Hitchin' a Ride

Hello all. Time is ticking and I´m on a shared hostel computer so lets get started. First of all a wee sedgeway, congratulations to Isa and James for the birth of their baby boy Luka. Hooray!

Our second stop in Argentina was originally going to be a transfer to another bus but on the recommendation of a mormon guy we met briefly in Tilcara we thought we ought to stay a night in San Salvador de Jujuy. On our arrival in the middle of the afternoon we discovered a dead quiet city with closed and shuttered shops, empty streets and abandoned cafés. This was our first experience of the strictly adhered argentine custom of "the siesta", where everything is closed from lunch to around 5pm. One flipside of this was that while the banks are closed, everyone queues madly outside waiting for it to reopen. The queue in the photo, which may have been tax return day or something, stretched right to the end of the block, maybe 400m! Once things started to reopen, Jujuy strangely reminded us of Hong Kong, with huge neon signs and banners stretched across the streets.

In Jujuy we went for a mission out of town to some thermal pools which were nestled in a valley overlooking a river. The trip out there on the bus was particularly picturesque, taking us through some of the first green countryside we had seen in months.

As food here in Argentina is a bit pricier, we´ve started preparing our own meals again which means exploring food markets and trying to learn all the multitude of spanish words for cuts of meat (it seems asking for meat of cow doesn't work too well!). In our next stop of Salta, we had a run in with an unexpected problem at the market. While wandering and browsing to find a cheap market restaurant for lunch we found ourselves mobbed by waitresses trying to get us to buy from their restaurant. We were surrounded by almost a dozen all yabbering at us, some laughing, some grabbing us and pulling, none of them listening to our insistence on being left alone. We did the cowardly thing and ran like hell. After regrouping outside we came up with a plan. We hurried back inside with our heads down and sat down at the first tables we could find. Whew!

Other highlights of Salta included walking up San Bernado´s hill with its views over the city. During this we found out what people do in the middle of the day when they´re not working, they exercise! There were all sorts running, walking, puffing and stretching their way up and down the hill.

We decided to have a bit of a night out on our last night in Salta and headed to the bar district to find a peña. We discovered that the big city peña experience was to be quite different from the cozy club in Tilcara. The bands were very professional, the wine was very fancy and the food was completely dominating. It was our first "parillada" or argentine barbeque which is served on a grill stoked with hot coals and for the two of us consisted of 2 steaks; 3 chops; 2 sausages; 5 slices of kidney; 1 slice of liver and a pile of long stringy intestine. We polished it all off, apart from the intestine which tasted a bit too much like I thought intestine would taste like, and at the end of the night we waddled out with stuffed bellies.

Our plan was to take the long way from Salta to our next planned stop at Cafayate in our usual "off the beaten track" search. This involved staying a night in a spanishy small town called Cachi where we hired bikes for the afternoon and pedalled up a pretty valley. The next day we planned to hitch hike to Cafayate as there were no buses that went all the way, unfortunately this was a Sunday morning and like Sunday mornings throughout the continent, nothing was happening. After standing at the outskirts of town for 3 hours, waving our thumbs around and talking to a local goat herder for some time, we gave up and reverted to plan B. Plan B involved taking 2 buses and hiring a private car to arrive wearily in Cafayate.

The Perfect Town?

We were finally on our way out of Bolivia, excited to be heading to a new place, with all the creature comforts of a more developed country, a little dread about how much more expensive such creature comforts are and a little dissapointment that we couldn´t have made more of our time in Bolivia due to the roadblocks and such. The border crossing at Villazón was pretty uneventful other than waiting for 2 hours in a queue while the immigration office was closed for lunch. However once we got through to the Argentinian side of the border we discovered that there were absolutely no money changers in this side of the town. We were stuck in a country with no money and no access to an ATM, another amateur mistake, always change money when you can! Luckily I was able to simply stroll back through to Bolivia to change money and stroll back again past all the suckers still waiting for entry stamps. Whew!

Our first stop in Argentina was the wee town of Tilcara, and what a wee town it is! We both pretty much fell in love with the place within our first day there thanks mostly to all the friendly people we met. The town is a hub for artists in the northwestern region so it´s packed with interesting people, cool shops and spring blossoms coming into bloom. There seemed to be a really different attitude towards visitors compared to Bolivia, where the people were generally quite shy to talk. We found ourselves staying, by accident, in a hostel which was really just a house full of hippies making crafts and fresh bread. The people were really friendly and made us feel at home.

We very quickly realised that all the rumours we had heard about Argentinian food were true. After our bolivian diet of bland everything, I indulged in two steaks on my first day and they were both really good. We had a meal at a local peña, which is basically a venue for dinner with live folk music. The show had a really warm, small town atmosphere and the musician Carlos held the audience with heaps of jokes, most of which we didn´t get at all. It was a great night with great food, wine and music.

There are ruins of a pre colombian town on the crest of a hill above Tilcara called the Pucará. We hiked up to enjoy the views of the valley and run around in the maze of semi restored buildings.

Tilcara was one of those rare places you find when travelling that you find you don´t really want to leave. After spending a few days soaking up the relaxed vibe and not doing too much else we ventured onward to the big smoke.

Yeee hah

So I´ll start this one with a little description of some of the roads in Southern Bolivia. Basically, there aren´t really roads as such, just tracks through the sand connecting the main towns. The buses rattle along the tracks at high speed slowly shaking themselves to bits, which is more or less exactly what happened to our bus from Uyuni to our next stop, Tupiza. About halfway there our bus broke down while driving up a shallow stream bed. Luckily we were soon rescued by what seemed to be a former school bus.

Tupiza is a scenic wee town surrounded by a constant sunset of red rock mountains dotted with cactuses. To quote the rather fitting cliché from all the guide books, "it´s just like being in the wild west". I assume this is true anyway, I´ve never been to the wild west, but the wild west has been to Tupiza. The area is infamous as the spot where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came in order to get their hands on some of the silver pouring out of Potosí but were eventually gunned down by the Bolivian Army. It´s such a big deal that our hostel even had the movie, starring the late, great Paul Newman and Robert Redford on scratchy VHS.

In order to indulge in such a vivid history, we went on a horse trek in the country around the town led by our "16 year old" guide. The tour began ominously as our "16 year old" guide led us through the town rubbish tip past other kids who were scrounging around. After our "16 year old" guide copped some flak from the other kids for bringing tourists through the tip, we continued plodding slowly on into more scenic areas. Our ride on the two slowest horses in Bolivia, took us up into gravelly red canyons that seemed to wind on for eternity and past bizzare formations named things like "The Throat of the Devil". Apart from the times our "16 year old" guide decided to whack our slow horses until they broke into a trot or even a gallop, the trip was quite relaxed. However what was meant to be a 3 hour trek turned into a 5 hour trek and our arses were so sore by the end we could barely walk back to our hostel. Oh yeah the wee guy on the horse in the pic above was our guide who actually managed to tell us with a straight face that he was 16 years old.

We also stumbled onto a rather strange parade in Tupiza which, we were assured was just the start of a weeklong celebration of some local patron saint. Everywhere we went in Tupiza during our few days there we heard various brass bands practicing behind closed doors. The parade itself consisted of several groups of bizarrely dressed people resembling a Disney "Beauty and the Beast" pagent marching out of the cathedral behind one such brass band and through the streets of town stopping to pass below temporary archways. Following this strange procession was a fleet of cars made up to resemble a bolivian Undy 500. The highlight of all this were the guys dressed up like blue tea cups and wearing white 17th century wigs while twirling clackers in their little dance down the road.

Tupiza was a chilled out and pretty little town which was a good way to finish our fast but dramatic tour of Bolivia. Our only real worry here was the classic money management issue where we were trying to be cheap because we only had so many bolivianos left to last until the border. After all our careful calculations we blew a bunch of cash on a nice hostel room which turned out to be 60Bs "per person" NOT in total! Amateur mistakes are made after terrible bus rides.....

On to the border!

More flamingoes than could fit on your front lawn.

Out we finally set on our tour of the salt flats and surrounding area of south west Bolivia. Our crew of seven, stuffing the four-wheel-drive to capacity, consisted of us, a dutch couple and three italians. This made for a bit of a strange dynamic and throughout the three days of the tour, the group never really gelled which led to silent hours sitting in the jeep. Add to this our driver, Victor, whose "ten years experience in tourism" made him the grumpiest guide to ride the salt flats, and only really spoke to us when he really had to.


Our first day took us through the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in Bolivia, which is formed by slat deposits washed down from the hills during rainy season and left behind when the collected water evaporates. The remaining landscape is eirie desolation where the constant glaring white light distorts perspectives and warps the horizon. Distances seemed to make little sense here as we drove at top speed across the salar, all the while the distant hills remained unchanged.


Eventually we came to the Isla del Pescado, a cactus studded blip on the perfect white landscape that served as a halfway point for incan travellers as they crossed the expanse. As we pulled up we found we were no longer alone on the salt flat, the island was being invaded by hordes in four-wheel-drives. This would be the way with all the stops on our tour. We soon scaled to the top of the island, past towering 1200 year old cactuses, to watch the other tourists taking wierd perspective photos on the salar. This seemed like fun so we did the same.









The next days drive took us away from the salt flat, higher into the desert altiplano. We passed through a landscape of intermittent tussocks and towering volcanic peaks towards a set of high altitude lakes complete with large sheets of floating ice. We came across a huge colony of pink andean flamingoes, which were very cool. It was like a scene from some african safari only a whole lot colder. We all got camera happy as we piled out of the jeep trying to capture the scene.


The lakes were all different colours, ranging from an ochre red, to a pale green caused by different algaes that thrived in the freezing cold waters. We also passed herds of Vicuña, which look loke a cross between llamas, deer and giraffe. At this stage in the trip I gained a different appreciation for Bolivia, it had been hard work travelling thus far but the unique and beautiful environment here was starting to make it worthwhile.















We continued to climb upwards into the appropriately named desert of Salvador Dali, with its surreal rock forests penetrating through the smooth windswept sand. That night we stayed in very modest acommodations next to the Laguna Colorada, a vast red hued lake complete with a small herd of grazing llamas, and as the temperature plummeted to -20degreesC we huddled near the fire inside wearing as many layers as we could.

The next morning began before it began, at 5am. As we were enveloped in the frozen air and morning darkness, quickly developing chill blanes in the back of the jeep, we trundled off to see the geysers of the volcanic area at the highest point of the trip of 5000m. Perhaps coming from New Zealand took away from this experience, or maybe it was the utterly penetrating cold of dawn, but the geyser field with its man made geyser was less than impressive. I really just wanted to move on as quickly as possible to the thermal pool to thaw out for a while, which luckily we did. Our last stop was the ice covered Laguna Verde which we arrived at just in time to see the ice sheet melting and revealing the hazy green water underneath.



The eight hour haul back to Uyuni was much like the rest of the trip, bumping across sandy desert non-roads while the driver played his one CD of skipping casiotone cumbia music. When we finally arrived back in Uyuni we realised that for the first time, despite the grumpy driver, the odd collection of people, and the worst music ever concieved by man...




We went on a tour in south america and nothing went wrong!!!!

Stuck in a Small Town Montage

A few more pictures from Uyuni.

Ice Cream Guys

Enormous bolivian flag flying high on referendum day

Candy floss guy was making a killing

There were no cars allowed into or out of town so the streets were left to the people

Even the police were getting to the festive mood

On the way to the train cemetery

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Our trip to Potosí had been made largely to escape the increasing political troubles and chaos in La Paz and as we rolled into town, weary and cranky from a disturbed sleep on the bus in the middle of a road block (a couple of old ladies started discussing politics and full volume around 2.30am), we ran into an independence day party blocking all the streets around the centre of town. While we normally would´ve been keen to join in, neither of us were feeling overly cheerful about the state of Bolivia and we wandered about and found some food in a quiet wee pub away from the action. We checked out the plaza after the celebrations were winding down, it looked like a tip with rubbish and empty beer cups everywhere. Many of the surrounding streets stunk of a smell that was starting to become quite familiar from bolivian streets, urine.

Potosí was, in its day, the centre of wealth of the spanish empire with an enormous silver mine pouring money into their pockets and making Potosí a major hub, at the time bigger than Paris or New York. Nowadays all the silver is gone and the miners spend their days trying to make a living scraping out the leftover minerals such as zinc. As a tourist attraction you can visit these mines and see exactly the rubbish conditions in which these guys work, and thats precisely what we did. I was hesitant, watching others misery doesn´t seem like good tourism to me, until I met a few people who claimed it had been the most worthwhile part of their trip. And so we found ourselves donning dusty overalls and heading into the mine with a dozen others from all over the world.

As we headed into the mine I found myself sort of enjoying the experience, it was quite novel and a bit cliched with the metal trolleys filled with rocks being pushed along train tracks and the ladders descending down into darkness. But soon enough we came across a crew working, setting up dynamite for a blast, which involved dusty, loud drilling (our guide supplied us with wads of toilet paper to jam in our ears for noise protection) and air blasting ammonia into the hole to give the dynamite a bigger pop. The dust made it increasingly difficult to breathe and the reality of working 12 hours a day in such a place started to sink in. We left a wee gift of coca leaves with the crew, which they chew round the clock to keep them going, and headed deeper into the mine.

The trip continued downwards, scaling down the descending ladders, and winding through passages, all the while visiting different work crews doing similarly dusty, difficult and crappy jobs. It made me feel a bit like an engineer again, visiting site to take photos of people working, or maybe just like a dorky tourist. After an hour or so down in the mine we were all starting to feel like we had been there long enough, but we waited well away from the action until the dynamite was set off. The sound echoed deeply around the mine, hanging in the air and shaking the rock walls like a monster from the deep.

The next day we awoke in Potosí, which apparently is the highest city in the world, to settling snow. In the plaza Tessa saw soldiers and children alike running about throwing snowballs at each other, the whole scene being quite surreal.

On the way out of Potosí that day we had our next, more indirect run in with the roadblocks. Our bus driver, knowing that the road was blocked, picked a way out of town through the back streets which eventually took us off roading through the desert. This was all well and good, the bus almost tipping only a few times, until we came across the city water supply pipe which ran half a metre off the ground. Out we all jumped and started constructing a stone bridge over the pipe, a successful crossing followed and we made our way bumping along the unpaved desert track to Uyuni.

Uyuni, placed in the middle of a flat desert, is a launching base for trips into the salt flats which is exactly why we were there. Unfortunately the dusty drab little blip of a town has very little else to do, which became a problem as we found ourselves ¡Trapped Again! The day of the referendum, the police closed all roads into and out of all towns in the country and most of the few shops in town were closed. We found ourselves wandering about the main square aimlessly with all the other trapped tourists and taking loads of pics of everyday things. At one stage there was a queue out the door of the internet café and a steady stream wandering past the town dump to the only other sight in town, a train cemetery filled with rusting shells of carriages and engines. For us it was the second day of killing time here as I had been brought down by a case of Bolivian Belly (one of the two of us had a crook gut for most of our time in Bolivia!)

The referendum day came off with very little trouble around the country, the people in Uyuni seemed to treat it as a holiday. Even the police were treating themselves to candy floss from the street vendors. After being stuck in town for a few days we finally headed off for our grand adventure to the salt flats and the high altitude desert areas to the south.

¡Trapped!

Whew! What a cliff hanger eh? Hope not too many of you are biting your nails in sheer anxiety about what was to come in La Paz....

On our first day in La Paz, as we wandered the city trying to get our bearings, we began to hear loud explosions in the distance and realising that they were getting closer, we cautiously made our way to the main street. There we saw a large protest consisting of many workers groups carrying banners, chanting and shouting, completely blocking off the main street while hecklers yelled angrily at them from the pedestrian bridge above. The explosions were a result of the dynamite the protesters were letting off in the street and firing (like a giant roman candle) into the air and at the hecklers on the pedestrian bridge! People were running from the progress of the protest with their ears blocked while bemused police looked on. We were curious but needless to say a bit freaked (Tessa was reading a book about crowd violence at english football matches at this time). As such we headed away from the protest to find that the police had posted large riot equipped contingents outside all the major ministries and government buildings and at one stage a dozen armed police on motorbikes swarmed past us. And what was all this in aid of? The workers and miners wanted the pension age lowered from 65 to 55....

A little political background that we have learnt in our time since, I´ll try to be brief. As with most politicians, El Presidente had promised the earth in order to get elected, and was failing to deliver and is alienating the rural workers and coca growers he represents. He´s also trying to nationalise everything in sight, alienating the rest of the country. In the week to come there was to be a referendum to decide whether the president could continue doing what he wanted. Every other group decided this would be a good time to try and get what they want (including the city´s disabled who, with a lack of foresight, organised a march a few days later going UP the main road). Throw in the fact that the city was also throwing independance day celebrations all over the show and you´ve got a pile of confused chaos.

The upshot of all this was that not only was it difficult to get around town during all the marches, it was also very difficult to get out of the city. Bolivians love to express themselves politically by blocking main roads and transport routes, grinding the economy to a halt and creating what could be violent and fatal confrontations. Our plans were constantly uprooted by news of fresh roadblocks, which meant we were stuck in La Paz for the immediate future.

La Paz was in fact quite a nice city and not that bad a place to be stuck. In comparison to many cities we have visited La Paz was clean and also had a lot of atmosphere. Once we had realised the balaclava clad packs of roaming youngsters were only shoeshine boys we felt a bit safer. The city was packed with markets (complete with dried llama foetuses), parks and interesting museums including a coca museum and a museum of musical instruments. We walked up to a kids playground which had great views of the city including the river which has basically turned into a giant open sewer.

Many people we had met had recommended that we cycle down the "death road", which I didn´t tell my mum about at the time. The death road earned its name when it was the main route between La Paz and the lowlands, with such high usage along a narrow windy gravel road with perilous sheer drops, that high accident and death rates were almost inevitable. The ride involves biking down from the sierra at about 4600m elevation, straight down the mostly single lane gravel road to the beginnings of the jungle at 1300m taking about four hours. The road is now closed to traffic and is hence filled with tourists zipping down at breakneck speeds. It was a lot of fun and needless to say it turned into a bit of an unofficial race to see who could keep up with our guide.

After being in La Paz for almost a week, we heard that the roads would be open for Independence Day. We rushed down to the bus station and booked a bus that night bound for Potosí, a town that we figured would be less likely to have problems and was also on the way south towards Argentina. Filled with hope by the reassurances of the bus company we hopped on the busand crossed our fingers.

However, we woke up at around midnight to realise that the bus had come to a stop in the middle of nowhere. We were stuck sleeping at the roadblock for eight hours while fires were lit all down the highway. In the morning things at the block began to get heated with the protesters arguing with the bus drivers and passengers while they let off dynamite. A line of buses stretched as far as the eye could see with crowds milling about not knowing whether to stay with the bus or try and cross the block by foot. Eventually we were allowed through after the drivers managed to convince the protesters that we were all starving, and as we drove through the block we discovered it was caused by only a dozen people! This would be our most spectacular run in with the roadblocks...