Sucre, Potosi, Tupiza and the Salt flats of Bolivia

The bus ride to Sucre was possibly the worst I ever had in South America, and that's saying something. Whilst PK slept blissfully next to me, I was kept awake nearly the whole way by nauseating bends, and the lady in the seat across the aisle from me peeing into a bottle. This was a 15 hour overnight bus ride. There was no toilet on board. And our driver had a bladder of steel, stopping only once to let people out to line along the roadside or squat behind bushes to relieve themselves. A very stern reminder there to NEVER book the cheapest bus company. It is just not worth it.....

Luckily making it to Sucre was definitely worth it, and we spent a lovely couple of days not doing particularly much other than wandering round the beautiful city enjoying the sunshine, and darting into the market several times a day to enjoy an amazing juice! This was probably one of the most wonderful things on the entire trip- there are stalls full of strange and amazing fresh fruit and a local lady will make you up an incredibly tasty fruit salad (which will quite literally last all day!) or you can choose a fruit that you have never seen before and she'll make it up in a juice for you for about 40p, giving you a free refill! Wonderful!!

Wonderful fruit stall!

We also went to a dinosaur park where we saw some 'dinosaur footprints' that had been discovered in 1985 by local miners. The huge slab of rock contains more than 5000 footsteps 462 separate trails, making it the largest and most diverse collection of dinosaur tracks in the planet! It is at a vertical angle due to the movement of the tectonic plates, causing that particular slab to be forced upwards, but back in the prehistoric times it was a watering hole for many different types of dinosaur. It was a cool park with lots of models of dinosaurs, and we were lucky to get an English tour with an informative guide. We then took the 'dino- express' back to the city and climbed up a beautiful hill to watch the sunset over the city.

Dino-Express!

Dinosaur footprints

Sunset over Sucre

Early the next day we pressed on to Potosi, a mining city. We met a girl on the bus who was recommended a hostel, so we shared a taxi with her and PK booked onto a mining tour. I opted to check out the city centre and find a coffee shop as, being slightly claustrophobic, I could think of nothing worse than scrambling through small dark tunnels hundreds of meters below the surface!! It did sound like an incredibly interesting tour though. Potosi is home to thousands of mines, where the local men still dig for silver and minerals in appalling conditions. Almost everybody who works there knows somebody who has died from a cave-in, or from carbon monoxide poisoning. The gulf between their lives and our own is stark, PK told me how he watched men shoveling huge mounds of earth and rocks for hours and hours at a time, all in terribly dark and dusty conditions. They earn about $80 a month. Before entering you had to offer gifts to the shrine of a devil, to make an offering for entering his territory. I heard a terrible story from someone who'd been the week before on one of the miner's holy days where they sacrificed a llama to the devil. The poor animal was forced 95% alcohol down its throat, followed by coca leaves and finally had its throat cut, the blood spattering onto the statue. Whilst sounding like an interesting albeit harrowing experience, I was glad to have stayed behind!

Devil- worship!

Another early bus journey took us to Tupiza, home of the wild wild west and where Butch Cassidy and Billy the Kid met their ends! Needless to say I immediately booked onto a day of horse riding, and was pleased when PK decided to give it a go as well! It was so much fun galloping around cowboy country, red mountains, giant cacti, canyons, ravines and some of the weirdest rock formations. The horses were good and everybody in our group were happy enough to go fast which is always much more interesting!

Tupiza was nice enough city, and not as touristy as we expected. Most of the streets had shops and stalls aimed at locals.

Except one.

In the street leading up to the pretty main square was a street that could be dubbed gringo- alley. On it, there are 6 identical Italian restaurants. Not similar, identical- from the same Italian menu to the same bamboo decor. They even had the very same dried cactus model pirate ship (to celebrate the land- locked Bolivia's rich maritime history we can assume?)

Somewhere, someone is making a fortune selling Tupiza women Italian Restaurant Kits. 

We had hoped to do our salt flats tour from Tupiza as we'd heard it was better, but it also turned out to be at least 500Bs (£50) more expensive than if we went to Uyuni and did it from there. Not only that, but as we wanted to end the tour at San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, it was a further expense and we'd end up doubling back on our route. As a result we hopped on a bus to Uyuni which took 3 hours longer than we expected and fell short of even our poor expectations of Bolivian buses. The window was closed when it was sweltering, and open when it was freezing, with the last 3 hours spent huddling inside our alpaca jumpers. Thank god for Game of Thrones which kept us sane!

We were exhausted when we got to Uyuni and decided to spend the next day relaxing on the city before finding a salt flats tour. This turned out to be a good idea as a big market and fete type thing was going on so we spent a nice sunny day drinking more juices and buying lots of cheap things on the market- making the most of our last day in cheap cheap Bolivia by sticking up on everything from socks to toothpaste!

Finding a tour was very easy with lots of people approaching us and all of them pretty much identical. We set off the next morning with all our luggage, but a little worried as we'd been told the snow had closed the border crossing into Chile. We were really hoping they'd be able to clear it as PK had a bus to catch in Chile in a few days and we didn't want to spend our final day together on a rickety bus retracing the same route we'd already been down!

The first part of our tour was visiting a train cemetery, which had been made into a playground of sorts. It was quite cool, in the middle of the desert with the mountains in the background! Then we moved into the start of the salt flats, where it is commercialised and mined. It was exciting to catch our first glimpse of the largest salt flat in the world! We then drove right out into the centre until you could see nothing but white on all sides, a little reminder of the insignificance of our tiny little lives. We passed a little island with flags from around the world, and a bigger island with strange cacti. And then we took lots and lots of perspective defying photos, not as easy as they might look....

Enjoying the train cemetery!

Salt mining

Looking out on endless white!

Crazy photos!

 

That night we stayed in a salt hotel which unfortunately was not as wonderful as I expected, but still nice enough.
The rest of the tour we saw some absolutely amazing things! Beautiful lagoons full of flamingos......

Hot geysers.....

Mountains....

Crazy rocks.....

And more amazing lagoons!!

The last day we woke up to hear that the border to Chile was open!! Hurray! We were so pleased and relieved and piled into the 4x4 for the journey to the border, where we were the first one. Gradually other groups arrived and we waited for the border office to open. And waited. And waited.... Eventually one of border control guys got a phone call. Whilst the Bolivian side was open, the road from Chile was impassable due to the ice and snow. Our guide told us they needed salt and sand to treat it. Now, I wonder where salt could be gotten hold of in the largest salt flat in the world? Or indeed sand, in a place bordering the Atacama desert, the driest desert in the world?! I can't express how angry I was at this point!!!! As with the border closed we had to spend the whole of that day in the jeep driving 7 hours back to Uyuni, before catching the bus to Chike which left at 3am. Which is the most annoying time for a bus to leave, surely, as what do you do?! Get a room only to leave at 2.30, what a waste!! In the end we stayed in a restaurant/ bar playing checkers, but we were exhausted!! Not the best end to our time tin Bolivia, or the start of Chile...... But after the whole of the next day on the bus.... we got there in the end!

The Chilean border, closed!