The Great South American Adventure

Sorry about the long wait again. There are new photos at

www.flickr.com/photos/12875483@N00/

check them out in all their Bolivian glory.

To make it to Bolivia before my Argentinian Visa ran out, I undertook a mamoth bus journey from Puerto Iguazu to Pocitos, on the Bolivian border, via Tucuman. This meant that I missed out on seeing Salta, which was a shame, but I saved getting fined 50 pesos. Anyway, from Pocitos, I was escorted over the boarder by this great guy who carried my bag for me while I went through Argentinian immigration, gave it to a friend of his on the Bolivian side of the boarder, then told me he needed 50 pesos to pay the immigration officials, which they must have forgot to ask for on my way through their office, plus a tip for carrying the bag. I had just been on a bus for 30 hours and wasn´t thinking very clearly or particularly in the mood to argue, so there went the 50 pesos I didn´t get fined. Anyway, Yacuiba, the town on the Bolivian side of the boarder wasn´t very pleasant so I got the first bus I could to Tarija, the capital of the region. So the mamoth bus journey became even more mamoth after an hour longer than expected wait in extreme cold at the Yacuiba bus terminal cause Bolivia is an hour behind Argentina.

Tarija was a nice place. I chose a place to stay out of footprints due to it´s description as having hot water and my need to shower after travelling by bus for two straight days. Unfortunately this description was unaccurate and my room had an ellectric shower, which only has on water handle, for cold water which is supposedly heated by an electric device on is way through. Basically your passing water through some kind of insulated toaster (safe), which barely warms it before it gets to you anyway. However, my need to clean out wayed my discomfort of having a cold shower, and in the end I felt better for having it. I had a bit of a walk around town and while I was there there was a sort of demonstration and a march through the city, comemorating the Chaco War, where Bolivia lost a fair bit of it´s territory to Praguay a while back, so that was interesting. I also got some decent food which was nice after the long journey. Tarija was a really pleasant place, especially after Yacuiba, but there didn´t seem there was that much to do there, so I decided to move on to Villazon, another town on the boarder of Argentina, where I would take a train to Uyuni, the first place I had previously planned to go to in Bolivia, from where I would take a tour to the famous Uyuni salt flats.

My bus from Tarija arrived around 1:30am, friday morning, despite the bus drivers best effort to get there quicker, despite the treachorous, cliff sided, one and a half lane, windy road which we took to get there. After finding a place to stay, I went to the train station the morning after to find out there was no train on friday. I had already known this, but in my rush to keep moving forgot before I left Tarija, and I shouldn´t have, given the immense supperiority of Tarija over Villazon in general niceness, things to see and places to eat. Villazon is a hole and the only thing I managed to do there was get the shits from eating in a dodgy restaurant. I don´t like Boliva/Argentina boarder towns. So I got the train on Saturday afternoon, which had a toilet, thank god (bolivian buses don´t), and got to Uyuni about midnight. The first place I tried to stay at wouldn´t answer the doorbell. The second place I looked at cost US$20 a night, a far cry from the 35 bolivianos I had been paying. So I ended up staying at the third place I came across, which only cost 15 bols per night, but exagerated my bad neck from the train and only had electric showers, which I gave a second chance, to no avail. In Uyuni itself there wasn´t much to see, but I was able to get my clothes cleaned, which was desperately needed by that stage, I organized to go on a salt flat tour and I changed to a hostel with hot, not electric, showers (between 8:30 and 9am).

The Salt lake tour was awesome. We headed out to the Salt lake first, which was amazing, check out the photos. On the salt flats we went to the Hotel de Sal, which has walls, furniture and beds made out of salt. Then we stopped for lunch on this island of dirt, rocks and cacti, called Isla Pescado, which just sticks out in the middle of the huge salt flats, surrounded by a sea of white. From there we left the comfort of driving on the flat salt and hit the markedly less smooth dirt roads, heading towards volcanos and lakes coloured strangely by the different minerals they are full of. We stayed the first night in San Juan de Rosario, a bizzarly lage town, given its location in the middle of nowhere. The second day we hit up a few of the lakes and volcanos and stopped a few times to change a couple of tyres and then we stayed inside the national park in extremely basic conditions. I slept in all my clothes and a beany, in a hired sleeping bag, under the blankets of the bed, and struggled to stay warm. On the third day we went to a hot spring, which was wonderful to get the warmth back into the extremeties. We had breakfst there, then went to Laguna verde, the most spectacular of all the lakes, a rich green lake in the forground of a conical volcano. After that we headed back to Uyuni, with a stop at a river to have lunch with some Llamas and at a small town with an old stone church.

That´s probably enough for now, but I´ll update soon with tales from Potosi, Sucre and La Paz.