, but being alone for my birthday would have been a bit sad.

We had thus arrived in Potosi the evening before with Ignacio and this day came very well, as we were both very tired and needed to get a day to rest. My birthday was the perfect oppprtunity for this 😉 In the evening, we went to the city center and went to eat a pizza in a very local place. The pizza wasn’t that good –the tomate sauce used was some fake ketchup…- but at least it was taking us out, forcing us to look a bit nicer and to disconnect from our way of travelling –camping and cooking for ourselves.
After a good night, we continued in the morning to enjoy being in a city: we went to a nice cafe to get some breakfast. The place was very nice in the microcenter and there were plenty of choices. I ordered all my favorite things: pancakes with melted chocolate, hot chocolate and a banana milkshake. The hot chocolate took 1,5 hours to arrive –I still have to get used to the Bolivian way of living, very chill- but my morning was still perfect!

After this nice and relaxing breakfast, we went to visit the city of Potosi. Firstly, we went up one of the mirador, where we could have a great view over the city and where a nice local guide girl explained us about the city and its buildings. From there, we went to walk around the city. I loved this city! It has a lot of charm, a nice atmosphere and people are very friendly. For sure, the houses are not very well restored, as they are in Sucre for instance but I preferred Potosi because for me, it looked much more natural and beautiful, when the buildings are as they were before and not as they are painted in white to look good but without any charm.

Potosi –like a lot of cities in Bolivia and in Peru- is built on hills, so walking in the city, you will have to walk up and down but it’s not as steep to go uphill as it could have been in Valparaiso, Chile for instance.

After spending the morning in the city wandering around, we took a minibus to go to a laguna and people told us about. It was a laguna, whose water was very hot and had thermal properties. We also knew that we could camp there, so that’s what we were going to do.

After getting off at the wrong stop, taking another minibus in the right direction and walking uphill, we finally arrived at the laguna around 3pm. We pitched our tent, ate a snack and then jumped inside the water. It was indeed warm water, it was nice to swim there, although in comparison to the thermal hot baths in the river near San Pedro de Atacama, it was dirtier and not that nice. It was however very nice to spend some time there in a quiet place.

The scenery around it was just great: there were mountains all around. There weren’t a lot of people at the laguna, so it made it even a better place to relax! After enjoying the water, we cooked our meal and then enjoyed the sunset and the dark sky full of stars. I will always remember this perfect evening we had there sharing about our lives and looking at the stars.

On the next day –I know it wasn’t my birthday anymore but something happened, which was worth mentioning!-, we went back to Potosi and there as it was Good Friday, we went by chance into a district, where the Christ procession was going to happen!! I was so happy! In France, we are celebrating Easter but there is nothing religious being done in the towns and cities, so it was the 1st time for me to attend to such a procession! The district was full of “doors”, which were decorated with toys and with plates, symbolizing money and by which the Christ procession would walk through. There were also some kinds of hotels, with a table covered by a white sheet and where a picture of the Christ was. Ignacio told me that they should be 12 points like this, where the procession would stop. We just waited there to see the procession. It came some minutes later, with some children wearing the cross, some people playing in the band and people wearing a statue of the Christ, kneeling. On their way, people were throwing some confetti at them and a woman went around the Christ statue with a burning essence. As I said it was an amazing experience for me to live this and I apologize in advance for religious people but as I am not Catholic my descriptions are personal and probably not totally following the religious wordings.

To conclude this post, as I said in the introduction, I was blessed to be able to spend my birthday with a friend, so for this, I would like to thank Ignacio so much! I had a great birthday in Bolivia 😊

The next days, we went to Sucre and Cochabamba and honestly, it’s not the cities I preferred in my trip, so my next post won’t be about it but about the wonders around La Paz.

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