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Our stay in Sucre was very much treated as two days to catch up on sleep, laundry and some half-decent grub! On our second night there, we all went out for the world's highest swiss fondue. I'm not a huge fondue fan but it seemed the altitude helped. It was amazing and, three or four bottles of red wine later, we staggered home, passing an outside concert in the dark. We fell into a much needed deep sleep while the sounds of the samba drifted in through our window. We left Sucre feeling refreshed, relaxed, rested and ready to start all over again. That didn't last long! After 13 hours on the bus we arrived in Uyuni. On the drive, we were left with no option but to leave the road and travel on the dirt for about 2 hours, due to a landslide we had just missed. Be not fooled; the roads in Boliva are so called because that just happens to be the route everyone takes. There are no lanes, signs or lights. There isn't even any tarmac. I do not exagerate when I tell you the roads are simply no more than Bolivian desire lines. So, "off road" is no different to "on road" except for the dust. Dust in abundance. It's that nasty type of dust that you can feel rattling into your lungs with every breath. The type that turns your eyes into huge red saucers. The type that you're still blowing out of your nose the following week. Having showered, and showered again, we grabbed a pizza before heading into town to inquire about visiting the Salar de Uyuni. This is where we met Dave! Dave and his wife own a small business in town specialising in salt flat tours.
Poor Dave wasn't all that good at negotiating and so we got a good price and met him the next morning to start the tour. We fitted very comfortably into the 4x4 and set off a little dubious as to whether "Dave" had ever done this before. The first place we stopped was a train cemetary and the town where the bodies of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were found after their last stand. At first I couldn't shake my resentment that the Bolivians will make a toruist attraction out of anything, but the longer we spent walking past rusty shells of steam engines, long forgotten, the spookier it became. It's the strangest thing I've ever`paid to see and the jury is still out on that one. The next stop was the small processing factories of the salt found at Salar de Uyuni. Only the locals are legally allowed to harvest the salt for free and they really do make the most of it. They even use the salt to build the houses they live in, the factories they work in and the barrows to transport the salt. So, for the most part, there are no overhead costs. It would be an amazing business venture if, of course, they didn't live in Bolivia. After we had marvelled at the factoires we finally headed down to the salt flats. Salar de Uyuni is a pre-historic lake which has dried up leaving between 5 and 100 metres of salt crust over 150 sq kilometres. This equates to approximately 70 million tonnes of salt. On the flats it is hard not be blown away by the sight of the brilliant white salt meeting the beautiful clear blue sky on the horizon. On some parts of the flats are "water eyes." There are small puddles of water on the salt that look like they are bubbling as the air escapes from underneath. The salt flats are so vast and untouched that you completely lose your sense of depth and perception, so what looked like a half an hour drive to Fish Island, ended up taking four times as long. It was worth the bumpy ride though. Fish Island, or Incahuana, is a small rock and coral formation which is home to 6000 cacti. Imagine a sponge with 6000 toothpicks stuck into it: now you have an idea of what Fish Island might look like! We spent a long time taking photographs and burning in the afternoon sun before returning to the hotel. Morning came quickly and we now found oursleves heading towards the border which would take about twenty hours on the bus. We decided to split the trip into two days and spend one night in Tupiza which is about half way. The first day of driving didn't go too well. What the driver thought was a blown out tyre turned out to be the suspension coming loose. I'm sure there is a much more "mechanical" explanation but you'll forgive me if I tell you I wasn't paying that much attention. All I knew was that the bus was out of action, I was in the middle of nowhere and it was just us, the sun and, obviously, the dreaded dust!! It remained that way for three hours until some questionable use of duct tape got us on our way again. We arrived late in Tupiza and left early, driving about four hours before pulling up to the border. This border crossing was much more difficult than the last one. The queues were long and slow, every person was searched, the truck was inspected and everything took longer than nessecary. Almost every national was taking a cat or dog across the border without anyone so much as blinking but a truck load of gringos coming in from Bolivia just cannot be trusted and so we were fumigated before we could leave. What a welcome to Argentina! All was forgiven though when I could see, in the distance, a grey ribbon of heaven, a tarmac road! I think, along with my dislike of their roads, the part of Bolivia that will always stay with me is the knowledge of the extreme exploitation it has had to endure. It seems it has earnt it's legacy as the poorest country in South America because the rest of the continent has given up on this spectacular place. They have taken what was not rightfully theirs until all that remains is a dumping ground for governement mistakes. The Spanish, in the 16th century, stole all of the silver from Cirro Rico, once the world's wealthiest silver mine. The US deliberately undervalued the price of it's natural resource, tin and zinc, leaving Bolivia no option than to sell at ridiculously low prices. It's last little bit of coastline was won by Brazil during the war leaving the fishing trade too expensive for Bolivia to particpate in. What is equally frightening is that the Bolivian economy appears to have no platform from which to rise again. To the budget traveller Boliva is, excitingly, the cheapest country in South America, but behind every baragin souveneir is a story of a family living so far from the breadline that the life expectancy there is only 45! Astonishgly, 60% of Bolivians are living in poverty and let us not forget that this is poverty by South American standards. My sincerest hope, as I left this most vulnerable country, was that, soon, the wind changed for Bolivia. Somehow.
Thought of the Day: Ghandhi was once known to have compared western governments to the Spanish Inquistion. Cheeky git obviously never had his bags checked at the Argentine border!
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