Potosi to Peru

After Potosi, as promised I went on to Sucre, the legislative capital of Bolivia. The bus ride there contained much excitement. I was seated at the back of the bus, above the rear right wheel. It was getting dark and I noticed flashing orange lights coming from underneath and I thought to myself ¨Yeah! a Bolivian party bus. Go Bolivia!¨ However I was to be mistaken. They weren´t party lights...it was FIRE! I didn´t realise this until the bus had pulled over after multiple cars had flashed their lights at us. The fire was eventually put out by everyone´s drinking water, leaving us with none. Fortunately, the bus trip was only 1.5 hours more.

Sucre itself was a pretty town though I feel that Potosi was perhaps nicer. Sucre is well known for it´s white washed colonial buildings and there were a few of those but mainly centred around the main plaza. The rest was as per the rest of Bolivia. There was a textile museum which was quite interesting. It looked at the history of weaving in Bolivia and the museum raises money to teach locals their traditional techniques to prevent them from dying out. I also went up to a conventy thing which was a steep walk though was well rewarded by the views that greeted me at the top. The convent housed a whole lot of religious art (by Anon), and a cedar that was over 1000 years old. The actual church was beautifully decorated also.

That night I left sucre and my travelling buddy of the last couple of days (Bertram from Germany), heading to La Paz. Everything they say of this night bus is true. It was long, stopped many, many times and was FREEZING!!! A lovely Bolivian man who was sat next to me was kind enough to share his blanket with me. I might have died of exposure otherwise.

La Paz was a city to behold. I stayed at Loki, which I might never do again for reasons which will become apparent. On arrival, I booked my mountain bike tour of The World´s Most Dangerous Road and then wandered into the city for some lunch. It´s a huge city with steep, steep streets which are really slippery with stones that have been walked on for what I imagine would be more than hundreds of years. The markets were interesting but there wasn´t the bartering that I thought there´d be. Oh well. The next morning I woke to do the WMDR which was awesome. I was aprehensive at first because of the well known 400m sheer drops from the edge of the road, the gravel we rode on (instead of asphalt), and the deaths that were constantly being talked about. I eventually loosened up and our group ended up being one of the fastest that our guide Matt had taken, having finished around 1.40pm. I also managed to meet some lovely Perth peeps on the tour, as well as a Noosa boy and a Brazillian living in Sydney. I spent the next two days consequently hanging with them. The following day we did the San Pedro Prison, made famous by Thomas McFadden for his drug smuggling. This was an eye-opener to say the least and that´s about all I´ll say apart from ¨Read the book.¨ That night was just a chilled night chatting in Yelena and Chris´room, up until I went to my own to change into my PJ´s, only to find that people had been smoking in the dorm and that they had left their empty cigarettes in my clothes. NOT HAPPY JAN! Then, when I awoke the next morning and looked in my locked box in reception, the $1300 Bolivianos ($300AUD) that I´d put in there the night before to pay for my room, bus out of La Paz, etc was GONE!!! There was much cursing though surprisingly very few tears. Osgur (the guy who runs the hostel) was kind enough to reimburse me half as he felt given the security of the building, it shouldn´t have happened and he felt partly responsible...damn straight. But live and learn. I spent the afternoon therefore trying to forget about it. I watched the new Bond flic which was partly set in Bolivia so that was cool. The others all left that night and I then bussed on to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca the following morning.

Copacabana was a cute little town though not much to do there. I did a day trip out to Isla del Sol, Isla de la Luna and the ¨floating islands¨they have there. It was nothing too special but I´ve done it now. I also did the climb up the cerro to see the sunset and that was about it for Copacabana. Or so I thought. Due to some farmer turmoil in Peru, the bus we (me and an Irish dude I´d met) had taken to get to Puno to see the real floating islands wasn´t able to cross the border and so we were stuck in Copa for the night. I could think of worse places to be stuck. It was cheap and the company was good. Today though I´ve made it to Peru and am sitting in an internet cafe killing time til my Uros Island tour (aka the floating islands). Until next time...Hasta luego!

My first week in South America

Well here I am in South America or Potosi, Bolivia to be exact. It has been a pretty busy week since I landed in Santiago de Chile. I spent three nights there and have to say that as a city it was really just another city. There were lots of pretty parks which was nice (and cheap!) but after losing my only jumper on the way to my hostel from the airport, I ended up spending most of one of my days trying to find some fleece. Once that was accomplished, I spent an amusing day in Valparaiso (read: Viña del Mar) which is a port two hours to the north of Santiago. This was a really pretty city.

Despite those two days out of Santiago, I decided to cut my time there short by one night and so headed up to San Pedro de Atacama in the North of Chile in the desert. There I did a sandboarding tour combined with a sunset Valley of the Moon tour. The first was really fun - I got sand in all the wrong places! and the second was visually beautiful. That night I also did a stargazing tour just off the edge of the desert which was really interesting though after a 24hr bus ride and sandboarding, by 11.30 (when the tour started) I was already quite tired as you can imagine. The next morning I was picked up by my next tour which was a San Pedro to Uyuni (Bolivia) tour. This was really amazing. There were three of us in total and we saw so much. Geysers, hot pools, multi coloured lagoons (green, red and white), flamingoes to your hearts content, llamas, alpacas, vicunas (all closely related), volcanoes, salt flats and desert islands packed with cacti. You can imagine I have hundreds of photos and it´s going to take me a while to get them up but I will do my best. The highest we got on this tour was 4950m! Fortunately the altitude hasn´t affected me too much. The most I´ve had to deal with has been a headache.

Uyuni was not so spectacular. I stayed there one night and spent most of it in my hostel room which sadly, was not a dorm but a single...I read a lot of my book. Needless to say, one night there post tour was enough and today I caught (the slow) bus to Potosi. I was going to reconsider coming here and skipping it but I´m so glad I didn´t. This city is just beautiful...a photographers delight (not that that´s what I am but you know), especially when arriving at sunset. It´s at 4050m elevation and much of the city is on a mountain side so loads of hills. Tomorrow I think I will visit the Casa Real de Moneda (Royal house of money...a museum that was the original mint). Potosi was originally a silver mining town though that´s much depleted. There are also mine tours but I don´t think I want to do this. There is no more silver apparently and the conditions are really very bad. So anyway, maybe only one day here and on to Sucre for tomorrow night (a city further east).

So that´s all that I´ve been up to so far. A fair bit for one week I think. Like I said, next stop Sucre either tomorrow or the next day, spend one or two nights there and then to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia.