Our first task, was to get ourselves to Uyuni to go on a tour of the salt flats. As with everything in South America, travelling a few hundred kilometres takes far longer than it should. Our journey starts reasonably early in the morning (9am) where we must make our way from our hostel to the bus terminal in La Paz.
Don´t try and rip me off because I´m a tourist!
So we hail a taxi near our hostel and ask him to take us to the bus station. Trying our best to say ¨Estacion de autobuses¨, we eventually give up and just get out our map and point to it. In South America, it is normal at this point to negotiate the cost of the taxi, but this detail slipped our attention at the time.
So we arrive at the bus station, and the taxi driver says ´Quince Bolivianos´. Being the experts at Spanish that we are, we mistakenly assume he has said ´50 Bolivianos´. Which is outrageous. So we hand him a 10B note. He repeatedly says ´Quince´, but not wanting to be ripped off, Alice and I stand our ground. We even fail to pick up with he starts saying ´Cinco mas´ or ´Five more´, that he has in fact asked us for 15 Bolivianos, not 50. Eventually he tires of arguing and drives off. It wasn´t until about 15 (Quince) minutes later that we realise he was asking for 15B, and we had just argued over 5 Boliviaos. That is about 80 cents...
Once in the bus terminal, we purchase a ticket for the bus (I will be honest, we cheated a bit here as we had our Intrepid Tour guide write us a pretty detailed list of instructions on how to get to Uyuni) and pay the departure tax. This bus takes a few hours and gets us to a pretty dirty little town called Oruro, where we have a two hour or so wait before catching this train:
To Uyuni.
The train initially looks very comfortable, it has a TV, heating, and reasonably comfortable seats. However, it turns our that our seats are the two right next to the door at the back of the cabin. The only way to close said door is to absolutely slam it shut, otherwise it will just swing back open. Further, our carriage is one carriage away from the dining cart, and there are probably another 3 or 4 carriages in front of us. Each cabin has about 30 people sitting in it. So, throughout the 7 hour train journey, there are 90 to 120 people who need to walk through our cabin to go the dining cart. All of whom will take three goes to shut the door, until they learn they will need to slam it. All of this is going on in my left ear.
To make it worse, the train has windows that open and close in small segments, locking into place every 10 centimetres or so. Alice has the window seat, and insists on keeping the window closed, except for all of the times when she has to reopen it to take photos out the window. Each opening and closing generates about 4 loud bangs. This is in my right ear.
Fortunately, to distract me from it all I have the soothing sounds of Culture Club (Boy George) singing Karma Chameleon and other hits from about that era, which is what the train company thinks is suitable entertainment.
At the end of the ride we are greeted with this scene of complete havoc.
That is the several hundred customers, trying to push their way to the baggage cart to get their baggage off. Eventually they move all the bags to a room, which is just as bad.
The next day we are transported around 9am to the office of our salt flat tour company. I can´t wait to meet our ´Professional Speaking English Guide´.
Turns out our guide is not English at all, he is in fact Bolivian. However his English is pretty good. Alice spends most of the trip distracted by his small hands, which she thinks were disproportionately small even for his short stature.
We head out to the Salt Flats. On the way we check out a train graveyard (sorry, no photos, they are on Alice´s camera). Once you get to the Salt Flats, it is basically 100´s of tourists taking stupid photos. It is actually quite difficult to do as there is so much glare that you can´t really see through the view finder of your camera what you´re taking a photo of. Here are some of our best efforts (Alice and I, plus our tour mates Jenny, Sarah from Sweden, and Chiraag and Nick from England).
After having our fill of photographs we drive onto Fish Island, which is a truly bizarre place. It is an island, as the name would suggest, in the middle of all this salt, completely covered in cacti. It is REALLY windy here, and the wind is ice cold.
After exploring the island for a while we jump back in our 1980s Toyota Hilux and head to our accommodation for the night. A building entirely made of salt. That includes walls, beds, floors, pillars to hold the roof. The roof is a thatch roof, the only thing not made of salt. As suspected, salt is not terribly good at keeping in warmth and it is pretty bloody cold. A few bottles of red wine do the trick to provide warmth (or at least ignorance of the cold).
More Mummies
We awake in the morning and have a quick breakfast before heading out on the second day of our tour. This takes us to another (groan) 1000 or so year old grave site where we see another 15 - 20 skeletons of mummies in the dirt. This cost us 10 Bolivianos ($1.40ish), and it wasn´t worth any of them. It was cold and windy. Here is me next to an ´Apacheta´, or translated ´Pile of rocks´.
Is the pile of rocks old? No, apparently not. There is nothing particularly interesting about it at all, it is just there. Probably nobody could be bothered moving it, and it was just easier to put a sign next to it like it was supposed to be there.
Change of itinerary
So, apparently it is so cold and windy that our tour guide has to call off the rest of our planned journey. It has been snowing in the regions we were to visit, which means all of the pink flamingos are apparently dead. While I think a photo with me and a few thousand pink flamingo carcasses would be great for the album, it is agreed within our group that we just head back to Uyuni.
The tour guide offers to take us instead to some hot springs. But neither Alice nor I have a towel with us, so we opt out of that option, and opt in to the ´Extreme Fun Pub´ in Uyuni. This place is hilarious. When you order the cocktails, they come in mystery glasses. Hilarious!
Somewhere in here, Alice and I also managed to do something completely on our own. Because our trip gets cut short by a day, we need to move our bus tickets earlier by one day. We go to our bus company and establish, with some difficulty, that the bus is full. This is all done in ou limited, broken, Spanish. We then take our limited broken Spanish to another bus company, and manage to purcahse two tickets. Slightly concerned that they are half the price of our other tickets we decide it is better to be uncomfortable and out of Uyuni, than wait another day here for a comfortable bus. We head back to our other bus company, and manage to cancel our tickets and obtain a full refund! Yay us!
Our bus leaves at 8pm and arrives at 6am. This was a TERRIBLE bus journey. It is dark, but I think most of the time the bus is not even driving on a road, as we are moving at about 1km per hour and I can hear the wheels spinning in dirt/mud. The only thing to lighten the mood is the group of 6 or so Brazilian guys, probably aged in their early 20s, who had clearly been drinking all day, and insist on meeting us and dancing around us like Kangaroos once they find out we are from Australia.
Death Road
Once we are back in La Paz, we check into two hostels. The first one is cheap, only US$10. But I will point out that it was Alice, not me, who suggested after we take a nap in it that perhaps we search for more comfortable lodging. I do not hesitate to agree. (I was probably about 1 second from making the same suggestion). We also book our places for a pleasant ´bike ride´ the next day on the WORLD´S MOST DANGEROUS ROAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I originally wasn´t going to do this ride, but because Alice got food poisoning when she was supposed to go with our tour group, I end up agreeing to be her companion. At the very worst I can just sit in the safety bus and have a pleasant drive down the mountain. We start the day high, at 4700m above sea level where it is BLOODY FREEZING and there is snow not too far from us on the mountain top.
Here we are in our sexy high-vis wind proof riding gear.
We then ride 60km or so down the mountain, which will also take us to about 1000m above sea level where it is actually warm! I haven´t ridden a bicycle since probably the year 2000, or maybe earlier. I am a little apprehensive, but because it is all down hill at least I don´t have to put a great deal of effort into it. There are some flat bits which, to my disgust, require me to pedal, but these are fairly short.
The first third is on bitumen, but after that we get onto the old road, which is made of dirt, and has drops to the side of the road of several hundred metres most of the way.
This road is called death road for a reason. The last death on this road was in June this year! People get distracted by butterflies and follow them off the cliff, forget they are still turning a corner (some of them are 180 degrees) and ride off the cliff, lose their brakes and ride off the cliff, adjust their goggles and ride off the cliff, try to take self portraits on their camera while riding and ride off the cliff. However, it becomes quite plain that the road is safe unless, as our tour guide puts it ´You ride like a f**king idiot´.
I am not sure why Alice has chosen to put such ´active´ activities in the 6 weeks of the journey that I am with her, considering that I am VERY unfit. Especially when, once I go back to Australia, she is heading to Colombia to sit on a beach and drink cocktails out of coconuts for four weeks... I signed up for the wrong end of the holiday!
At the bottom of the mountain we are given a buffet lunch at a nature reserve. Here there are several species of monkeys, birds, turtles, a boa, and of course some dogs for good measure, that have run of the place.
They jump onto people, and you are not allowed to touch them. They will hop off you when they are done. We are told to empty our pockets of all valuables, because the monkeys will pick pocket us.
The monkey in the photo above (and I assure there is a monkey there somewhere...) has epilepsy and so is kept in a cage. Normally, in the wild, its family/friends would kill it. However here it is kept and given epilepsy drugs, which are apparently very expensive. Further, because it has been on them so long it has to keep getting a higher and higher dose, at ever increasing cost. Meanwhile, 30% of the Bolivian population lives below the poverty line on less than $2/day...
This large parrot, only minutes after this photo was taken, gets attacked by a Spider Monkey. Very amusing... turns out the animals might not be as happy living together as the owners make out! I guess the Spider Monkey thought this bird, with its colourful feathers, was getting far more attention than it deserved.
For the 3 hour drive back up the mountain we treat ourselves to a well deserved beverage.
So that is about it.
We are currently sitting at the airport in Santa Cruz after catching an early morning flight from La Paz. Our airline from Santa Cruz to Buenos Aires is Aerolineas, and we arrived to find a completely empty desk. By the look of the vacant desk and the rusting gold plated sign behind it, Aerolineas may have gone bankrupt since we booked our tickets (or perhaps even before...), but this is still early days, we will give them another hour or so before getting too concerned.
Ciao.
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