SwiftRambles

Bolivia and Peru At-A-Glance

 

Days spent: Bolivia = 24, Peru = 12

Transportation taken: Planes = 0, Buses = 15, Taxis = 5, Boats = 2, Trains = 2

Number of places we stayed: 9

Final daily budget: Bolivia = $80 (would have been $69 if we didn't have to pay an expensive visa fee), Peru = $211 (The Inca Trail is expensive!)

Wildlife spotted:

- Vicuna

- Llamas

- Flamingos

Some ink on Incans - Copacabana and Isla Del Sol, Bolivia

After yet another overnight bus, we arrived in La Paz and decided we were not ready for exploring a big, rough city.  So that morning at the bus station we spontaneously bought onward tickets to Copacabana.  No, not the famous Rio beach.  Copacabana, Bolivia, is a town on Lake Titicaca (yes, we made juvenile jokes about the name) where Incans used to live.  We realized that while we saw natural beauty and how Bolivians live today thus far in Bolivia, but we really hadn't seen much on its pre-columbian history. 

We arrived in Copacabana and found that it was filled with tourist-centric restaurants, tour agencies, and crapcraft markets selling Homer Simpson t-shirts - not the quintessential Incan cultural center we were picturing.  They love The Simpsons in South America:

I got jumped by a llama - Tupiza to Uyuni, Bolivia

Note: There are a lot of pictures on this post so it may be slow to load! It's worth it I promise :)

Having barely heard of Bolivia before this trip, much less not being very aware of what there is to see here, one of the few things I knew I wanted to do was to take a multiple day tour of the salt flats in the southwest region of the country.  It's great fun!  Basically, you squeeze into a jeep with 4 of your new best friends and drive around all day for 4 days. Your ultimate destination is the Salar de Uyuni, a giant salt flat, but you take three days to get there. At night it's a balmy -20 C (-4 F) and oh, by the way, there is no heat.   It's so cold that the drivers have to wake up and start the jeep every 2 hours or the engine will freeze (which one day it did).  The food is ok, but not great and let's not even discuss the conditions of the bathrooms.  The whole time you are above 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) and one day even go up as high as 5,000 meters (16,404 feet).

So why would you do all of this?  Well, maybe I should just show you:

Giddy-up - Tupiza, Bolivia

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are rumored to have lost a gun battle near Tupiza, Bolivia (some think they actually lived on the run in Patagonia). Whether or not the famed outlaws actually died nearby, Tupiza felt like the Old West. It was dusty, rustic, and was set in scenery straight out of a spaghetti western. It was here Amber and I signed up for a Salt Flat tour and explored the area while we waited for the tour to begin.

In true cowboy fashion we went for a horseback tour of a nearby canyon:

Reaching new heights - Potosi, Bolivia

I first heard about Potosi from a Continental Airlines captain I met at a soccer game in Buenos Aires, who said it was a must-see. Since he had traveled all over the world, I thought it best to heed his advice. Potosi is known as the highest city in the world at 4,090 meters (13,420 feet) and we thought it would be a good way to start acclimatizing for our upcoming Inca Trail trek. The city developed because an indigenous farmer found silver in 1546 and shared this knowledge with the Spanish. The Spanish in turn mined the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) for hundreds of years, generating millions of pesos. At one point Potosi was the richest city in the world and it was rumored that enough silver was found to build a bridge from South America to Spain. Today, the Potosis still mine Cerro Rico for silver and zinc and the main tourist draw is to see the mines in action.

View of Potosi:



Cerro Rico:

 

We arrived to Potosi and we definitely felt the effects of the altitude. We could not go up the stairs to our room without gasping for air. We took it easy and kept hydrated so that we could acclimate.

Following in the tracks of dinosaurs and Incans - Sucre, Bolivia

Note: We are way behind on the blog!  No internet access for a long time and our recent quick travel schedule has made updating the blog difficult.  We hope to catch up soon but here's a nice unusually long post in the meantime...

After the hellish lovely time at Ginger's Paradise, we headed to Sucre to soak up some Bolivian culture. 

Actually by "headed" I mean we walked to the restaurant where we supposedly could catch a bus, found out that the bus is full (well, we were offered to ride in the middle of the aisle... for the 12 hour ride), discovered too late that we should have been waving down every bus that we saw in an attempt to get seats, and then headed back to Ginger's Paradise for one more night.  Oh, and by the way, this day was Tom's birthday!  So not making the same mistake the next day, we backtracked a couple of hours to Santa Cruz and took the bus from there... only to stop at the very same restaurant we had waited out the night before to pick up a couple of passengers.  Such is travel in Bolivia.  This doesn't even go to mention the 12 hour bouncy ride on unpaved roads, the extremely smelly guy sitting next to Tom in the middle of the aisle, and the fact that 99% of the bus was comprised of a teenage boy "delegation" who spent the night taking flash pictures of their shaving fight and having rap "battles".  We definitely felt like we arrived in Bolivia with these transportation hijinks.  At least Tom stopped one of the boys from peeing into a bottle in the seat next to us... we didn't want to set a precedent, right?

After arriving to Sucre though, we felt the travel woes were worth it as we viewed the whitewashed city high up in the foothills of the Andes.  At 9,000 feet, Sucre was a good introduction to the higher altitudes we'd be experiencing in Bolivia. 







Known as the cultural heart as well as the constitutional capital of Bolivia, we spent a pleasant few days exploring the city and doing typical touristy things, like visiting a textile museum to learn about the traditions of the various indigenous cultures of Bolivia and seeing some indigenous masks worn at festivals:

Ginger's Paradise? - Bermejo, Bolivia

As Tom mentioned in his last post, he convinced me to go and stay a few days at an organic farm a couple of hours outside of Santa Cruz.  The location was beautiful and the farm's website had a clever poem promising that we could milk a cow.  As I have always wanted to milk a cow, I was in!  The farm was called Ginger's Paradise and while it was beautiful, there are several reasons why I would not use "Paradise" as the moniker of the farm...

Reason #1 - There was no cow

Surviving the Death Train - Santa Cruz, Bolivia

From the Brazil border we caught a train known as the "Death Train" from Quijarro, Bolivia to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.  The history of the name has numerous theories from the train carrying yellow fever victims to murders occurring on the train.  Today the train is deemed safe to travel on, but we still had to decide between a 22 hour or 15 hour train ride.  We opted for the 15 hour overnight train, hoping that we could sleep and awaken in our destination.

As the train pulled away we realized that sleep might be difficult as the train jostled along the tracks.  Then a movie started, and I felt my ears start to bleed as the volume of the movie was excruciatingly loud.  As I tried to focus on what movie it was I realized I could not understand the dialogue as it was dubbed in Spanish (AND perplexingly had subtitles in Spanish).  The movie title showed on the screen and it was...Major Payne, a kids movie with Damon Wayans as a retired drill sergeant trying to manage kids at a private school.  I remember seeing this as a kid and not really digging it.  Bumping along the tracks, with the movie on full blast, I started to understand the name of the train...