The chicas hit Argentina

Salar de Uyuni... the magic continues...and La Paz

So we have failed you. We haven´t written in the blog for about a month, and for those of you who were living vicariously through us, we are sorry that you´re lives were put on hold for so long. But we have two very good reasons for not writing. 1) We have been having so much fun every single day that we haven´t been able to actually find the time to hit up internet cafes. 2) All they have in Bolivia is dial-up (and in lots of places no internet at all), so it is frustrating enough to check your email, much less coordinate downloading pictures. So here we go.....
We left off with an extremely brief description of Samaipata, a little Bolivian town of 3400 people. It is everything you imagine. Tiny little streets, chickens, horses, cows, tons of motorcycles, a beautiful town square with a really old church, etc. Very quaint. We had planned on spending 3 days here, and after doing El fuerte (the pre-incan ruins), walking around the town all day, and just chilling in our beautiful Bed and Breakfast (run by a Texan!), we thogught we would be ready to go. But then the morning came to pack up and move on and we just couldn´t bring ourselves to leave. The charm of this place was irresistable. We ended up staying 8 days total! One day we went for a hike into Hippy Valley, 4 km away where they have an entire alternative lifestyle going on. They have these awesome little circular buildings, beautiful gardens (Stacen looked for evidence of Marijauna fields but could find none), and little shops where they sell their handicrafts. We continued on down the road to what Stacen had been dreaming about going to for months...a meditation center run by a Buddhist monk! But when we got there, our hearts sank. It had been all but abandoned. Empty buildings lay in overgrown grass and weeds. The Buddhist monk had returned to India becuase he got bored! Needless to say, we both got very sad and left the valley.
Another day we rented a motorcycle and drove 20 km up the road to a path that you can follow to waterfalls! We hiked to our hearts content through the ice cold jungle streams and took turns dashing under the waterfalls. This was like the community pool. There were hundreds of Bolivians there having an awesome time! After a couple of hours Nicole and I decided it was time to head back. But when we were almost all the way back to town, we passed this little dirt road that led straight up a mountain and we couldn´t resist it. We powered all the way up, but then we had to turn around. As Stacen went to pull a 180, the bike slipped and fell on it´s side sue to the loose gravel road. Stacen managed to jump free, but Nicole (who was wearing sandals on a motorcycle!), was not quick enough. Her left sandal got stuck up in the engine, and her bare foot was caught in the moving spokes of the rear tire. We surveyed the damage, and saw...almost all of the skin on her heel had been ripped off, and the wound was covered with dirt and pebbles. Nicole couldn´t even walk. We go to get the bike picked up and heda back for some first-aid, when we realize that the left foot rest has been bent in the fall in such a way that it will not allow the bike to shift gears! We freak out even more, but thanks to the appropriate use of a spare sock and Nicole´s sandal, everything was soon bent back into place. We made it back and Stacen played doctor. He had been given some first-aid stuff from the nurses in the ER, and he actually had a chance to all the gauze, tape and neosporin.
Thus followed our two ¨scrabble days¨. We did absolutely nothing except change Nicole´s bandages, eat, read, watch movies, and play scrabble. We had an awesome time, even though Nicole cheated in the end of the last game and made the word ¨fluftufty¨. When she was able to hobble again, we went to the town zoo! It was more of a petting zoo, with almost all of the animals all running free together. Aside from tons of horses and dogs and cats (and 4 week old kittens!) and donkeys, there were parrots, tucans, pigs, cows, and howler monkeys! The girl monkey climbed onto Nicole and immediately snuggled in (Nicole´s new facebook picture), and shortly thereafter the really big male monkey climbed off a tree when Stacen wasn´t looking and would not get off of him for an hour and a half! They were so cool! And their hair felt so soft and was just like human hair, and their hands were so soft and strong! It was pretty difficult to get them to get off of us when we were done with our tour. One of the highlights of our trip!
It came time to leave and after a final walk through the town, we stopped at a little cafe on the town square for dinner. Before we knew it, some really cool swiss guys met up with us, along with the only other american backpackers we have met down here, 3 girls. So as we drank our chuflays (bolivian liquor made from grapes, mixed with sprite) and our Paceñas (the bolivian national beer), we were able to watch as the town prepared for its elections! There was propoganda everywhere, music blasting, and about 20 teenagers who looked like they were from the jersey shore. It came time for us to leave and we were very sad. We will one day go back to Samaipata, and possibly stay there forever! We weren´t even able to do any of the 4 days guided hikes through the surrounding jungles, so one day we will!
We make it to the restuarant on the main road where the bus is to pick us up. By this point we really need to go to the bathroom, and we figure we will just go on the bus since it is showing up now and buses have been known to leave people behind if they don´t move fast enough. We get on the bus and discover three things. The bus is not air-conditioned, it smells, and there is no bathroom. Nicole looks at Stacen in horror as they take the two remaining seats, and shortly after Stacen opens a window and begins to solve the smell and temperature problem, we turn onto a dirt road. So now we are rhythmically bouncing with full bladders, practically on the verge of tears. Six very very very very long hours later at about 3 in the morning, we arrive in a little village where the bus driver stops and announces that we can all go to the bathroom here if we would like to. There is a mass exodus from the bus, and as we step to the ground we look up and see everyone peeing in a giant semi- circle, on the edge of the light from the bus´s headlights. We were only too happy to join in. And after that, we slept blissfully until 8 am, when we arrived in Sucre, the cultural capital of Bolivia. After refusing about 50 offers for taxis, we found the hostel and met up with Sarah again. She had been in Sucre for 3 days so she gave us a tour of all the cool stuff in the city center. We also went full-out souvenir shopping, but by mid-afternoon Stacen was beginning to get pretty sick from the altitude so we headed back and rested for a few hours. Sucre is at about 8500 feet. We discovered that there are no supermarkets in Bolivia, only markets, so we headed out to the town market to get food for dinner. We were blown away by the sheer amount of food there was. Thousands of stalls stretching for dozens of blocks, all full of indigeous women and quite literally TONS of food. Picture tractor trailers full of corn. There were about 20 of them. There piles of peppers so high that you couldn´t see over it. You name it they had it. And all of it was rotting. It was simple supply and demand. To give you an idea of prices, we went to buy 3 onions, 5 green peppers, some jalapeños, 6 tomatoes, and some spinach from this one vendor who was particularly well stocked. The total came to 4 bolivianos (about 60 cents). We handed her a 10, and she couldn´t make change, so she ended up piling us with food until she could make change. It was a pretty eye-opening experience. If Bolivia would just improve their roads this food could be transported all over the country.....
We made a HUGE salad for dinner, and while preparing it met this Irish guy who invited us to a gringo bar that night. United Kingdom people LOVE going to these foreign countries and getting drunk in places where they don´t have to speak spanish. So we went with him, and discovered how much the irish drink. We had an awesome time, but let´s just say the next morning Stacen had a difficult time getting up in time for the bus so we ended up booking a bus out of Sucre for that night. We spent the day attepting to feel better, and spent about 3 hours on the back porch of the hostel playing 20 questions. Nicole had some real stumpers like Venus and chocolate cake. We make it to the bus station, board the bus, and settle in for what we think is going to be an uneventful 10 hour trip to Tupiza, the site of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´s demise! However, before we are able to leave Sucre, we hit a snag. It is Semana Santa (Holy week) before Easter, and all of the churches are holding parades throughout the city, which means that about half of the streets have been shut down. Well, no one told the bus company this, so the police rerouted us down this tiny road that was too small for the bus! But we rumbled along anyway, knocking down power lines as we went. At one point, there was a car parked and blocking our progress, so the driver had to get out and knock on all the doors of the surrounding houses until the owner was found and convinced to move the car. A short distance later however, we had to make a 90 degree turn. It took us over half an hour of gentle rocking back and forth before we could do it, creating a LONG line of cars behind us. Highlights include taking off chunks of the buildings next to us, and a very angry police officer who looked and sounded like he was going to kil the driver. But we finally made it out, and hit the open road, heading south into the desert.
It was a terrible bus trip, too cold and the driver was blasting music the whole time. We made it though, dropped off in Tupiza at 3 am with nowhere to go. We have come here because we want to take a 4 day tour of the bolivian desert and Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world! We have to leave TODAY, because tomorrow is Easter and the main office is closed. We´re walking along when this random guy gets our attention and starts speaking an odd combination of french and spanish until he realizes that we speak english. His name is Alex, and his wife´s name is Alix. They are from Marseilles, now living in Bristol. They have inside info that they knw for a fact that we can get a tour this morning if we go the 5 of us. We figure why not? We end up crashing in the lobby of a hotel for 4 hours, during which time we started to get to know one another. We end up clicking from the start and know that our tour is going to be amazing! Sure enough, when the tour company opens up at 8, we are there and get a tour booked. We left a few hours later!
Day 1: The 5 of us, our driver, our cook, and our Toyota Land Cruiser leave town and begin a very long trip up into the REAL Bolivian Highlands. It´s everything you can imagine; one lane dirt roads, crazy switchbacks, crazy dropoffs into the abyss, canyons, indigenous communities, llamas, and mines. We break for lunch in a huge pasture and attempt to touch llamas, but they kept scampering away. At this point the altitude was affecting everyone, and if we ever tried to do anything too strenuous, like walk quickly or stand up too fast, we got headaches, stomachaches, very short of breath, and develop a crazy pulse and blood pressure. Slightly unnerving. But in Bolivia they counter these negative effects by chewing coca leaves! And no, you don´t get high, but your mouth does go slightly numb. Stacen has sworn by them ever since. Our driver/guide is very knowledgeable, and answers pretty much every question we have. He tells us that the miners work in terrible conditions and have a life expectancy of about 35. We stop towards the end of the first day and are exploring a series of abandoned buildings. We meet this little boy, and turns out that he lives there. The poverty is something that neither of us have ever seen before. The buildings are all built out of mud , there are a couple hours of electricity in the evening from a generator, there is of course only running water in the places where the tourists go. We spend the night in a tiny little place like this. We try to get to know the kids in the town, kbut they are acting very strangely. First of all, in Bolivia, the vast majority of everyone speaks Quechua as a first language, so it is not un-common to find people that do not speak spanish very well. In fact, everywhere we go we see very simple words misspelled. Well these kids obviously don´t speak spanish very well at all, but deny that they speak another language. They are also quite obviously about 7 years old, but claim they are 12. It´s like they are ashamed of their culture, so we tried to pump them up as much as we could. Stacen decides to ask them about aliens (for those of you who don´t know, bolivia and peru lead the world in UFO sightings. No one knew what an alein was, what a UFO was, or had ever seen anything strange in the sky. Not even the adults. Needless to say, we were in the middle of nowhere, and the people here lived a very simple existence of mining and llama herding only. We wake up in the middle of the night with our hearts pounding. After all, we were sleeping at 14,000 feet. It was a very cold place too, well below freezing.
Day 2: We leave at dawn, shivering as we make our way over the first rise of the hill. We come to el Pueblo Fantasma (Ghost Village), which was built over 500 years ago, and abandoned over a century ago. Many ghost stories and legends surround this place, and while many find it creepy, we loved it! There were all these old stone ruins to walk through, but best of all, were the vizcachas--GIANT CHINCHILLAS! There were hundreds, just hopping around everywhere. They have actually replaced bunnies as Nicole´s favorite animal. We drive on and see all kinds of beautiful mountain desert scenery, and then all of a sudden come up over a hill and see our first volcano, with a giant lagoon of borax in front of it. We keep driving, astounded by the beauty, and all the time talking with the Alexes and blasting anything from regaton to Michael Jackson. These trips are awesome because we learn a ton about France and Canada, and teach about the States. We pass a wild llama mating orgy. We pass a llama with her newborn of only a few hours according to our guide. And we begin to pass lagoons and flamingos everywhere. We cross our first salt flat (tiny, took us about 10 minutes), and stop for lunch at some hot springs! The water was over 100, and the air was about 40. We went on to see more volcanoes and rock formations, before driving through a desert that looked like the moon, then one that looked like Mars, and then, at 16,500 feet, came to geysers and bubbling mud pots! This is no Yellowstone, but it also has zero safety precautions, so it was pretty intimidating and impressive anyway. We are about to arrive to finish the 2nd day when Stacen asks our driver if HE has ever seen a UFO. And he said YES! He told a story about when he was 10 he was sitting on the porch with his family after dinner and clearly saw this very bright red and yellow thing flying around and around the top of a nearby mountain, and after circling it many times in about 2 minutes, suddenly just zipped off up into the sky and the immediately lost sight of it! Stacen asked if he thought it was a weather baloon, but just got a confused look.
Day 3: We left early again, and drove to the Colored Lagoon, which is in the running to be one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World. It was red, filled with thousands of flamingos, and had hot springs along the edge. We continued on, and today entered into a world of lagoons, more volcanoes, and sandy deserts. We would go hours without seeing a plant, just sand and rocks. We hiked on a dried lava flow, and watched a smoking volcano. At lunch we fed vizcachas! We hiked the edge of a lagoon, and Sarah spectacularly failed to jump over a mud pit. We drove through another salt flat (an hour this time), and made it to our 3rd night´s accomodations, a ¨hotel¨ made entirely out of salt! It wasn´t nearly as glorious as it sounds, but it was still really cool. We walked around the surrounding hillsides, which interestingly enough are covered with coral and giant cactuses! The coral was millions of years old, and the cactus was hundreds! We looked out on the Salar, excited about the next day, and then spent like 5 hours playing cards that night.
Day 4: We leave before dawn and are on the salar for sunrise. Our guide tells us that in places the salt is 60 feet thick! And it is hard as a rock, and cold! And yes, we all licked it. We drive about 60 miles in, and stop at an ïsland¨for breakfast. We stayed here for hours, hiking more cactus covered coral, seeing one that was 900 years old, and one that had just died, but was 1100 years old. There was an ostrich-looking bird (South America has them too) that we were able to get really close to. We kept on driving, and stopped in a place where all you could see in any direction was salt stretching to the horizon! We stopped at the original salt hotel, which is on the salt flat but was closed for ecological concerns. then we drove through where they were collecting it. On the edge of the Salar there are a couple of towns that survive by selling the salt. So it was pretty sad because the salar had pretty much been destroyed in this part. We got to the edge, where we hit up a crazy tourist stop, and where we discovered that people who live in and around the town of Uyuni hate tourists! Which doesn´t make any sense because that is the only reason their town survives. In the town, after the tour, the vast majority of them treated us with total rudeness. In an internet cafe, Stacen was attempting to translate for a scottish guy who who was trying to say that his internet wasn´t loading gmail. The owner of the cafe got so angry at STACEN that we left. very similar experiences all day. We did not like Uyuni.
We have all afternoon before our bus to La Paz, and we spend hours in this internet cafe attempting to book Stacen´s flight home for his med school interviews. That done, we sat in a cafe all evening and had a pretty ok time. There were no spanish speakers on the bus to La Paz, just a ton of very annoying Israelis, and some English people. And then, as we were driving through the desert at about midnight, Stacen looks out the window and sees a strange object on the ground about 100 yards away. It is long, about 100 feet, shaped like a submarine but slightly more angular, and has 7 circular windows which are covered by different colors of plastic, and illuminated by an internal light source. We had passed it before Stacen could get the camera, but he has to ask: why, in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night where there is no electricity, no surrounding villages, and only mud huts, was there this large bright thing?
We make it to La Paz the next morning, and are immediately blown away by it´s size. It is BIG! And it has tall buildings! It´s a real city, with paved roads and people wearing business suits! We checked into a hostel, took ice-cold showers, and then hit up Tourist Street, where we load up on souvenirs for Stacen to take home. That´s all we did all day, and we had a great time! We bought alpaca sweaters for $8 each, among other very cheap textiles, and Nicole stocked up on jewelry. By this point we are pretty acclimated, so we are actually able to walk up the hills that are everywhere here. In the evening we went to the fanciest restaurant we could find, loaded up, and spent about $25. And the next morning, at 3:30, Stacen caught a taxi for the airport, and 3 flights later was back in DC. Nicole stayed behind with Sarah, hunkering down for 2 weeks of just girl time. Stacen hung out with his parents and sisters and some friends, reunited with his car, took a train to NYC for an interview, drove to Erie, PA for another one, and then flew back to La Paz, arriving two days ago. He met up with Nicole and Sarah at the airport (they had actually gone back to Argentina), and we drove back into the city. We spent the first day doing absolutely nothing except getting caught up on everyone´s travels, then going out to the same fancy restaurant again. Yesterday, we walked over to the presidencial palace (but Evo was nowhere to be seen), and we had an AMAZING TIME feeding pigeons. They saw the birdseed and attacked! No joke. They landed on our hands, arms, shoulders, legs, heads. Nicole screamed a lot, and Sarah took TONS of pictures. We had a blast. We remember how the travel health lady that had given us our immunizations had told us NEVER to touch a single animal down here. We have since touched many dogs, cats, horses, cows, rabbits, parrots, chickens, MONKEYS, vizcachas, and pigeons. HAHA. She also told us not to get into ANY freshwater because there is a snail who will burrow into your skin and cause lots of pain. We have since swam in hot springs, rivers, and stood underwaterfalls. HAHA. Don´t worry we aren´t being stupid, she was just very cautious and tended to apply dangers in one country down here to all the others. Like with Malaria. However, she had only ever travelled to Greece.
We continued walking around just taking it all in, get some bus tickets for Copacabana on the coast of Lake Titicaca, and go to an amazing Indian Restaurant for dinner. But then, Nicole got crazy food poisoning! We weren´t able to leave this morning, had to say goodbye to Sarah (who is heading back home to Canada in a couple of days), and poor Nicole has been in bed all day. But don´t worry, she is feeling better, and Stacen is at least confident that she may eat something tonight. So there you have it. Everything we have been up to. Probably heading to Lake Titicaca tomorrow, and we have a flight to Rurrenabaque, the launching off point for ecotourism in the Bolivian rainforest, on monday afternoon!