Flavia & Gregory go LA

Here we are again! We left Coroico on Friday, as we managed to scrounge a lift back to La Paz from Downhill Madness, the company we came down with. Aaron was limping as they had an accident - someone took him over - which is rule no. 1 broken, NEVER overtake the guide - causing a small pile up on the good part of the road and someone broke a shoulder... sooo glad this road is past us!!!

Hotel Esmeralda was great but in fact we did nothing but eat and play pool, so towards the end we were concerned about our weight and eager to leave. On the last afternoon I went to visit Senda Verde, a animal refuge 30 minutes from the village. Gregory was not bothered and stayed to continue playing pool till the last minute. The refuge was well run and they had a lot of rescued monkeys, some of which were as young as 7 weeks and with nappies on! Really cute. This is the place where GRAVITY, the top biking company down to Coroico take their bikers for lunch. They have some cute cabañas to offer (not many), but this is a place for the few, very very tranquil, away from everything and full of animals, including insects!!! It is possible to volunteer here, though they are still quite small and struggling with the amount of work they get. It seems that Bolivians started taking animals here even before they actually put the place together...

We stayed in La Paz overnight and then got a bus to Copacabana.

Copacabana is quite nice, it has a huge beautiful cathedral which is quite impressive as one sees it from the bus getting into town. We stayed one night and then got a boat over to the Isla del Sol. Here we hiked the island north to south and then stopped for the night in the southern village of Yumani, at a very basic place for the crazy amount of $5 for both!! No bathroom and no flush toilets, but this is a very basic place we are talking about! It was actually an excellent opportunity to see how the Aymara local campesinos live. At sunset everybody comes back home, so you see donkeys and sheep coming into town from everywhere, really quite lovely!! And then the village lights up, all the family restaurants that are closed during the day come to life and it is really cozy and warm (in the romantic sense, it is quite cold in fact). While we were sitting down having a coffee a little girl got hold of my hair and started plaiting it and then put a couple of typical bands in it, like they wear them. Then she demanded 10 bs!!! We agreed on 7.5 and we were both very happy. The next day I asked the landlady at the hotel to plait them again for me... the landlady was Aymara and such a lovely woman!! Beautiful, with freckles and soo sweet. I recommend her to anybody who goes that way, Hostal Templo del Sol. She also had fantastic hand-embroidered sun table cloths that I was tempted to buy off her, but changed my mind when I realised how much they cost.

Well, today we are back in Copacabana and tomorrow we are leaving for Puno. This afternoon we went up the Calvario hill nearby - 30 mins steeply uphill - the views were great and we survived it, especially Gregory who is suffering the altitude quite a bit... fingers crossed for the Inca Trail in a week´s time..!!

While in Coroico we went to visit Tocaña, a local village where the Afro-Bolivians live, 40 families in all, the descendants of the Potosi mines slaves. We visited the local school:

Coroico quiet street corner

Senda Verde

cutest 7-week-old howler monkey

more young specimens...

Isla del Sol

Coffee break in Yumani, Isla del Sol.
The little girl next to Gregory is the business woman who plaited my hair. At about 5:30 the family animals came back from the fields, so we had a catwalk of donkeys and sheep just behind where Gregory was sitting. Quite amusing!

LA PAZ

La Paz is quite nice. We got there in the late afternoon and got straight to our designated accomodation, Hostal Republica. It was a good choice, the place is just 3 minutes from the main square and really beautiful > www.hostalrepublica.com
We stayed 3 nights there and took it fairly easy, considering that this city is at 3,600 m and, being scattered all over the hill sides, steep roads are the norm. Generally, we cannot say that high altitude has affected us too much (Gregory more than me – choking sensation while in bed trying to sleep), however as soon as we do a little exercise, the effects are felt immediately – walking uphill is quite fatiguing. La Paz is quite chaotic and there isn’t so much to see really, apart from the main square and the many markets. It is quite extended and yet it has a provincial feel.
We spent half a day going up and down Calle Sagarnaga – the gringo street with the artesania shops and the travel agencies – and went to take a look at the famous Mercado de Hechicheria (witchcraft market). Here we bought a few good luck charms and amulets (they look cute and, should they not bring any luck, they won’t harm either) and took some shots at the many exsiccated lama foetuses which lie in heaps and are used by the Aymara population (the indigenas) to bring good luck. They burn them, together with other strange ritual material, on the grounds of new houses to bring fertility and fortune. Apparently they do not kill the lamas for the foetuses, these come from natural abortions. However, they do worse things to these animals, including buring them alive near the mines or cutting their throat and then eat them by the mine entrance in ceremonies held to wish for more minerals…

La Paz

Central Square

Calle Sagarnaga

Mercado de Hechiceria, see the llama foetuses in the basket....

TIWANAKU
The next day we went to visit Tiwanaku, a pre-Inca site about 70 km from La Paz founded about 3000 years ago. While the museum was fairly interesting and furnished, with lots of ceramics, a mummy, a good few elongated skulls (they used to stretch the skulls of babies in order to make them larger and create more space for brain cells!!) and monoliths (none of which could be photographed unless a bribe of 5 BS was paid to the museum guard) the actual site was quite pathetic. We managed to scrape a couple of decent pictures together but it really was hard work: the place has been pulled apart and the massive stones making up the pyramids displaced by the Spanish when they found gold in the ground, even breaking up the big ancient stones with dynamite to provide gravel for the foundations of the railway! Bloody hell.
This civilization grew quite large thanks to a remarkable agricultural system of raised fields called sukakullo, which enabled them to produce incredible quantities of food surplus. They say that in their time, the Tiwanaku could feed over 100,000 people, while today the same area produces food for only 7,000 or so. So they are thinking about re-implementing the same system today, which seems so much more effective than the modern technological methods! Quite incredible.

THE MOST DANGEROUS ROAD

From La Paz we booked the famous bike trip down to Coroico in the Yungas, through what’s known as the most dangerous road in the world. ‘We’ is Gregory on the bike and me more safely in the minibus…. Yes, I chickened out and did not sign up for it.
At the beginning I was the one who was enthusiastic about it, and Gregory didn’t want to know. Then we did the mini-version of it back in Tupiza, and things changed for both of us: I did not want to do it anymore, but Gregory did!! So we booked the trip, but under the agreement that I would follow in the support minibus following the group. I came to the conclusion that there was little point in doing something that cost a lot of money and I was not going to enjoy (braking hard for 4 hours on fearsome precipices is not what I call fun), and in fact being in the bus and having the chance to actually look at the views rather than watching the road and being able to take pictures appealed to me a lot more. The road descends over 3,500 m in just over 60 km, and it is a crazy incredibly STEEP road. Nobody knows how many people have died there, but it is in the many hundreds. The thing is, nowadays the road is a lot less dangerous than 6 months ago. Until 6 months ago this road was the only one from La Paz down to the Yungas, meaning that it was very trafficked day and night in both directions. In some places only one car can fit, and they had coaches carrying 50 people and big trucks going on it! So every month some vehicle would fall down into the precipices, sometimes with lots of passengers. Many accidents were due to mechanical failure, some to human error and many others to drunken drivers. Drunken drivers!! It is just impossible to grasp how anybody would contemplate drinking while on a road like this. So now that a new road has been built and most vehicles use it, I’d say that it is a lot safer, though a couple of people still managed to die in the past 6 months while doing the bike tour. Even if you don’t fall off into the precipice (from where they can only retrieve you by abseiling down), there is still a real risk of falling off the bike and injuring yourself on the rocky road, and big stones still occasionally fall on the road from above. So not so safe still…One of the girls in our group fell off the bike and had to have 3 stitches in her head. So I spent the time worrying about Gregory, reminding him at every stop that he should exercise maximum care and feeling really rotten for having him doing this while I was sitting back in the bus. Well, he made it without ever falling once!
I think we picked a good company to do this with – Downhill Madness. They had some of the most expensive bikes ($65 - probably the most expensive, but even though really stingy, I was not going to go on the cheap on this) and the chap that we saw in the office, one of the guides, inspired us. His name is Aaron, a young English guy full of enthusiasm and a loud voice who has been doing this for months. Lots of attention to discipline and instructions, he spent a lot of time briefing the group at the beginning of each section of the road, providing lots of commentary on the many stops that they did. Most of the road is dotted with crosses in each spot where someone has died, quite an incredible sight really, so you get an account of the biggest or most curious accidents that took place over the years. I got a lot of stories too in the bus with Ollie, the driver, who was driving down the crazy road while taking pictures for the group, much to my extreme worry.
Downhill Madness - highly recommended company, the only one that uses full face helmets that protect your nose and teeth and not only the skull. Not cheap, but worth it.

The paved beginning, 9 am, 4,800 m....

Isn´t it scary....

Our intrepid Gregory...

Watch this.. it happened to Aaron a couple of days after we came down the road with him, a biker broke rule no. 1 and overtook him. Consequence: innocent other biker broke a shoulder...

see also news about dangerous road-update 25/04/08
http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=8167589

COROICO

Down in Coroico we were taken to Hotel Esmeralda for lunch and showers. We had already organised to stay down for a few nights to enjoy the warmer climate and unwind, given that there is a big swimming pool on site, sauna, pool table and lots of tranquillity. So this is where we are going to be till the weekend: www.hotelesmeralda.com

The day after the mines we decided to stay in Potosi for the morning and to get to Sucre in the afternoon just in time to get the 7pm bus to Cochabamba. We had to take the night bus because there are no day buses going to Cochabamba!!! So again we missed out on what seemed a very scenic road, on top of risking our lives again. And we are not paranoid... On the way to Potosi we saw a bus lying on its side in a ditch next to the road (only 3 m or so deep, no precipice luckily) and found out that the driver had fallen asleep at 4 am in the morning: no dead. Then, while driving from Potosi to Sucre, we saw the carcass of a bus lying in the middle of a dried river bed, and could not quite understand how the hell it had gotten there... till we realised that it had gone straight through the railing of the bridge after coming down from a steep serpentine and rolled several times to the middle of the river: 18 dead. This also happened in the early morning. Apparently brake failure. So, towards the early morning on our night bus to Cochabamba, looking down into the precipices we could kind of see in the night, we were quite worries, at least I was. Gregory was not sitting next to the window and had his eyes closed, so I don´t think he suffered as much as I did. Anyways, we did make it to Cochabamba alive, urrah. From now on we should not have any more night buses to take, fingers crossed.

We came to Cochabamba with a view to visit the Toro Toro national park. This turned out to be far too expensive - over $200 each for 3 days jeep tour - and frankly, after having been to S Pedro and Uyuni for peanuts, we thought it´s just not worth it, especially when we can do with some extra time to spend around La Paz and Lake Titicaca. So we are moving on from Cochabamba for La Paz straight away. Cochabamba is the town from which Marta, my auntie Zia Maria´s carer was from. It is a rather messy place full of market stalls everywhere, quite ugly really. They seem to have quite a few flight agencies here, and lots of flights to Milan and Bergamo!!!

So far, the best city in Bolivia for us has been Potosi. Sucre is refined but Potosi is where life flows. Its old streets are really lovely, and the market is also a very interesting place. We have now developed a better tecnique to take pictures of people who don´t want to be photographed, so we have had a lot of fun with taking a few really good shots. Here are some.

This is cow´s heads they are selling. Apparently a typical dish of the Altiplano, cow´s head soup... and they only cost 2 Bs ( about $ 0.25)

The coffee here is very good...guaranteed by Gregory (TM)

This is Gregory, remember me?? Gregory, I am finally writing the blog!!

Potosí - 4100m above sea level , highest city in the World. Potosi is a wonderful and a tragic place in Bolivia.

Potosi is a living museum of Spanish colonial architecture, everywhere you look. It is difficult to understand at first why anyone would want to build such beautiful things here (remote, inhospitable location). So high up, sea level dwellers usually suffer the effects of altitude sickness, which includes headaches, shortness of breath and of course death if symptoms are not treated (usually a fast exit down to a more comfortable level). Gringo smokers need not apply for a job up here...

The tragedy of Potosi is also its fame and wealth, one name, Cerro Rico ( Rich Mountain) which we visited today for half a day underground with the miners.

A brief history is basically that the Spanish empire and most of Europe’s wealth was built on this mountain. Since the 15th century Silver, Tin, Zinc and other metals and minerals have been taken from this mountain. 8-9 million miners have died here since then, in the bad old days 90-100 miners a day would die bringing silver etc to the surface, mainly indigenous peoples and African slaves, the latter due to the altitude sickness and the 20 hours daily shifts, in a dusty, poisonous gas environment that is also why Cerro Rico was also called “the mountain that eats men”. The modern tragedy is the fact that there are some as young as 10-year-old children working in the mines, supporting their families. An interesting fact is that all the mines have a effigy figure call “el Tio” which they all worship every week on Friday by bringing presents of cigarettes and Coca leaves and llama foetus carcass, in order to make the mines give a good yield and save their lives. What is quite clear is that the Bolivian miners have no problems going to church on Sundays ( those that can) but in the mines they worship the El Tio –the devil, because they were taught 500 years ago by the Spanish that god is in heaven and the devil lives underground, where they work.

I mentioned earlier that Flavia and I spent the half a day in the mines. Just to describe the sequence of events. We were picked up in a mini bus that we had to several times get out of so it could go uphill (a small group of 8 gringos and 3 guides). They took us to the miners market to buy presents for the miners. The presents were bottles of coke, dynamite, fuses, ignitors, ammonium nitrate (bigger bang), and bags of coca leaves with all the bits that help to masticate them. Fully loaded up we then headed for a shack near the mines to get into our miners gear with our guide Jaime. Fully equipped with presents and geared up we entered the mines. The ordered chaos of the place is best experienced than described, in the beginning you were running to get out of the way of groups of four men running towards you with 1-2.5 tons of ore in a mining wagon, you learned pretty quickly to get off the tracks and stand clear when they were coming down the line. I banged my head about 10 times on the low ceilings, saved from fractures by the helmet I wore. It was a lot easier for the gringos to get out of the way when they were carrying their load trolley up hill , because of the strain on their bodies. Also they were glad to see the gringos in the tunnel, because they would scream for sweet drinks or coca leaves which we happily gave them as they passed. This is unfortunately all what the miners get out of the tourists, the cost of the tours is not shared or passed to them, which is really crap. But at least they get some drink and coca leaves for free, which are very very essential for working down there. These guys run from 2000m within the mine to the exit with 1-2.5 tonnes of ore 15 to 20 to 30 times a day. I think we got to about 2500 meters in the 4 hours we were there and it was exhausting. After the first hour 1000m into the mountain two girls of our party were overcome with events and had to be taken back to the surface, while the rest of us waited for the return of the guide watching the miners go by still running and moving tonnes like toys.

One very important point: coca leaves are VITAL to the miners and the people, without the coca no human being could ever work in the mines, in fact we just cannot conceive how they can do it, even with their mouth full of coca. The USA and Mr Bush should try a few hours in the mine themselves before trying to dictate what Bolivia should and should not do with their coca crops....

Potosi

Cerro Rico

El Tio. Note the fallic thing, this is about the fertility that he is meant to bring with extracting the minerals

Gregory passing through the narrowest tunnel we passed

The very civilised tunnel from the colonial era near the entrance, this is NOT what the inferno looks like a few more hundred meters into the mine...

This is a bit more like it...

Outside the mines, this is where the trolleys are emptied out

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...

Trip lunch and Claire, really nice girl

The devil´s gate

El Sillar - from where we descended by bike...

Sucre

At Sucre´s Museo de Arte Indigena

This trip was SPECTACULAR, possibly the best we have had so far. It is difficult to compare or rank the places we have visited (where do you put Fitz Roy??? Or Torres del Paine??? Or Perito Moreno?? Or Rio Carnival??? Or San Pedro de Atacama???), but this one was something truly out of this world. For 3 days we travelled through stunning mountain scenery, volcanos and lakes of all colours, only to end in the biggest salt flat in the world in a sea of some 10,000 square meters of very white salt!!

After having consulted the book of suggestions and complaints at the tourism office in San Pedro, we decided to buy our tour from Estrella del Sur, one of three Bolivian agencies offering 3-day tours to Bolivia. It was a very good choice - everything went incredibly smoothly and, unlike all the warnings found in the present tour guides, the food was good and plenty.

I will cut this short and post a few good pictures, though I must say that again, like with the Valle della Luna, the photos do not do justice to what we experienced. Very briefly, during the first day we went through a few lagunas of different colours with lots of flamingos. We stayed at an extremely basic shack up at more than 4000 meters at -20 degrees (nobody slept, despite the 3 layers of clothing plus the sleeping bag plus the 2 blankets) but hey! we were right next to the Laguna Colorada, dotted with hundreds of flamingos. And they were not even indoors!!!! The second day was a long drive through more lagunas, volcanos etc to a hotel by the salt flat shore - a salt hotel built with salt blocs! Walls, floor, beds, tables and chairs were all made out of salt - very peculiar! The third day it was a 5am start to drive to the middle of the salar and watch the sun rise. This was really crazy, we had the sun going up on one end and the moon going down at the other!! Then it was the drive across the white sea to the Isla del Pescado, a small island covered in giant cactuses, where we had breakfast. Then it was another drive in the white salt desert thorugh the salt ´mines´, where they extract the salt for human consumption, then the salt museum and finally a visit to the train cemetery on arrival in Uyuni.

I´ll shut up and let the photos show you the itinerary....