Beautiful Bolivia

From Uyuni to Sucre

02.05.2007 - 07.05.2007 25 °C

We have finally found a bit of spare time to catch up with our blogger - I cannot believe how short the days are, even on holiday!!!

We got to Uyuni on Wednesday at around 2 pm and the town looked worse than Copiapo´, so we decided to get out of there asap and get straight to Tupiza (south of Bolivia). Out of the 3 jeeps that were kind of travelling together through the salar, we managed to find 6 people who wanted to come along and so hired a jeep which would take us there departing at 5pm (all transport leaves for Tupiza in the morning). Great! So we paid double the fare ($15 each) for the pleasure to leave Uyuni kind of right away in a vehicle which normally would stuff up to 12 people with just 6 of us. It never dawned on us why no vehicles go to Tupiza in the night....What a bloody journey!!! That night - it got dark 30 minutes after we left, at 6:30, since the jeep was late and we had to find petrol etc - that night we spent 7 hours literally doing a camel trophy style journey, crossing rivers, mountains, valleys and crossing just ONE small town in the whole time. When we got to our booked hostel at 1 o´clock in the morning (instead of 11 pm) all in one piece, we were all unanimous to give the driver, Apollinar, another $2.5 dollars tip EACH for getting us there alive. The guy did such a brilliant job, that road was just crazy. Doing it at night is crazy, much of the road is on serpentines on the edge of the mountain with very vertical drops, needless to say it is all a dirt road full of holes and big stones, ditches, basically it is not a road!!!! The man was a hero, our Apollinar, chewing coca leaves all night and getting us home. AND we missed the beautiful scenery... Never mind, you leave and learn.

Tupiza is a small place and quite pleasant. The group stayed together the whole 2 days there - Claire (Canada/UK), Malcolm (UK), John and Gabriela (USA and Brazil) and Simon (UK) who is a smart chap and who got there the next day travelling in the day. Togetehr we did a whole day trip called TRIATLON, which means that you go round the canyons first by jeep, then by horse, then by bike. It was all great till we got to the bikes... Now. The concept of the bikes is that they drive you up this place called El Sillar (it seats like a saddle between two valleys) and then you come down the mountain by bike. The road is 17 km to town and it drops 900 meters in height over this distance, which, together with the fact that the road is in appalling condition full of holes and stones etc, it makes the cycling down a very strenous and dangerous affair. You basically brake ALL the time (and your hands hurt like hell after 5 minutes) being very careful not to go over the hedge and fall to your death a few hundred meters down. I started second and arrived last, taking one whole hours instead of the average 40 minutes, by the time I got down it was dark and I could not even see the stones any more, it was just really stupid. The others seem to have enjoyed it though, so I must be a chicken?? The thing is, I was the one who wanted to cycle down the Yungas road - called the most dangerous road in the world - which is a downhill business like the one we have done in Tupiza, only 4 times longer!!! 60 km with a 3,500 m drop. Now I am not sure I would enjoy it. Will see.

From Tupiza we made sure we took a DAY bus to Sucre (10 hours) to get there on time to go to Sunday market in Tarabuco, a town 60 km from Sucre. It all worked out very well, apart from encountering an overturned bus on the way - guess what, a night bus!! - Sucre is a very posh and colonial town, the best and richest in Bolivia.

At the Tarabuco market we met a lot of known faces from Uyuni and did a bit of shopping, which was cheap until we posted it > $ 54 for 3 kg!!!! I wanted to cry, it so much hurts to spend unnecessary money, especially when the average hotel room costs $10 for the pair of us...

From Sucre we went back on ourselves to Potosi, which is famous for being the highest city in the world at 4,100 m, and for the Cerro Rico on which it flourished back in the centuries, Cerro Rico being the richest mountain in the world for silver and other minerals. We went to visit the mines - Gregory is writing all about it - and tomorrow we have a few hours to see the beautiful churches before we go back to Sucre and to Cochabamba from there (heading north).

At the market in Tarabuco we met a very nice French couple in their 50s who had just spent 5 weeks working in Potosi with the children of the mines - meaning that there are some 800 kids aged 10 and over working in the mines - they gave us a movie to watch which was extremely interesting (I cried throughout). Then we bumped into the couple in town, went to lunch together, then they came to our hotel and we looked at our pictures, then at theirs, and they had fantastic pictures which made me feel like ours are sooo inferior!!! Great people these guys.

One last thing I wanted to say before I shut off - Bolivia is nice, and Bolivians are nice people. Friendly. Inventive. They have no money and it is nice to see how they use what they have, like the plastic bottle screw cap that holds the toilet chain in place, or the metal coca cola cap that is implanted in the soap and this is held up over the sink by a magnet. Great. The only bad thing is that they do not like to be taken pictures of, this is sooo hard to deal with! Gregory says it is because I have no style when asking. Maybe he is right.

Tupiza and its fallic symbols...