Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Hello,
We left La Paz on a night bus to Potosí, the world's highest city at 4100m, and that's about that…It used to be a very rich city because of the silver mines, but today there isn't much to do.
Next day we took a shared taxi to Sucre, 165km away through high mountains. Sucre is stunning, feels like you are in Barcelona or Seville. It is also called the white city of the Americas. We had decided with the taxi dude to pick us up at 3pm, because we had to take a bus from Potosi to Uyuni at 7pm. From Uyuni we had organized a Jeep trip into Chile. Anyway…lets just say the taxi didn't show and we were running out of time. At 4.30 we managed to get another shared taxi, the trip takes about 2.5 hours and we realized we were going to miss our bus. Phil told me to tell the drivs in Spanish that we will pay him 100 Bolivianos (70 was the price) if he got us back to Sucre in 2h! Let's jut say that the driver wanted those extra 30 BOB. He went flying! Up through the mountains, pot holes, land slides, lamas, sheep herds, dogs, he took the corners like a rally driver. We went at 120km an hour on a 50km road, the whole car was shaking. At one point he also picked up a traditional dressed Bolivian lady that was lying in the trunk! He got us to Potosi bus terminal 6.45 and Phil took another taxi to the hostel to pick up our bags. While I tried to find the bus and I was going to bribe the bus driver to wait for Phil. The bus departed 4 blocks away from the bus terminal. So I went there, but Phil didn't know that. The bus was delayed till 7.30 and Phil made it there at 7.28, the previous 30minutes he had been running around the bus terminal looking for me carrying a 20kilo backpack on his back and a 20 kilo backpack in his arms. Eventually a Police man told him where the bus departed from. We were so happy being on that bus!
The next three days we spent going by Jeep through southern Bolivia in to Chile. The nature was amazing. We went through the world's largest salt lake with a very cool island with massive cactuses, 12m high. Very surreal! Through mountains, moon landscape of corals and desert. We will post pictures, it was a great trip! We entered Chile through the Atacama Desert in to an Oasis town.
We are on budget for the first time on our trip. Bolivia was very cheap and we lived on an average of 32 pound a day for the 2 of us and we did so many amazing things.
From the desert town we caught a short bus to Calama, from here we flew to Santiago. We had some more luck in Calama. It is quite a dodgy place and we had some hours to kill. So we went to an indoor market. We were sitting in a juice bar on high bar chairs ( we had been out the night before, so I was slightly hangover has well…)Anyway we had both our small backpacks on the ground by our chairs, I always normally sit like a complete geek hugging my bag, but for some reason I didn't this time and the chair was too high for me to feel the bag with my legs. All of a sudden I realized that my bag was missing. Let´s just say there was panic! I had my passport, ipod, camera, Cds with all our photos and much more in my bag! I looked at Phil and said my bag is missing; it has my passport in it. Phil got up and said he would try and find it. For some reason he decided to go to the right. He ran of and he could see a guy with a bag looking like mine walking very fast through the crowds. He pushed some people out of the way and a few meters from the exit of the market, he grabbed my bag from the guy. He got it and the guy just walked off. I was so surprised when Phil came back holding my bag up in front of him. Nice to have some luck, Phil said the moment he launched himself on the guy, he had some doubts that is really was my bag…could have ended really bad if it wasn't.
We are enjoying a very European Santiago, sunny and a very nice city.
Love
Sofia and Phil
- comments