Bloody Bolivia; PART 1

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April 24th 2012

Published: April 30th 2012

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gonewalkabout

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Bloody Bolivia PART 1,

Hey friends and family,

Where to start? Crossed the border into Bolivia without hassels and made it to the wild wild west town of Tupiza. This is where Buch Cassidy aqnd the Sun Dance Kid where finally killed. Of course we had to do some old fashioned horse riding, so we put on our best cowboy clothes and set out on a ride through the canyon. Cut a long story short, a flash flood come down the canyon and strait into us. Horses and people were screaming and Ian (lying half on his horse, with a horrified look on his face) flew off down the valley as his spooked horse went crazy. (sooooo funny) We found Ian walking horseless, covered in blood and mud!!! Sooooooooooooo funny.

From tupiza we booked a 4 night 5 day 4wd tour of South Western Bolivia. It was a brilliant trip (one of the best) but our first day was a big learning curve. Little did we know that we would spend 13hrs in a car, go from 3000m above sea level to an amazing 5000 meters above sea level, get bogged and try and push the

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car out with no shoes on and snow falling, get stuck in a 4 car-bogged-at 5000m parade, get hit with the extremely painfull effects of altitude sickness and get close to hypothermic as we walked next to the 4wd at night as it went over steep rises. Alana was the worst and she lay in the car in constant pain that day. The next days were amazing and we were only left with small headaches. We saw amazing lagoons, snow capped mountain, volcanoes, geizers, rock formations, flamingoes, lamas and many more amazing sights (see photos). We ended our trip with a pre dawn trip out to the largest salt flats in the world. It was amazing...again words cant describe...see photos. Some travellers ask me what its like on that trip and I saw it like a mixture between the moon, mars and your dreams.

From Uyuni we travelled to the highest "city" in the world, Potosi. It is more like a large town. It was build under the shadow of Mt Potosi, which was once a massive silver mine that provided silver for the incas. It is still a mine and you can do tours.....dangerous tours!! Tours where you

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can buy TNT. Paul and Ian did the tour and it was one of the craziest things they have done. 100m under ground, crawling through tunnels, with no oxygen, dripping sulfur water, live electricity lines, arsnic crystals on the roof and all this for 2 hours!!!! Crazy!!!

From Potosi we made to Sucre. A beautiful city at 3800m. We spent a week here and by this staged had ganged up with a frenchy (jezlin) and a German (olley). Spanish lessons, good food, some fun nights and a bed bug infection took up our week. The group split up at the end of this week and Paul and Alana went off into the jungle to work with animals, Franky and Ian stayed in Sucre to work on their spannish and Jezlin and Olley headed North towards Peru.

Part 1 finished (this was about 3 weeks)

Additional photos below

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