Blogs from Potosí Department, Bolivia, South America

There's an old legend, that Jesus once turned water into wine. Seeing is believing, goes the other old saw. Road-trip into a small, north-Argentinian town in search of a local version of Rio de Janeiro's famed carnival, fiesta, frolic and fun. Another bandied hack flickers its tongue: beware of what you ask for. The trumpets blare, rumpety-pumpety drums beat and beat, others triple and thrum, oboes move air, charangos twang and trill, and violins fill the empty spaces with cumbian drive and rhythm. And the wine flows. Free wine! 'No such thing as a free lunch?' Maybe. Free wine! Seeing is believing. The country's wine-bearing regions run mostly along the eastern base of the Andes Mountains, in areas of ample sunshine and enough snowmelt for good irrigation. From the south, Neuquen (in northern Patagonia), northwards some ... read more

Today was the day that we finally made it to the Salar! The Salar de Uyuni is the largest and highest salt flat in the world, with an area of ​4000 sq miles and over 500 ft deep. The Salar is one of the largest lithium reserves in the world and also has significant amounts of potassium, boron, and magnesium. In the dry season the salt flat has a beautiful hexagonal shapes far as the eye can see. In the rainy season a mirror effect will happen. Not only is it beautiful, but GPS satellites will be calibrated by reflecting light off huge surface of the solar, much more effective than the ocean's surface which is the common alternative. We had a lovely picnic lunch out of the back of the truck on our way to ... read more

We left at 4am on Friday for our adventure through the mountains of Bolivia! There are 5 of us in total, Adam, three other volunteers and me. We started with just a 4 hour drive to the starting point of our tour. We left early to make sure we would not get stopped with road blocks from the protests. We had a few delays, but nothing major. We stopped in a very cute town called Tupiza. Tuk tuks are their main taxi service there which are just so adorable running down the skinny roads. We had a quick lunch, loaded up and hit the road. We are seeing tons of Lammas now that we are up in the mountains. I also learned about a new animal I was not aware of. The Vicuña is a smaller ... read more

A lady blogger suggested adding this to a list of potential places to go. As adventurous as I think I am, I wonder, in times of this pandemic, highly skeptical about going somewhere I have never heard of. And worse, what is their vaccination status, and quality of health care? I like the idea of going someplace new and different. But to point to some country I have never heard of seems to tempt fate. Let me just illustrate the folly of this idea. At random, I found Central African Republic, a landlocked country in central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, DR Congo to the south, Republic of Condo to the southwest, and Cameroon to the west. CAR was a French colony, with ... read more

Late pick-up today at 09:30, so after a good 7.5 hours sleep I woke up at 06:00 to catch up on this blog but couldn’t publish it because the hotel’s internet is too slow. Today was basically a driving day to get to our last stop before four nights in the Atacama Desert. Soon after leaving the hotel. We went to the same spot where we watched the sunset and Issac showed us how to do some funny trick photos, which was a lot of fun. We then drove for about 90 minutes to Julaca which is a tiny town almost like a ghost town although Issac told us that a year ago there were no shops providing a public toilet but now there are two. After that we drove on with a couple of stops ... read more