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Back in La Paz after a week of adventure. Last time I wrote I was in Potosi where we stayed for New Year. January 2nd, when the bussses started running again we took the bus south west to Uyuni where we booked a three day tour of the Uyuni salt flats for the next day. However the next day it turned out that due to the hollidays the city had run out of gasoline so we had to postpone the trip for a day.
To spend the extra day we went to see another mining town located a bit outside Uyuni. This was especially interesting since we were accompanied by a Canadian geology technician who was on holliday from her mining prospecting job in canada and who we had meet on our hostel in Potosi. This was a mining city which had worked for about a hundred years and when it was closed down at last in the fifties it had employed 20.000 miners. Now there was just a few hundred people living there and it was eerie to walk around the abandoned buildings and huge corroding wreks of heavy mining equipment. Milada, the geology technician could also tell us about the many signs of minerals that we saw in the rocks and tailings from the old silver mines. There was also a graveyard for old steam locomotives that included a train which had been robbed by the infamous Noth American gunslingers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who had left their bulletholes in one of the carriages. They were lured to Bolivia by the huge mineral wealth here and had robbed one of these ore trains before they ended their days in a shoot-out in the town of San Vicente furter south.
The next day we went on our tour which first went to the Train cermentery of Uyuni, whichj was another cermentery of stean locomotives, this one held all the steam locomotives of Bolivia which had been scrapped whenthey switched to disel trains in the sixties it was amazing to see the huge rusting hulks of maybe 50 trains just standing there in two long rows in the middle of the desert and imaging the power they used to have. Next the tour went on to its real highlight, the Uyuni salt flats, which are held by most to be the most impressive sight in Bolivia. The Salt flast is the biggest salt lake in the world covering the 9000 sq. km. with a layer of salt up to more than a hundred meters thick. It is said that in there is in total about 10 billion tons of salt here. It is amazing to drive over this perfectly flat and perfectly white featureless terrain while seeing noting but white salt. In the rainy season which was beginning now the flats become covered in a thin layer of water giving a perflect refection of the sky and it almost feels as though you are driving throug the clouds. For us there was water in a few places so we were lucky to get a sense of both views. We had lunch at a small island in the salt which was covered huge cactuses up to at least 1200 years old. At night we slept in San Juan, a small village at the edge of the salt flat, in a hotel built almost entirely out of salt blocks, the walls were made of salt, the chairs and tables were made from salt and even some of the beds were built from salt so that was quite special. The next morning we went driving through the desert south of the salt flats. It was domionated by a number of huge old volcanoes, one of which were still smoking. The influence of the volcanoes ensured that the lanscape kept changing in the most amazing ways, the color of the sand would change one moment, the color of the mountains the next. In one area the ground was covered by ancient corals from a sea which dissapperared millions of years ago the next we were sorrounded by strange surreal stone formations resembling tresses or odd fantasy castles. In this area we also saw amazing lakes whith different colors, whiter, green red or multicolored and many of them were filled with thousands of pink flamingoes feeding on the scrips which lived in the salty waters. The second night we slept near one of these lakes in the middle of the desert and had the most amazing sunset before the bitter cold forced us indoors. The last day we got up at 4.30 in the morning to drive to see a steam geyser errupting in the sunrise and walk around the amazing pits of boiling mud on the sulfur covered ground. The biggest pits were throwing boiling mud many meters into the air so it was important to keep a safe distance. Afterwards we went on to a hot spring where we had breakfast and I had a nice hot bath with a view of red volcanoes, a lake with pink flamingoes and a few vicunas, andean deer, watching from the nearby slopes. This was the last stop on our tour from which we went on to the Chilian border which we passed through to get to San Pedro in the Atacama desert.
San Pedro is hailied as one of the centre of one of the most amazing natural places in Chile, however that is mainly due to sights similar to those we had seen in the Uyuni, so we only spent one day there to go to see an amazing errosion area called the moon valley. After this we headed back toward La Paz, but because transport in Chile is much faster we did this mostly on the chilean side. We did this by first getting and evening bus to the local centre and mining town of Calama, then a night bus to the costal city of Arica where we spent the morning doping an express tour of the city. We had a swim in the pacific , went to see the local fish market which is amazing because the groups of pelicans and sea lions which come to feed on the waste were they clean the fish. We got to try a protion of the local super fresh Cerviche, raw fish in lemon chili sauce and finally went to see a customs building and church built by Eiffel in the 1870-ties. After this hectic tour we made it back to the bus station for our onward bus at 12:30. This bus trip turned out to be the most caotic one I have experienced in South America and which was a sharp contrast to the other Chilean busses which had departed exactly on time and sometimes arrived even bofore time. On this one we started out by waiting for 2.5 hours before finally leaving at 15:00 when we could see the mechanics working the bus companies other bus which, like ours, should have at 13:00. half an hour out opf the city we then had another half our stop because someone spilled a bottle of water all over the floor and they insisted on stooping to wipe it up even though it would have dried in an hour in the intense heat anyway. two hours later we met another bus comming from Bolivia, whichj we had to change into. two hours later we then got to the Chilean border control, followed by half an hour of driving through border land before artriving at the Bolivian border control. Thios was followed by another long wait while people did their border shopping so it was nice that I was well familiar with La Paz when we finally arrived in the dark at 23:00 on the 8th of january and had to find a hostel. However despite the chaos it was still very worthwhile to take this bus since we got our Bolivian visas renewed so that we can stay all of January and the bus also went through a beautifl national park dominated by some of the biggest volcanoes in the Andes
The 9th of January we saw a few of the museums of La Paz displaying inca gold as well as some fantastic traditional masks and feather decorations, which had been, and were still, used at festivals. At night we went to a pena a restaurant with traditional Bolivian music, it was quite a fun experience, and it was not too dominated by pan flutes.
Yesterday we took a trip to Chacaltaya, which was once famous because for over fifty years it was the worlds highest skiresort at 5300 meters above sea level. However in the last decade the global warming has caused the snow to dissappear and there is now only occasionally a thin layer covering the slopes. The views are however still amazing and when we went to the top at 5380 m it was the highest I had ever been without flying. It was abit sad however to see the decaying cafeteria which was once the main building of the ski resort still with its Gast stube signs hanging over the entrance to the abandoned resaturant with the empty fireplaces and bar, but still madded by the same owners as when the place was in its prime.
In the evening we made the the rather random decision to go to cholitaswrestling, which was advertised as a great attraction. it turned out to be a bizare mix of mock fighting and clowning in which the oddly disguised male fighters competed with cholitas, women dressed in the traditional andean dresses, in bizare mock battles similar of American wrestling. When the show finally ended we were not sad to return to return to the lower parts of La Paz and get some sleep.
Today we have been relaxing, shopping a bit, getting a lot of practical stuff sorted and I have been writing this blog while I sent Rebecca to try the local massage which I tried in Cusco.
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