La Paz-Tiwanaku-WMDR-La Paz

After three days in Salar, La Paz felt nice and warm. I had sensation in my feet again and I was ready to rock out. We arrived at 630am on Sunday 7 September 2008 after doing an all-night bus ride from Uyuni through Oruro and we were tired. We decided to take the day to relax by shopping and eating.

Eating icecream together in Plaza Murillo. Yum yum yum.

In the witches market.

We planned to go to Lake Titicaca on Monday 8 September 2008, however due to road blockages, we were unable to go:( Instead we signed up to visit Tiwanaku, an ancient site that holds a lot of religious significance to the Aymara Indians and where Evo Morales formally took power when he was elected president of Bolivia. The site had some impressive ruins, but it was pretty poorly maintained. There is no security whatsoever, very little excavation has actually been done, and people literally pick up artifacts and walk away with them.

One of the statues

Another statue

The moon gate. Below us in the sub-level plaza were a bunch of heads sticking out of the walls and we saw a group of people jump the string and take photos touching the heads.
Not touching the heads.

Tuesday 9 September 2008 Brenda and I decided to do the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' on bike. The WMDR is a windy dirt road between La Paz and Coroico and it got its moniker because of all the accidents and deaths that occurred there (1986 was the most fatal year with an average of 1.5 deaths per day). The road drops a couple thousand meters, has sheer cliffs of 700 meters and is essentially one lane. Brenda and I decided to go on the trip since we had already seen the city, were told that the ride was for beginners, had to fill a day and the company that we went with was reputable as being very safe. Unfortunately, the tour involved a lot of horror stories of people who died on the road while being on bikes, people who did not die but who were very badly injured, and the alternative route that has been used for the past few years by cars was closed for maitenance, so along with sheer cliffs there were a lot of big rigs to deal with.

I was the only one in my group to fall off of my bike, coming around a corner after seeing multiple crosses and a headstone in Hebrew I skidded out and fell on my face. I got really scared and ended up sitting in the bus for about an hour before getting back out and finishing the ride. Overall, I would say it was a terrifying experience, there is a reason I do not do X-sports and the following night I had nightmares about getting hit by a truck.

After the ride.

One of the many crosses on the road. This one was for a French girl who fell off the mountain after making way for a car coming up the road.The bus in front of us.

10 September 2008: Brenda's Last Day

On Brenda's last day with me in La Paz we went on a culinary tour with Karen (the Paceña we met in Potosí. Paceña=a brand of beer or a person from La Paz). We started out the morning eating Salteñas, then went on to eat Tucumanas (an empanada filled with salteña filling sold on the street with many different salsas to try) and Llauchas (an empanada with liquid cheese inside that is usually eaten hot in the morning with coffee. We finished up our tour going to a park overlooking the city and took some final photos before Brenda left for Santa Cruz.

Salar de Uyuni Day 3

Woke up on Saturday morning when my set alarm went off at 5am (we were going to head over to some hot springs, a green lake, the border with Chile and finally back to Uyuni). Nobody came to get us however, and until 6am we stayed in bed waiting for an update. At 6-something, the driver came by to tell us that the car was not in working order but not to worry at 10am another car would pass by to take us back to Uyuni.

The story was as follows: The night before our cook and all the drivers got drunk and ran out of alcohol. When they asked the people at the 'hotel' to give them more alcohol, they were denied, so the cook, being the youngest in the group, was sent to get more. He somehow had a fake copy of the key to the car and took it without our driver knowing and proceeded to go to the next town or hotel over with two people from the group (not sure why anyone would get in the car with a drunkard, BAD IDEA). On the way back from the town in the middle of a flat area, the car flipped and was ruined. We were mightily pissed that our tour was not complete, that our driver and cook were irresponsible and that they clearly had no judgment whatsoever.

Tour car.

While we waited around for another car to come pick us up, a bunch of llamas came by the hotel, and we took pictures of them and played cards to keep us busy.Not sure why all the llamas had colored pom-poms on their ears, but it was very cute.
Strategery
All the girls from the tour in the car that came by to pick us up at 10am. We were very lucky that another group decided to all go to Chile since this driver dropped them off at the border and then picked us up on the way back to Uyuni. I talked to him in the front all the way back to make sure that he stayed awake and to find out if he had been drinking (he had not).
We stopped in a mining town with a beautiful church on the way back to Uyuni and took a photo next to the bell tower.

Salar de Uyuni Day 2

We stayed in a really nice salt hotel our first night right outside of the Salar and in the morning I woke up to this site:
We got in the car and day two involved a lot of driving up to higher altitudes to look at mountains and lakes. A selection below:

When we stopped at this lookout point for 10 minutes, I had my ears uncovered and they turned icy and painful within minutes. Cold cold cold. In the background is a borax lake. The car got a flat tire, the second in two days, at this place, which was on the way to the first lake with flamingos.
Flamingos in a lake. It was SOOOO cold and windy, I have no idea how the flamingos were able to stay in the water and focus on eating.
Mountains in the distance.

The second night we stayed in a ghetto hotel that was dirty and cold. It was apparently one of the coldest nights of the year and the bathroom, which was foul to begin with, got even nastier when the water froze due to the chill overnight. But that was just the beginning of the adventure...

Salar de Uyuni Day 1

The bus ride from Potosí to Uyuni took 7 hours and it was all dirt roads. Since we bought our tickets pretty last minute, we sat in the back of the bus and literally flew up from our seats at multiple junctures (the bus driver was in a rush). We arrived in Uyuni at 3am and it was freeeeeezing. We checked into a hotel to sleep a few hours and then woke up to start the tour.

Stop one was the train graveyard a few miles outside of town. Uyuni has a ton of natural resources (like salt, obviously, borax and other minerals that are mined and exported) so trains from Uyuni to Chile started running in the early 1900s. This graveyard outside the town used to be nicer, but a lot of the train parts have been stolen and graffitied.

With Brenda on a train.
Pretending to be a conductor.

Around midday we finally headed to the Salar. I had tons of sunscreen on and still got burned, it was that white. When I took pictures I could not actually identify anything, I just saw whiteness, so I am glad that the pictures came out ok.
Brenda and I posing for our calendar wit some salt piles. People put the salt into little piles to dry it out for processing in a plant and then for consumption.
In the middle of the Salar is Fish Island, a rock formation covered in cacti that is in the shape of a fish. It is a good place to look over the whole Salar. The climb to the top was relatively easy but I was seriously winded since we were at an altitude of maybe 4300 meters.
Whole lot of salt.

Potosí 3 September 2008

On Wednesday 3 September 2008 Brenda and I went to a museum in Sucre before hopping into a shared cab to go 2.5 hours to Potosí. Potosí is the capital of the department with the same name and I think it is the city that actually has the highest airport since it is up around 4000+ meters about sea level. Brenda and I only had a few hours in town before we had to catch a bus to go to Salar de Uyuni, so we walked around the streets in the center for a half hour and then headed over to the highly recommended Casa de Moneda, a museum that documents the silver industry in Potosí. Potosí has a hill that is full of silver and which actually kept the Spanish empire afloat financially for years.

A church in Potosí.

One of the machines in the Casa de Moneda where silver was pressed down into coins. The machine required four donkeys and a few people working it and the Casa de Moneda had four machines to make coins for the Spanish Empire. The guide told us that ironically Bolivian money is now made in Spain.

With Bolivianita, a gem that is found in Santa Cruz, and Karen, a nice Paceña who was on the tour with us. Along with the story of silver, the museum had a lot of exhibits of natural resources of Bolivia and paintings.
Freezing in Potosí and it was only to get worse...

Sucre

It has been quite a while since my last blog post because I was traveling around with Brenda and without my computer. Luckily, I had my camera and thus there are copious pictures to update and stories to tell, so without further ado, here is the delayed update about my travels since September started.

On Tuesday September 2 Brenda and I woke up at 530 am to head to Trompillo airport in the middle of the city of Santa Cruz. With the airline TAM (which apparently has a pretty crappy reputation, we of course did not know about the reputation until the tickets were bought) we flew to Sucre, the capital of Bolivia. Sucre is considered the most beautiful city in Bolivia and its chocolate capital, so I was very excited about visiting. Our first stop on the grand tour of the city was the Casa de Libertad, a building where the Constitution was signed and which also served as a university. Brenda and I were able to get in as nationals thanks to her appearance and accent.
The hall where the constitution was signed. Because independence day passed relatively recently before our visit (August 6th), we saw the actual constitution and not just a copy, which is what they usually have there. When this building was a Dominican university, which used to be the best in the country, this room was where students defended their thesis’s in front of their professors and the public.
Paintings at the head of the room where the constitution was signed. In the middle is a painting of Simón Bolívar that he considered to be the most accurate representation of himself (on the left the gold leaf is a note from Bolívar congratulating the artist for doing such a good job).
After Casa de Libertad Brenda and I headed over to the Prefectura and got someone to take us to the top for a view of the city. To the left in this picture is the plaza, the tower in the front is from the Cathedral, and there are tons of other churches all over town. Sucre is known for all its white buildings.
Some graffiti that we saw all over the city. While the department of Chuquisaca has a large indigenous population that supports Evo, in the city Evo is disliked and there have actually been a lot of protests and Evo has not been able to land his airport in Sucre.
We met up with Geovanna, from CEPAD, and a girl from Spain who was placed in Sucre to do her internship in the evening and went out to dinner in a lovely restaurant. When we met up there was a parade around the plaza, so we stopped and took some photos. Here we are in front of the Cathedral and the parade is behind us, though you cannot see it well.