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Cakes and Coca
The Bolivian idea of a zebra crossing is to dress a young boy in a zebra costume and direct traffic at junctions. Brilliant.
It was good to get back on the road after the prolonged stay in Mendoza. Another easy 18 hour trip aboard a hotel on wheels that is Argentina's bus service. My last stop in Argentina was Salta and disappointed me somehow, not sure how, maybe overhyped. Very much more indigenous up in this corner of the country. It seemed like I'd spent a long time in Argentina but looking at the map I was comforted that I had already done half of South America in distance from Ushuaia to Salta. Into the tropics again now.
Before heading into Bolivia I side stepped back into Chile over the Andes to an oasis in the middle of the driest desert in the world called San Pedro de Atacama up at 2500m above sea level. The journey over the Andes into Chile was pretty special, lots of winding mountain roads with endless views, we got to the remote border post which was so so bleak up at a windy 4000m with the officials grumpily letting us through. San Pedro is an awesome place, so arid but with pockets of green due to underground water, lots of salt lakes making swimming in one quite amusing as you can't actually push your legs into the water enough to kick properly! The landscape around San Pedro is all about smouldering volcanoes, multicoloured sands, occasional lakes and massive dunes. Sand boarding had to be given a go on these, a brilliant day out, the setting was stupendous and felt as if you has come to Mars to board. Sand boarding was a little easier than it's snow boarding equivalent as sand is a little less slippy than snow! Apparently it is like snow boarding in the powder and you need to lean back more than lean into the run, what the hell do I know, I cannot even turn properly!
I met up with some Cambridge lads on their year out in San Pedro I had briefly met in Argentina. There are a lot of young backpackers in South America most of which you hear from a distance bemoaning the fact that Daddy hasn't transferred their travel funds quick enough. Gone are the annoying Americans replaced with a young English sloane crowd who have replaced their pink puffa jackets with multicoloured 'indigenous' woollen numbers. This said the boys from Cambridge were pretty sound and I ended up staying with them for two weeks. It was good to have some fun with the whipper snappers and I definitely drank more in those two weeks, all good.
Pisco Sours. Pisco (liqour made from grapes), egg whites, and lime juice. A Chilean speciality and apparently a Peruvian one too. Delicious I kid you not.
From San Pedro we organised a 4WD trip over the border into the Bolivian desert to see the Salt Plains and many other odd otherworldly things. All off road over a gravelly terrain at stupid altitudes (5000m I think was the highest). It really did feel as if you had left the world as we know it. In the 6 man 4WD were the 5 Cambridge lads, me, and an extremely worn looking Bolivian guy called Philipe who drove the Land Cruiser with the world's biggest hands and smiled at you with a classic toothless grin as he pointed out the sights. We saw lakes of varying colours dependant on the local mineral, we saw white, red, green, and blue, some of which had rare species of 'James' Flamingo sucking out God knows what from the shallows, how anything could live in conditions like these takes some hardcore animal! Occasional llamas were seen together with weird rodents, the Spanish names we were told now forgotten. We bathed in thermal baths, we goggled at bubbling geysers spitting out noxious mud, and we were blinded by the world's biggest salt plain in the world. It is indeed very white and we had some fun trying to take perspective free pics. In the middle of this 4000square mile white plain was an island of cactuses. Every sight seemed to take the bizarre a step further. Underneath the thick salt crust we drove over lies a lake which rises above the salt crust a few inches in the rainy season. Obviously being in a 4WD full of lads we took the no alcohol advice at altitude with a good deal of British flippancy but fortunately none of us suffered from the copious amounts of rum that was imbibed in celebrating the bizarre sights we were witnessing. I've found breathing at night hard at 5000m though automatically breathing through my mouth to get more air in resulting in a nice crusty early morning mouth. Or was that the rum?
A strange entrance into Bolivia, we had not seen a proper town or a substantial amount of people until we got to the dusty s***hole frontier town called Uyuni. First thing we noticed were that bowler hat wearing women were carrying around excessive amounts of what looked to be wedding cakes. Thought it was a special holiday or something but no the Bolivians like their fancy cream cakes and I'm sure most shops in Uyuni were cake shops. I'm going to sound quite harsh as I describe middle aged Bolivian women, I do not intend to diss, but heyho.. They are short and well fed (too many wedding cakes) and have bellies bigger than their t***, they wear traditional full skirts that further extend the look of width as your eye draws to the ground. At the central pivot point is a tiny pair of feet. With their wobbly gait due to the packages they carry on their backs I cannot get the image of a weeble with a bowler hat out of my mind.
Next was Potosi, the highest city in the world. Yes a lot of 'est's in this blog. This used to be one of the richest cities in the world with an incredible amount of silver found here. Today it is a pretty grim place despite some surviving colonial buildings. The mine is still open to extract the remaining small amount of silver and some other metals, the workers labour in medieval conditions akin to how one would expect hell to be. You can visit the working mines oddly enough as if Bolivia hasn't got enough weird things to see. I went into the mountain at an altitude of 4300m into the mountain for a kilometre, it was simply hellish, cramped dusty tunnels some of which you crawled through, breathing was panicky. I didn't see any workers for a while when I first went in but soon did when a shout of 'vamos' went up form the guide when a 2 tonne mining wagon was seen hurtling towards us on the tracks and we had to leg it back hunched low and dive into a wider bit of the tunnel. Terrifying. We lobbed a bottle of pop and some coca leaves into the wagon for the guys working and they somehow managed a 'gracias' despite giving it their all pushing this wagon. Further out from the main lines miners were using long chisels to core out a cylindrical hole before ramming it with dynamite that you can buy on the streets here. Unbelievable conditions and probably a bit wrong that tourists and go down and gawp, I guess the miners are glad for the presents that we bring. Apparently millions have died in these mines since they opened in the 16th century.
A word on coca leaves. Yes it is the raw product of cocaine. The locals however chew the leaves to combat altitude sickness and give them a mild buzz, it's also used as a mild anaesthetic. You can't swallow the leaves though and have to keep them in your cheek giving you the look of a hamster with green teeth. Apparently it helps dilate the bronchioles of your lungs aiding breathing. It is big tradition here and it is thought about 80% of people chew coca. It tastes horrible.
Onto Sucre, a beautiful town full of a young university crowd, spent some good time partying here especially as it was a bank holiday on one of the days. We got invited into a church party where a good group of elderly people were having a proper knees up and falling over drunk at 4pm in the afternoon. We got treated to some of their local liquor and made to dance with some very flirty old women after downing some aphrodisiac cocktails. It turns out that it was a party to raise funds for a funeral fund for the next person to die in the group! Mint.
I left the lads behind and struck out on my own again leaving Sucre. For my overnight bus to La Paz I showed my ticket at the station and got ushered onto a bus and off we set. Ticket inspector comes along and looks at my ticket and says that I'm on the wrong bus and throws me off the bus in the middle of nowhere 30kms from Sucre! Hate being stranded in the dark. Fortunately there were a few food stalls along the road and an extremely nice lady helped me blag my way onto another bus. Weird and scary but all good in the end.
La Paz - the highest capital in the world. A stunning entrance to the city on a clear early morning, the city is set in a valley with brick housing cubes endlessly scattered up the valley sides making quite a spectacle. Hard work walking around the steep streets at altitude but worth it seeing more random things like dried llama foetuses being sold at the markets as good luck charms.
From La Paz you can cycle down the so called 'Death Road'. Incredible. Someone please give me some more superlatives. A 65km trip starting at an icey 4700m and descending to a tropical 1200m. Precipitous drops of up to 900m give the winding mountain road its infamous name. It's just a single dirt track, and up until 2007 it had trucks and buses plying the route and frequently dropping off the cliff. Fortunately another road has now been built and the original track has been turned into a bit of a Gringo playground. That said apparently a couple of people die on the road still every year, I'm not sure how, you've got to do something pretty stupid to go off. Amazing downhill experience and had some good races with the guide and an Italian guy going down. Proper buzzing.
Had wanted to go into the Amazon in Bolivia but there are a lot of protests at the moment which road blocks for days and weeks at end so I've had to sack the idea off. Protests are a way of life in Bolivia, the one that affected me was actually for a better wage for government workers, but there have also been protests when the government brought a ban for drink driving! I have instead headed to Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian border. For a change it's not the highest lake in the world but it still seems pretty strange to have a lake at 3800m high. Nice sunny weather during the day, Baltic at night. Off to an island in the middle of it now.
Well I'm off to see whether I can actually tip a weeble over, I shall don my bowler hat and say adios for now.
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