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!