9 hours for 200km!

Hills around Tupiza
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Posting this from Salta, Argentina. We made it!

Trying to get out of Uyuni was as plagued by uncertainty as our trying to get there. Rumors of miners blocking the rail tracks and all the access roads into Tupiza kept flying around in town. You would get different flavors of rumors depending on whom you would ask; by now we didn't believe anything anybody said, after being lied to too many times: about hotels having hot water, about bus rides only taking three hours, about tours leaving exactly at 10AM...

The best solution was to take the Sunday morning bus to Tupiza, rather than wait for the train that was leaving Uyuni on Monday at 2:30AM. Better by day than by night, knowing the temperature extremes we could expect... The bus was supposed to take 7 hours and, of course, it didn't have a bathroom, but the driver assured me he will stop every now and then. The problem was, there was nowhere to stop - the bus goes for hours through the desert and there's not even a tree in sight. The only real bathroom is in Atocha, 4 hours away from Uyuni.

Amazing carvings

There is no paved highway in the southern Bolivian Altiplano, and the stretch from Uyuni to Tupiza is no exception. At first the road is a pair of barely-visible tracks in the barren, sandy plain south of Uyuni; later it turns into a dusty ribbon carved in the steep sides of hills and canyons. At times, you find yourself praying for good brakes and for the driver's ability to take a dangerous turn. It took almost nine hours to get to Tupiza, but the drive ended without incident. Occasionally, the driver stopped to pick up or drop off people in the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed to me: no houses, no animals, no water. What were they doing there? I asked myself what would happen if a car breaks down on this road. There weren't many vehicles crossing in the other direction, and cell phones certainly didn't work. You would have to wait and have many blankets, in case you had to spend the night...

Tupiza is a small town in the southern Altiplano, and at 2900 meters altitude it's the smallest elevation we've been at in Bolivia. The area around it looks more like Arizona than the typical Altiplano landscape, and it's no wonder that Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid chose it for their last evil deeds: it must have reminded them of home...

For us, it was just another stop on the way to Argentina and a place to relax, do some horseback riding and eat a lot of pizza - since there's not much else in the way of food here. Connections in Internet cafes were very slow - there's only one provider in town, everybody shared the same line, and people loved to video-chat; even writing email was an agonizing challenge. We stayed at a decent hotel - the "Mitru", took a nice horseback tour with "Tupiza tours" and moved on. Bye-bye Bolivia!

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Adventures on the Altiplano

Salt mounds near Colchani
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Getting from A to B in an unpredictable country like Bolivia is no easy business and we were just about to find out why. In our case “A” meant La Paz and “B” Uyuni, a little town at 3670 meters altitude, the tourist gateway to the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni. The trip between La Paz and Uyuni consists of a 3½ hours bus ride to Oruro – a large, ugly mining town – and from then on, a seven-hour train ride on one of the few surviving Bolivian rail tracks, to our final destination. Like the good tourists we were we booked our tickets through a travel agency in La Paz, only to have our plans messed with by the favorite pastime of South Americans: social protest.

The miners in the south of the country - particularly in the department of Potosi - had gone on strike, and after a couple of days of unsuccessful negotiations with the government they had decided walk out and to block various railways and roads until they got their demands agreed to. I haven’t been exactly able to understand what they wanted from the newspapers, because the few articles I’ve read assumed inside knowledge of prior events on the side of the reader and didn’t make it clear what the strike was about. I was able, however, to get some information from a cab driver: in short, it’s about money, of course!

The man and his sweater

Miners or not, the agency wasn’t selling train tickets anymore (and we got our money back) and we decided to take a calculated risk: we reserved rooms both in Oruro and in Uyuni (our final destination) and took the bus. If the train wasn’t going to leave that day we were going to stay overnight in Oruro and make our way south some other way.

En route to Oruro, the most incredible of itinerant sellers joined us: he started talkin about the dangers of cholesterol, of drinking too much soda, eating fatty meats, of not eating fruits, vegetables or healthy foods like soy - of which Bolivia is a major producer but not a consumer - and so on, in a scientific yet comprehensible language. After talking health generalities for 30 minutes he started to extoll the virtues of the product he was selling: cod-oil, made in China! Very healthy! I don't know if anybody bought some, but people were asking questions...

We were lucky in Oruro: we caught the train just as it was about to leave, and it did leave because the government had brought in the army and the police to keep that part of the country free of miners. Sure enough, the ticket was much cheaper as we bought it on the train than what the agency was charging.

Water bubbling out of the ground

The train ride was seven hours and ended in Uyuni at 2:30AM on a freezing night. Within two minutes of getting off the train Angela and I couldn't feel our toes anymore. It must have been -15 or -20 degrees celsius... Luckily we had a hotel reservation, but the short walk to its door was the most excruciating three blocks I've ever walked.

We ended up spending 4 nights in this god-forsaken dusty, tree-less town and on the third day we finally took the Salar de Uyuni tour. We decided for a one-day tour only, because the night-time temperatures in this area and the perspective of being crammed in an SUV (everybody calls them jeeps here, although they are all Toyotas) for four days together with 6 other people had cut off our enthusiasm for three- or four-day tours.

Geometric patterns with car

The Uyuni salt flats and the southern Bolivian Altiplano (of which we didn't see much, except what got through the window of our bus going south the next day) are not to be missed by any traveler to Bolivia. It was absolutely stunning, walking on that immensity of white, seeing the reflecting mountains in the distance, smelling the salt in the wind, looking at the endless pattern of hexagons sculpted in the fake snow... The pictures of things we didn't see - the lagoons with colored waters south of the salt flats, the rocky deserts reminding one of Martian landscapes seen in National Geographic, the high-altitude flamingos - looked even more amazing. All I can say is "I'll be back!" You know whose accent to use when you say that out loud....

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Our Lady of Peace

Downtown La Paz
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I have never been to a city as geographically interesting as La Paz. Sure, I’ve seen pictures of it, but nothing prepared me for what I saw when I got here. To begin with, you read that the capital of Bolivia is at the bottom of a valley, but it isn’t a valley, it’s in fact a steep-walled canyon. The sprawling and dirt-poor suburb of El Alto sits on perfectly flat ground at the top of this canyon overlooking the real city below. If the residents of El Alto were to get pissed with their government they could walk to the edge of this ditch and throw rotten tomatoes at the presidential palace in Plaza Murillo…

The bottom of the canyon is the only flat ground available in town and it’s just enough for one large boulevard on whose sides the cross-streets rise sharply giving the city a terraced aspect. Besides all this, the bottom of this valley itself - the downtown - is “punctured” with smaller-scale ravines, so that between two main sections of the town one has to cross an elevated bridge which spans over a less-privileged neighborhood. “Nuestra Signora de La Paz”, by its old colonial name, is definitely an oddity among big cities and probably a tough nut to deal with for civil engineers.

Plaza San Francisco

As many guide-books say, the poor in this town enjoy better views than the rich and it is true: all but the steepest sides of the valley are covered with makeshift brick houses which can be usually reached just by stairs and sometimes by dirt alleys too steep for cars. God only knows how these multi-story shacks are erected, but the dominant theme seems to be “build until it’s habitable and don’t bother with the rest” – a principle which explains why the vast majority of houses outside the downtown, the colonial old town and the newer rich areas are never painted nor even covered in gypsum, and why the dominant color of this town, seen from any angle, is dark red: it’s all bare bricks.

Besides being the highest-altitude capital city in the world, La Paz could be famous for other things as well. If it were after me, I’d say it should be definitely known for its pastry shops: from the first day I noticed the many good-looking, clean cafes, having mouth-watering cakes and pastries on display. We didn’t try them all of course, but the ones we sampled were excellent and kept me going back for more.

Sagarnaga street

Shopping could be another reason to visit this town: not only there are western-quality malls, boutiques and department stores in La Paz – for the more snobbish of the visitors who wouldn’t buy anything in a place that doesn’t have air conditioning and elevator music – but the city itself is one giant, hyper-stocked market. The abundance of street sellers isn’t matched by anything I’ve seen so far – in fact, one day, walking on one of the narrow streets that was covered in makeshift booths selling all kinds of clothing, we spent so long without meeting a cross-street or any traffic, that we thought we would end in El Alto accidentally… I can’t vouch for the quality of the merchandise, but it certainly isn’t expensive by our standards. What I don’t understand is how these people can make a living – when there are three hundred booths selling T-shirts, how many of them can make a sale before the end of the day?

Angela did some shopping of course, but I don’t think we went over $150 with all the things we got. We didn’t get anything we didn’t really need (mostly stuff for the upcoming visit to the very cold salt flats of Uyuni) or could carry in our backpacks.

One thing we learned the hard way is that the rates for hotel rooms have climbed to almost double since our Lonely Planet guide-book authors have researched the place in 2005. We didn’t like our hotel very much ($16 for a reasonably large room with a shared bathroom in an old colonial house) so we went searching for alternatives, but everything we found in the under-$20 range was either very dirty or downright creepy: if you can imagine a dimly lit, strangely smelling corridor with doors opening into bunker-like rooms with windows only to the inside, you got a good mental picture – would you stay there? I came to appreciate our hostel much more after our day of bargain-hunting...

Popcorn seller in Plaza Murillo

After reading all the horror stories about tourists being tricked into following fake police officers into fake cabs to a fake police station and then forced at gunpoint to give away the PIN numbers for their bank cards and kept hostages until their accounts are emptied (gory details at http://www.katharinaandpeter.info) at the beginning we were understandably very cautions while walking on the street or getting into taxis. Needless to say we were not approached by any scammers (and neither are the large majority of tourists in Bolivia), and basic common sense would prevent any such unhappy event from happening – they cannot trick you without some degree of cooperation from you; thus knowing that the real police never asks to see one’s passport and even less likely their wallet and credit cards should be enough of a hint.

To sum up, La Paz is a “must see” in my South America ranking and definitely a town I would return to, despite the lack of impressive architecture or famous museums. It seems that I’m not the only one holding this opinion: the place has already been invaded by hordes of young Israelis…

Addendum for those with inside knowledge: white people, stop wearing Andean striped pants, you look like you just got out of jail!

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Luxury in Bolivia?

Through the arch
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As I mentioned before, we made it to Bolivia and spent some time in Copacabana on the shores of lake Titicaca doing... nothing. We even skipped that overrated bunch of rocks called "Isla Del Sol". We wanted to see it but various factors prevented us from taking that day-trip: either the weather was bad, or we had to change rooms, or again, I had I slight cold and preferred the coziness of our room to the great outdoors.

Speaking of rooms, the suite we had at "La Cupula" was without a doubt the best hotel room we had so far; kudos to the German owner and the management team. The best way to describe it would be to say that we actually enjoyed spending time in our room, which I cannot say about any other rooms we've had in the last three months. It was that good, yes, and cost us only $32 per night, price that got even lower since the first day there has been a power outage and the owner felt it was worth a discount to make the clients happy, and for the rest of the days we had a 10% discount for being South American Explorers members.

Copacabana is a tricky place though - food is dirt-cheap: you can get your belly full to burst for $5 but other things don't come in conveniently: there is no ATM so you're stuck changing money with the local exchange offices which give you a dismal value for your dollar, and even less if you want to change traveller's checks. There's one small bank on Avenida 6. de Agosto that has the best rates (but still bad) and where one can get cash advances on the credit cards - assuming one doesn't mind the hefty interest rates our banks at home usually charge for this service... In adittion, internet is very expensive, 12B/hour (about 1.5 dollars) - I know it doesn't sound like much, but for somebody like me who has to blog and upload pictures, it quickly adds up, and it doubles, since Angela is usually online as well at the same time. Compare that with the La Paz internet prices of 3B/hour...

Honestly, there's nothing to see in Copacabana proper, it's just a small, dirty town which happens to be on the tourist route between Peru and Bolivia and offers great views (but not necessarily the best) of Lake Titicaca. I'll have to see the lake again, there's something eerie and fascinating about this immensity of water situated so high up in the mountains...

We're now in La Paz, discovering the city street by street and trying to find deals on side-trips and hotels (since we don't like ours that much). Food is cheap as well - the first night we got here we rewarded ourselves with a gigantic Argentinian steak for dinner, with wine and all the good stuff, all for 180B - about $22 - for both of us. I know It's pointless to compare this with the prices in the United States but we wouldn't have gotten away without paying $150 for an equivalent dinner in Seattle. Leaving the understandably-overpriced US restaurant business aside, after seeing the price and the quality of fruits and vegetables in South America, Angela and I are already feeling outraged at the fact that grocery stores in our country charge insane prices for the same products (and double for the so-called "organics",) prices which cannot be explained economically except in terms of a fool's tax for a high living standard. Any opinions on this controversial topic?

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