Further Wanderings

After a long break from writing, we finally continue the ‘blog with more travels in Bolivia.
Just as after a long break from travel in Sucre, off we went bound for Potosi.

Potosi is a fascinating place. By some measures it’s the highest city in the world, at 4100m above sea level. And it’s really kind of in the middle of nowhere. No lakes, rivers or good agricultural lands anywhere nearby. The reason for building a city in such a forbidding place was Cerro Rico “the Rich Mountain,” which sits behind the city and contains one of the richest silver veins ever found. In the 16th and 17th century the Spanish conquistadors exploited the mountain to its fullest using thousands upon thousands of indigenous and African slaves. Thousands upon thousands of these slaves died in the process while the colonials took the riches of the mountain and in addition to enriching their home country, turned Potosi into one of the largest and richest cities in the world at the time.

The legacy of the colonial mines lives on in the rich ornamentation of the city, which sits scattered amongst the more modern but much less glamorous recent constructions. Meanwhile the mining of Cerro Rico continues.

A altiplano pueblito (village-ette) on the way to Potosi

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The trip to Sucre was one of the nicest overnight bus trips I’ve ever taken. We both slept like babies! Having woken up at 04:30 that morning and taken a dramamine before departing doubtless had something to do with it.

We arrived in Sucre at around 04:30 but, though I thought I’d been mistaken when the ticket lady told me so in Spanish, we were permitted to stay in the bus resting for a couple more hours after we arrived (indeed, after the few people who wanted to venture out into the city before sunrise were let out, we were pretty much locked IN the bus.)

When the sun came up we were turfed out of the bus and left to find our way into town. People were happy to point us in the right direction, and in about 20 minutes we were at the hostel where we’d booked a single night, just because we didn’t want to have to deal with finding any place to sleep that early in the morning when we would (presumably) already be very tired. It took about 15 minutes for someone to answer the door, but we eventually found our way in.

As mentioned in the last entry, Bolivia loves a marching band

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I’ll do things a bit differently for this entry. First because there’s not THAT much to say beyond what’s in the photos themselves, and second because there are just SO many pictures. So as we’ve done at times before, I’ll just abandon the narrative and let the photo captions do the talking for this entry.

The “Southwest Circuit” 4WD trip came very highly recommended to us so we were excited to get on our way. First the loading of our jeeps had to be finished. As did the loading of the three other jeeps that the same tour company had leaving the same day. Leaving aside the constant tourist jeep traffic, the area we’d be traversing was quite remote, and very arid, so it’s not really the kind of place you want to break down with no help nearby. As such the tours always leave in pairs.

As we left, one last look at the fabulous badlands around Tupiza

There were four of us in the jeep, plus our driver and cook. This meant that everyone always had a window seat, all the better to admire the landscape unfolding ahead (or in this case below.)

The first of the many (many!) llama pictures

Like yaks, llamas really only start to appear above 3000m. Since this trip was spent entirely above that altitude, we saw LOTS of them

Such majestic creatures!
Cria! (Cria is the name for a baby llama [or alpaca, or any of the other South American camelids.])

Day one was mostly driving up, up, up onto the heights of the altiplano. Though Tupiza was already at 3000m ASL, we went as high as 4855, just before our lunch stop pictured here. Soon after we descended back down to 4000 or so, which was where most of the four day trip was spent.

South America: it’s not just llamas! We saw a number of rheas, kind of emu-like large flightless birds over the course of our trip.

Like yaks, llamas really only start to appear above 3000m. Since this trip was spent entirely above that altitude, we saw LOTS of them

Our first night’s resting spot was probably my favourite: a small village whose residents got by on llama farming and work at a small mine 20km or so away. Almost every building was built of mud brick (the church is the focal point of pretty much every South American village, so it IT is mud brick, you can count that pretty much everything else will be) except for the school. Which, of course, had a marching band practicing inside when we arrived.

The lamb of God. This sheep was just sitting happily under the cross above the town when I climbed up to have a look. It didn’t seem at all bothered by my being there

The view out over the mountains from the cross. If I’m not mistaken the big snow capped one is Uturncu. This 6008m volcano is one of the easiest 6000m peaks in the world, and an ascent can be included as part of the 4WD trip. Unfortunately, despite several days of looking in Tupiza we couldn’t find 2 others who were interested in tacking on the extra day that it would take to their trip, so we only got to see it from afar.

The next morning we started out very early. I thought the driver was joking when he said we’d be waking up at 04:30! Our first stop was a Spanish colonial mining settlement. About 250 years old, it was long abandoned. I can certainly understand why… It was one of the most inhospitable sites for a village I’d ever seen.

It wasn’t, however, entirely uninhabited. The nooks and crannies amongst the rough stone buildings provided a perfect habitat for Vizcachas. They’re relatives of chinchillas, but to us they looked like nothing if not long-tailed bunny rabbits.

Even 250 years old and decaying, as always, the church was the most elaborate building in town.

Day two took us through the Eduardo Avaroa Andean national fauna reserve. After the twin villages near the park entrance, we said goodbye to towns and villages for a day while we traversed it.

In one of those twin villages we saw a cria chasing a herd of sheep. Was it training to be a sheep-llama?

In the other we saw probably the greatest concentration of llamas ever, inside a pen made of un-mortared stone there were probably close to one hundred of them!

Hope you like llamas… There are a bunch more of them to come!

Interesting note: the owners of the various llamas were identified by the coloured tassels on their ears, just like the yaks in Tajikistan

Enough llamas for ya?

Just before lunch we descended into a valley surrounded by colourful mountains and with a wide, flat floor covered in borax, which had formerly been mined and then processed nearby

At lunchtime we stopped at a hot spring. Lovely warm water (especially as there was no shower and no hot water at any of the places we stopped.

Gringo soup! Here we were in a remote corner of a fairly remote country, and they couldn’t find a way to avoid having 19 jeeps full of tourists (over 100 people!) showing up in the same place at the same time? This put me in a rather sour mood for most of the rest of the day.

Not llamas! Vicunas, their smaller, un-domesticated cousin (kind of like the high altitude version of the guanacos we’d seen in Chile.)

The Dali Desert, so called because the landscape was similar to (very similar actually) to that in many of the surrealist painter’s works

The “geyers” at Sol de Mañana, the world’s highest “geyser basin.” The quotes are because there actually weren’t any geysers there, just fumeroles and mudpots. Apparently fumerole is translated into Spanish as “geyser.” Though if you’re going to be using an Icelandic loan word, why on earth wouldn’t you use it to mean the same thing it means in Icelandic? This was strike two on the day, and I was very grumpy indeed by the time we were done (not helped by the fierce wind and chilly temperatures while we were up there.

And then things took a wonderful turn for the better. We raced off to our evening’s lodgings (a large group of stone, mud brick and concrete buildings in the middle of the desert) dropped our stuff off and then headed out to the Red Lake, Laguna Colorado. You can’t really see it in this photo, but the lake really is quite a bright rusty red colour. This is due to the algae which are then eaten by tiny shrimplike creatures and others which are then eaten by the flamingos, thus giving them their pink colour. Laguna Colorado, with its thousands of flamingos and volcano in the background was just so wonderful I couldn’t help but be cheered by it.

And then that night our driver ensured that ours was one of five camera batteries that actually got charged by the solar powered storage batteries in the lodge. Things definitely were looking up (except perhaps for our prospects of sleeping in… we woke up even earlier on day two, at 04:15!)

First stop next morning, another “Dali-esque” desert area, with wonderfully coloured mountains off in the background

A particularly famous resident of the desert, the stone tree (and me trying to imitate it. A thoroughly ridiculous photo, but as soon as I’d done it, everyone else seemed to want to get a photo in the pose as well )

A pee stop at the foot of a volcano. Once again, as soon as we’d done this photo, the other two couples in our pair of jeeps wanted to give it a shot as well

There was VERY little vegetation in this desert. Miniscule amounts of rainfall, salt and borax blowing around on the wind and chilly 4000m ASL nights will do that. But in this tiny narrow quebrada we drove through these “vegetable sheep” (I love that name!) were thriving

Not llamas! Vicunas, their smaller, un-domesticated cousin (kind of like the high altitude version of the guanacos we’d seen in Chile.)

Heading out of the national park we passed a series of six smaller lakes, all complete with volcanic backdrops and flamingos feeding.

This particular lake featured a restaurant and hotel on the edge, with toilets it charged 5 Bolivianos (about $0.75 for the use of.) I was particularly galled by this sign as a result. By all means, ask people not to pee on the lakeshore. But using your eco-friendly gesture to force people into paying an outrageous price for your services takes away from the warm fuzzy feeling a bit

Back on an actual road, we caught sight of this volcano blowing off some steam in the distance behind us. As far as I know, no significant eruption followed.

The cooks did a fabulous job given the isolated environment and lack of facilities (even at dinner, each jeep’s cook got a small section of tile bench and a basin to collect water from the common tap, and that was about it.)

Our lunch stop on day three was at the Black Lake, Laguna Negra. There were lakes of just about every colour along our route. Interestingly, the green lake is presently coloured light brown. An earthquake a few weeks before we visited had stirred up sedmient, or perhaps altered the flow in/out of the lake, changing its colour. No one seemed entirely sure if it would return to its original colour or not.

Around lunchtime the sky started to look ominous. Perhaps I’ve inherited my parents gift of making it rain when they visit deserts?

We saw several of these inverted-rainbow-sundog things over the course of our trip

After lunch we got on an honest to goodness paved road, headed north. During the dry season tours usually continue their off-road journey north, but there was flooding in some areas so we had to skirt around them as we headed towards the town of Uyuni.

The lovely church at Avaroa, the first real settlement we’d seen in a couple of days.

Unsurprisingly, given the altitude and the fact that we were in the tropics, the sun was fiercely powerful. This is some of the coolest hot-ground caused refraction I’ve seen

The outskirts of Uyuni were a dump. Both figuratively and literally. Garbage was strewn all over the ground for about 5km around town as we approached. I suppose the locomotive graveyard on the edge of town was a rubbish disposal site of a sort as well, but it had a lot of character, especially in the dramatic afternoon, when the sky couldn’t quite seem if it wanted to bake the ground or drench it with rain

The locomotive graveyard was actually really fun to play around in. There were swings hanging from some of the old engines, and you were free to clamber around, over and in any of the “exhibits.”

Most of the engines were manufactured in England in the mid 19th century. Must’ve been quite a task to get them to the high plateau in Bolivia… Either ’round the horn and over the Andes, or a long overland journey from the Atlantic in areas where tracks hadn’t been laid yet.

Around lunchtime the sky started to look ominous. Perhaps I’ve inherited my parents gift of making it rain when they visit deserts?

Don’t let the photo fool you. The dumpiness of Uyuni didn’t end at the outskirts. There was a tiny, tourist focussed area near the centre that was pleasant (like this.) Surrounding that were dusty commercial streets filled with slightly grubby tour agencies (most of the southwest circuit trips actually leave from Uyuni, not Tupiza.) And around that were some of the grimmest suburbs I’ve ever seen. Our lodging for the evening was out in this area.

Pets? Food? Future zoo exhibits? No idea what these baby rheas were doing in someone’s back yard.

Final morning, final day of getting up ridiculously early. We woke at 04:30 again, planning to be out on the Salar De Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, for sunrise. Unfortunately one of our jeeps was having mechanical trouble (at least that’s what the drivers told us… I’m still not completely convinced that they hadn’t just slept in.) So we had another morning of feeling irritable, only slightly improved when we arrived out on the flats JUST in time to catch the sun as it came over the mountains on the horizon.

Breakfast stop was at the “salt hotel” on the edge of the flats, whose walls were constructed entirely of “bricks” of salt cut out of the surrounding flats.

After breakfast it was time to take some of the silly-fun photos you can do with a uniform white background that stretches off into the distance almost forever and thoroughly messes with perspective. Apparently the salt sits in layers about 1m thick, alternating with layers of saturated salt water. In some places you could actually whack through the thin surface crust and find small “vents” of water near the surface. Growing inside these were fabulous big sodium chloride crystals (that gave me a series of spectacularly fine cuts on my fingetips when I pulled at them… painful in conjunction with the salt water!)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was chosen to represent one of the least evolved states…

Back in Uyuni we had lunch with our fellow tourists, as well as all the others who were staying in the same guesthouse as us. We said farewell to our driver and cook, who were headed back to Tupiza. Then we waited, waited and waited some more. Our bus out of town didn’t leave until 19:30 at night. This gave us plenty of time to explore the nice parts of Uyuni (tourist area, train station and immediate surroundings, which is where we found this cool piece of sculpture.) Also had time to sit and play cards, drink a high altitude beer, and even have dinner with some others we’d met at lunchtime who were waiting for the same bus.

Thankfully we did manage to get out of Uyuni having only spent one night there. Our bus to the city of Sucre left after dark, but we were on it. Having woken up at 04:30, it wasn’t very hard to get to sleep

Looking back on it, this trip was a very cool one. We saw tons of fascinating and beautiful stuff. But I can’t help but thinking it suffered a bit, both from the crowdedness of some sites, as well as from high expectations. So many people we’d talked to had done the trip and raved about it so much that we were expecting it to be the best thing ever. And while it was good it was almost impossible to live up to our hopes. For all that, I’d still highly recommend the journey to anyone who’s in the area, especially if you can leave from Tupiza and minimize your time in the hole that is Uyuni.

Up next: a lazy week(!) in Bolivia’s white city and constitutional capital, Sucre.

Sorry it’s been so long between entries… First our laptop needed a repair (everything was fine except the power switch, meaning that you just couldn’t turn it on!) and then we stayed three nights in a place without electricity, so obviously no writing got done then either! Anyhow, onward into Bolivia…

We were amongst a large queue of people waiting for the border post at La Quiaca, Argentina to open. About half were foreign tourists and half Argentinians or Bolivians. Once the post opened up things moved quickly enough and we had soon been stamped out of Argentina and welcomed to Bolivia (I still as a British citizen… Unlike at the Armenia-Georgia border, the Bolivians insisted that my entry stamp had to be in the same passport that contained my Argentinian exit stamp.)

Our very first quick look at Bolivia was Villazon, the town on the other side of the border from La Quiaca. It was pretty much typical border town, albeit with a friendlier face than many. Dozens of currency exchange shops lined the main street, which was itself packed full of porters carrying goods down to the bridge or up from it (vehicle transit between the two countries isn’t particularly easy, so most goods were offloaded on one side of the short international bridge, then carried across on foot or in wheelbarrows or dollies to the other.)

We took a short walk up the main street to find an ATM which, delightfully after Argentina, not only dispensed Bolivianos (the official name of the currency is the Peso Boliviano, but everyone calls it the Boliviano) at a decent exchange rate, but even gave out US dollar cash if you wanted it.

From there it was only across the central square and up the street to the busy bus station where we were hurried aboard an almost empty and (genuinely!) soon to depart bus to the town of Tupiza, a couple of hours to the north which would be our first real stop in the country.

Again, one chronologically appropriate entry (the main street of Villazon, Bolivia) and one that’s just a nice attractive intro to the entry (a view out over Tupiza from a big rocky hill in the middle of town)

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Somehow or other it’s easy to forget how big a country Argentina is. When we’d arrived in Mendoza I sort of thought, “okay we’re up north now,” even if just on the edge of the north. But from Mendoza we took a 16 hour bus ride to San Miguel de Tucuman and still weren’t anywhere near the northern borders of the country. There was lots more travel (33 hours on buses!) and exploration to do before we arrived there.

Tucuman was just a transit point for us. We spent a couple of hours in the bus station before departing. As far as bus stations go it was actually kind of interesting: open air because of the low latitude and altitude of San Miguel and had coin operated TVs in the waiting areas.

Our next destination was NOT low altitude. The 3 hour bus ride to Tafi del Valle spent pretty much all of its time climbing up endless hills and swtichbacks into the Andes. Though unlike many visions of that range, the hills and mountains around Tafi (2000m ASL) were verdant and fertile. It’s a major dairy farming area and is noted for its cheese production (which is actually kind of what drew us there… we’re pretty easy to entice, aren’t we?)

The wild (north) west of Argentina

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As if we didn’t do enough lazing about and drinking local beverages in Santiago, we did plenty more of it in Mendoza. This wasn’t my first time in Mendoza. A good thing, since with all the laziness, we really didn’t get around to seeing all that much of it. We didn’t even make it to a winery for goodness sakes! (No worries though, we did cover the wine touring aspect by a sneaky, convenient method that was much easier than heading out into the wops to the wineries themselves…)

A fabulously decorated wine barrel preparing to serve as a table at a Mendoza street festival

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We ended up arriving at our hostel in Santiago rather late. Not really according to plan. Our flight from Punta Arenas had been delayed by 3 and a half hours, turning a latish arrival at 23:00 into a ridiculous 02:30 in the morning. Credit to Sky Airlines (a Chilean discount line) they told us very promptly that our flight would leave at 19:30 instead of 16:30 and come 19:30 everyone was aboard and the plane pushed back from the gate. And I suppose it was also nice that there was no traffic on the way into town from the airport.

Thankfully someone was awake at the hostel when we arrived, so we actually managed to get 5 hours or so of sleep before checkout… We’d only reserved one night and the place was booked solid the next day (or maybe they were just annoyed at us waking them up at 2 on a Wednesday morning?) but thankfully another nice hostel around the corner had room (has anyone else in North America noticed the glaring lack of budget/hostel accommodation? Santiago has 20+ hostels. Wellington has at least 10. While I can think of less than five in Toronto. And Toronto’s better than most cities in NA!)

The tiredness and the change of lodgings meant that it was already comfortably into the afternoon before we got around to actually doing anything and seeing any of the city. Santiago had been well lit but slightly run down and creepy looking when we’d arrived the night before. But in the bright summer sun it was anything but.

Big Chilean flag in the sun. Well, relatively big. It’s modern democracy big, not Tajikistan or North Korea big

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When I first heard of Torres del Paine this was the natural “translation” of the name. Which, if you take it word by word, is actually two thirds correct

Our plan for tramping/hiking/trekking in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine was to take four days doing most of the famous “W” track with a small additional section at the end. The W takes you across the front of the Torres range, making three side trips up valleys into the heart of the mountains.

We spent four days hiking in the park and found Torres del Paine both disappointing and fabulous.

Disappointing because there were just so MANY people there. On the W, each of the campsites we walked past had at least 40 tents set up. PLUS there were people staying at refugios (effectively little backcountry hotels, complete with restaurants, bars and hot running water.) Also, Torres del Paine was astonishingly expensive to visit. $30 each for the return bus trip. $32 a night to rent basic camping gear. $40 each for the park entrance fee. And unless you carefully planned your trip to avoid it, it would also be necessary to pay $10-20 per night per person for campsites plus a further $20 each to get to one of the trailheads by boat. Our trip to Torres del Paine cost us over $70/day!

But despite my complaints, like so many places that have become over-run with tourists (and over-priced as a result), there’s a good reason behind it. The mountains in the national park were absolutely beautiful. Many of them were spectacular in a way entirely different than anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world.

Walking along the road towards the trailhead with the Torres off in the distance

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It’s a bit unfair on Punta Arenas that we had to visit it immediately on returning from Antarctica. Just about anywhere in the world would suffer in comparison. Even leaving aside the scenery and wildlife we’d just spend ten days on a ship in a comfy private room being fed five times a day by a top notch kitchen crew.

So it was kind of inevitable that we took a look around, found ourselves only mildly interested, then moved on.

Even so, if for no other reason than that buses leaving town were packed full until the evening, we did actually manage to explore the town a bit.

A mural in progress in Puerto Natales, Chile. Unlike much of the rest of Argentina and Chile there seems to still be a fairly strong presence (or at least remembrance) of the indigenous peoples who originally lived in southern Patagonia

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Our first two days in Antarctica seemed to fly by. It was one of the most exciting and fascinating places I’ve ever been.

Even so, you still began to get used to some of it. The sight of penguins. And the smell of penguins. But Antarctica still held some surprises. And back on the ship we came to know our fellow passengers and the crew better as well.

First the expedition crew. They were an interesting bunch, with widely varied, but almost universally fascinating stories (I think it’s almost a job requirement.) The “expedition leader” was Alex. At first I thought him a bit snooty “this isn’t a cruise… it’s an Expedition!” but by the end of the trip I’d grown to like him. And of course it was impossible to be unimpressed by the fact that he was running the whole show but was still 10 years younger than I.
Several others in the crew were zoologists (an ornithologist and two marine biologists, including Miko, who had been the base commander at a Polish Antarctic station for two years.) There was a photographer. A couple of kayak guides. A “generalist” who had been amongst other things, a navigator in the Canadian coast guard (about half of the expedition crew were Canadian.) And then there was Laurie.

Laurie is probably one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. A Scots born Canadian in his sixties, he’s an ultramarathon runner, an Antarctic AND Arctic explorer (as part of a joint Russian-Canadian team he was one of the first people to cross the Arctic Ocean on skis) as well as a fabulous story teller. He’s the kind of person who can say things like “overland travel in the Antarctic is much easier than in the Arctic” in casual conversation. Though he’d only ever do so in response to a direct question as, accomplished as he is, he’s also tremendously modest and down to earth.

And we can’t forget was the ship’s crew on the bridge. I didn’t get to talk to them all that often, but Sarah made even more regular trips than I did up there, and got along very well with them. They were from all over the world, Ukraine to the Philippines and just about everywhere in between. I guess it’s true what Sarah says that everyone complains about weather forecast(er)s except for the people who it actually matters to, e.g. sailors.

Finally there were our fellow passengers. Several people on the ship had been to the Antarctic before and were so entranced by it they were making a return journey. For others it was the culmination of a lifelong dream. And for still others (like us) the voyage was made almost on a whim. I reckon the average was a little older than me, though they ranged from early twenties up to late seventies. But whatever the differences, I think most Antarctic tourists are attracted by the same things, and have much in common. They tend to be adventurous, environmentally thoughtful and well travelled (as well as necessarily having a big pile of money lying around.) We found we got along wonderfully with everyone. For meals in the ship’s dining room we usually just showed up, found a table with a couple of spare seats and ate with whoever was already there and invariably had friendly and interesting conversation while we ate. This carried on to lectures in the lounge, or trips out on the zodiacs as well, and several of the people we met on the trip are ones we’d like to keep in touch and remain friends with in the future.

Captain Oleg out on the bridge arm doing some close inspection during a bit of maneuvering through a channel in tight quarters

Several of our shipmates on the rear deck during the “Antarctic BBQ” we had for dinner one night

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