Bombing Bolivia

With our bags packed it was adios to San Pedro and Chile.  Hello Salar de Uni salt flats and Bolivia.  It was a short minivan ride from San Pedro to the Bolivian border for our change over to the four wheel drives that would take us through the salt flats.  Cold weather was the call of the day and a nice steady wind helped cut any tolerance anyone had to the cold.  Lucky the fourbies were warm and comfortable.  The first night we stayed in a hotel made entirely of salt!  Yes salt, the floors were salt, the walls were made of salt bricks with salt mortar, the tables and chairs were solid salt etc, etc.  It was amazing! 

Yep, it is salt!

The cactus's are big in these parts

The Salar de Uni salt flats are one of the most amazing places you could ever see.  Truly,  I really have no way of describing them so let the pictures talk….

Yep, definitely cold.  Note the snow

The drive.  Nothing but space

 On this part of the salt flats there was a thin layer of water which produced the most amazing reflections and really blurred the horizon.

More big cactus's.  This time these were on a little island oasis in the middle of the salt flat.  Some of the cactus's were nearly 900 years old and 9m high!

After 2 days touring we arrived at our second nights’ accommodation where the scenery was action packed.  We had a volcano, lamas, flamingoes, mummies, amazing sun sets and more…..  Absolutely amazing.  Here are more photos to do the talking.

Flamingos by sunset.

 

Near the volcano crater behind our second nights accommodation

Dids on top of the world

 Lama.  There were heaps.  They are cool and oh so soft!

The only hiccup of the whole trip was when our four wheel drive pulled up on the second day with no brakes at all.  Cool, way cool.  Even a night time backyard repair job performed by the guide could not fix it. To his credit we still drove on without any incident.

The trip finished up in Unyuni where we soon booked a 10 hour overnight bus ride to La Paz.  What a bus ride!!  I truly believe it is physically impossible to sleep on that trip and I think there were another 30 passengers who could attest to this.  In La Paz the goal was food and sleep and that is what we did.  Later we booked two tours, one to mountain bike the world’s deadliest road and a second to do a spot of canyoning.  

Well the world’s deadliest road is amazing!  Mountain biking it is fun as hell as well.  It is not so bad on a bike but when it was open to traffic you can easily see why it claimed between 200 and 300 lives per year!  The ride started at about 5000m and finished at about 1500m.  That is a whole heap of downhill!  Actually it was something like 78km of downhill.  There was one spot of uphill on the way where the guide challenged one and all to a race for beers.  The group was at a disadvantage though with heavy downhill bikes while the guide zipped along on a light cross country bike.  So sneakily I tried to even the score with a little local help.  With the guide far enough in front I flagged down a local driver and asked him if I could hitch a ride holding onto his door.  No problems and with this I made up a fair bit of time.   I love the people here, they are sooooo cool!  I did chicken out at the end and decided not to let the guide see me do this in fear of him kicking me off the ride for being “too careless”.  Baaah!  So he won.

The entire ride was excellent and Dids got a good feel for what mountain biking is like.  The smile on her face meant she enjoyed the day thoroughly.  There was only one injury in our group of 10 and that was a broken collar bone for the nice Dutch dad.  This was a big bummer for him because next he was to trek the Inca trail and complete the remaining 2 weeks of his trip with the family.  This is what you get when you push too hard though.   (Update: we later found out that the dad broke 3 ribs and his collar bone in 2 places.  A little surgery later....)

 This was a pretty standard drop along the road.  Some were 600+m straight down!

This was one of the many monuments for the people who had died along the road.  This particular one was placed at the sight of the murder of six political opponents to the then ruling party.  Apparently, the ruling party was looking like losing the election, so kicking your opponents off a 600m sheer drop was one way of regaining power. 

  A little vid of the day.  I'm number 2 past the camera, Dids is number 7 in the blue.

Dids and I said good bye to the group and stopped for the night at a local animal refuge where we got to meet some local monkeys, Macaws and even a Spectacled Bear.  Unfortunately the guy running the joint was all too interested in getting money out of us and this soured the experience.   I think the description getting around was that he was a “right tosser” (Dids speak).

The next day we were met by our friendly local canyoning guide Lucio.  He picked us up from the refuge and took us to the local town where we grabbed our provisions, a second guide Marcus and headed off for the mountains.  Well if we thought the worlds deadliest road was bad, the roads we were driving to the canyon we were to trek were waaaaay worse!  We were slip sliding up some very wet clay roads in a taxi van.  Dids was in the back with me losing her stuff at the driver and generally getting quite worked up.  The local guides were just kicking back and chilling in contrast to this.  Well we pushed as far as the taxi could go before we had to abandon it and trek by foot.  We passed through Marcus’s house on the way to the canyon.  Here we got shown the coca plantation and the ancient Incan terracing which was still being worked by his grandfather.  

Near the river we were kitted up with our wetsuits and other abseiling gear.  Then it was down to the river and “quick jump down that water fall”.  We abseiled down nine waterfalls in total as we made our way through the canyon.  The two guides were awesome even though they spoke absolutely no English.  The end of the day was spent jumping off rock ledges and being carried down river by some small rapids.  Way cool. 

At the end of the day we were dropped off at the local minibus terminal where our guide stuck by us to fight the local crowds for tickets to get us back to La Paz.  There is no etiquette here for buying these tickets either.  It goes like this….When the bus shows up you rush to the ticket office and kick, punch, bite and in one guys case cry your way to the front for the few limited tickets.  One French guy started on our guide for cutting the line and not playing fair.  Bloody idiot, I hope he is still there playing fair and waiting for a ticket.  Haha! 

The minibus ride back was interesting.  Foggy, wet roads, landslide wash outs very, very limited visibility, a maniacal desire to speed and overtake……Oh my god!  But we got back, that’s all that matters.

Next it is chill out time in La Paz.   Deserved I think, the life of an adventure traveler is hard!