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I took off for my next destination La Paz, the captital city of Bolivia. I was expecting to reach La Paz at 4pm. However following true South American timing we were delayed an hour and a half. The funniest and scariest senario came about as we traveled from Copacabana to La Paz. The Bolivian authorities haven't gotten around to building a bridge between two pieces of land.
Our bus driver asked us to disembark the bus and proceed to a taxi boat. But how was the bus going to get across! As we made our way onto the taxi boat we watched in shock and awe as our bus drove up onto a wooden ferry raft. It appeared extremely dodgy. The bus looked as if it was going to nose dive into the water. It was an astonishing sight. After a wait we could all breath a sign of relief as the bus reached land safely at the other side.
We finally settled in our accomodation and took off to explore the 'The Witches Market' on Illampu street. There were all types of unusal lotions and potions in the market. Bolivia's answer to Diagon Alley from Harry Potter. The markets were a bit freaky for my liking. As a rope come up around my neck I almost lost my life. I was so jittery you couldn't say boo to me. The rope turned out to be harmless, a man opening up his market stall.
Later on in the day I got on the most bizarre city bus tour of my whole bear existence. On the tour we were told that in the last 175 years Bolivia has had 175 different presidents. Shocked? I was too! There was a president elected in 1969 who remained in power for a bare 6 hours. We were also told that the first president in Bolivia was illiterate and gave away alot of Bolivian land to Chilean president in exchange for a horse. Bolivia is indeed very under developed and the vast majority of the population live in extreme poverty. The tour operator told us that on average a Bolivian woman gives birth to five hildren and 40% of the population is under the age of 14. Bolivian citizens can retire at the age of 65 where they will recieve free health care. Taking into account that the average life expectancy in Bolivia is 61 for males and 63 for females those peaks don't appear very attainable. Thinking about the conditions these people live in makes me very sad and angry. There is alot of corruption in Bolivia and it is hard to see past it.
After a days rest and it was time for my first tour from La Paz to see the world famous Salt flats. The bus trip to the village of Uyuni was by far my worst bus journey to date. For alot of the journey we travelled on a dirt track with massive rocks and rubble as it's surface. It was bone rattling. We arrived in Uyuni exhausted from the lack of sleep. Onwards and Upwards. We went for breakfast in Uyuni and freshened up for our tour at 10:30am. I got chatting to a father and son from New York who were both fluent in Spanish which was very handy as our Salt flats tour was in Spanish. They translated any parts of the tour we couldn't understand, which was quite a bit of it!
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