A few more Photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonflydreams2011/?saved=1

NEW PHOTOS

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonflydreams2011/page1/

Ciudad de blanco

Entering Bolivia was exciting. When we entered the salt flats our passport details were taken down and we were asked to get our visas in Uyuni town. When we go to the immigration office, the very nice officer told us they only had 2 visa stickers left! Yannick was to travel illegally till we reached La Paz which was more than a few days away!!

Sucre or the White city, is the official capital of Bolivia but since La Paz is the seat of Govt, it works out very well for Sucre. The city is Spanish in its architecture so it is full of arches and colonial style buildings. The food is fantastic. We ate the mondongo a pork steak with a spicy Portuguese style red sauce, the saltaenas which are basically baked empanadas are great and the fruit juices fantastic.

We hung around Sucre for a couple of days before taking the bus to La Paz.

La Paz is a stunning city. It is set on the walls on the valley so in the night the walls of the valley lights up and looks like a beautiful piece of jewelry. The setting is stunning!! The local people will tell you that the best way to get to the centre is to throw a ball from anywhere and just follow it all the way down. La paz is a surprisingly crowded city for a population of 1.5 million people.

We were staying with friends so we decided to chill out a little. Bolivia is cheap and the food great. Tukumanas, the Bolivian equivalent of the fried empanada was fantastic, as were the almuerzo, or plato completo. This is a set meal that includes a soup, a main course and sometimes a desert, and a refresco which is water flavoured with pieces of fresh fruit, all for 1 to 3 $’s. Friends from the Uyuni trip were in La Paz with us so we decided to do the Amazon together.

Musings about the Salar...

the salar de Uyuni  is one of most spectacular lanscapes I have ever encountered. The lack of a horizon is what makes it so unique. The white salt flats merge with the sky in the most  ethereal way. The island of fish or Isla de pescadore, is an island formed in the middle of the salt flats with huge cactus covering the entire hill. It is only when you are atop this fascinating island that you realise that below the salt there is water.  Crunching the salt crystals as you alight from the 4X4 is as fascinating as walking on ice for the first time, or seeing the magnitude of a glacier upclose. We were lucky to have had some rain a few days before we arrived and therefore a layer of water covered the entire salar making it the world largest mirror. When the sun rose, the reflection of the sky made it a double sun rise, one in the sky and one in the mirror...spectacular!

From the Uyuni we ended up in Potosi, the site of the enactment of the severest cruelty by the spanish conquerors on the poor unsuspecting welcoming  indegenous people, to fulfil theor greed for silver. Unexpectedly, Potosi was a beautiful little city. Flanked by the Cerra Rico or rich mountian where the silver is located, we expected a sad miserable people would live here but the locals were vibrant, the food fantastic, and the hostel, an old monastery very enchanting.

We did the silver mine tour and it was everything we expected it to be. The tunnels were no larger than 5.5 feet at its very max height, and most of the tunnels were under 4 feet high. In places we were crawling on or bellies for many a minute. It was claustrophobic and pitch dark. Small little hole like tunnels led from one level to another and we crawled through 3  such levels. Oxygen levels are so low that taking a breath is difficult. Add to this the dust that mining in such tunnels creates and you feel a darkness deep within you. It was one the most exhausting experiences I've even been through and I attribute it mainly to mental fatigue. At one point I lay on my belly, closed my eyes and thought I would never be able to get out. And it was inside here that the spanish forced the local people to work for upto 6 months at a time,

It is said that the Spanish took out enough gold and silver to build a bridge of from Potosi to Spain and killed enough indegenous people to be able to build another such bridge with their bones!

The entire experience teaches you to really love the life we are lucky enough to live. Miners are still working in these mines in horrible conditions. The average life span of a miner is 35 years and even the young look 20 years older than they are. I felt profoundly sad but really glad to move on from the mines.

The bolivians we met here were really generous, they shared tales, information , and even their food. I was lucky enoguh to try a fantastic potato from a locals plate. This oblong white potato is apparently freeze dried at night for many nights and then left in the sun for a while before being boiled. It has a crunchy hard exterior and a really melty soft interior. The texture is fantastic. So also the chirimoya, the sweetest fruit I've ever tasted, and thumba a yellow orange pomogrante like fruit that has a very dry aftertaste.
It was time to move on to Sucre...

Chaos - ysm

Our initial plan was to get into potosi ( in bolivia ) after finishing uyuni. But after seeing what happened to everybody at high altitude papa decided that we give it a miss. But mamma really wanted to go. Mamma thought about it and told papa we could go to Sucre ( we were planning to go after potosi ) as it was low altitude and take a day trip to potosi. So thats what we were going to do. Papa bought tickets to Sucre and almost the whole uyuni group except for three were also coming to Sucre. At about 12 midnight the bus stopped and 3/4 of the bus left leaving the uyuni group and two locals. We stayed in the same spot for about 45 mins or something and so papa went out and asked the driver something and i dont know wht he replied saying but papa came back. Another 20 mins passed by and the bus conducter came in and said that this bus was not going to sucre and there was another bus that would go to sucre and there were only 4 seats. A local got angry and shouted at the guy and went back to sleep. None of the uyuni group knew what to do. a min later the bus started to move and we took a round of the city, realised it was potosi, and then the bus came back to the same road except on the other side. The guy came back in and said there was another bus  going to sucre and all could get in. But by then the uyuni group decided that we should stay here because we wanted to come to potosi anyway. So all of us except one guy stayed. Potosi was great, we went to the silver mines  and papa will explain potosi in detail. So potosi was great and we left to Sucre. The seven of us from uyuni had started travelling together. Sucre was great to, we had great meals and we were there on the race day where there were some race cars going around the city...it was great fun. We did not do much in the place but we loved it.Sucre going to La paz was where the uyuni group broke up. Four of us (which is basically papa, mamma and me and Dahlia) left to la paz and three stayed. In la paz we wanted to meet these friends of ours ( also from the uyuni trip ), but we did  not meet them until late at night. but during the day we went searching for amazon tours. The next few days we searched for amazon tours with ion and susana...the friends from uyuni. We had a great time it was alot of fun. On the day we were going to book the tour our tour opereator girl told us that a friend had come four times in the day searching for us. we realised it was dallia ( the person who came with us from sucre to la paz. as we paid we met her and she joined the tour. Just before leaving for rurrenabaque we heard some bad news : the peruvian border had been shut down.  It was because of the elections and some thing about gold mining. We thought it would be open as the elections would be over when we came back.The amazon was totally amazing. Papa or me will explain the whole thing in detail in another blog. when we returned the border was still closed. We gave it a day before we started thinking of another route. In the mean while we wanted to go to copacabana and isla del sol. we checked some guides and theysaid the route to copacabana was shut., and they would know if it opens at 3 pm.  At 3 pm we heard that the route was open the next day. We got back to our house and then we bumped into Flavia's brother ( we were staying with flavia's boyfriend ) and flavia's guest.
 She told us that the peru vian border was shut and there was no way to go. We could not even go by flight becausse a volcano erupted,  there were no buses through brasil and the only way was to go through chile. Now that was a problem for us as our chilean visas had expired. Now we had to figure a way into peru before we got into copacabana because if we came back  and the border would still be closed, we would not have anywhere to go. The Only way other than chile was to cross the border illegaly......

San pedro de atacama - yannick

Many many many adventures here....and it all started when we got picked up by our hostel owner........

.....when i saw the van he was taking us to the hostel in....i was wondering if we made the right choice booking that hostel. the hostel owner´s name was Mario, as soon as we got out of the bus we saw him with a sign with papa´s name and X3 next to it. The hostel was not at all bad, much more clean and all that than the van. It was an open air place...and it was huge. We got our room and we asked Mario where Uyuni tour companies were and which ones to take. We spent the day looking for the best deals, and which we were comfortable with. Eventually we chose the company Coirdillera, as i said in the blog before. We walked around and realized that we should book a tour to the geysers now because the tour started at like 4 am!!!!!! The first place we went to was the one we picked...because it was the cheapest. all the tours were like 15000 chilean pesos but the lady in the first office gavi it to us at 12000 because she did not like her boss :-). We woke up at 3 30 am and got ready by 3 55. We stood outside the gate and waited till 4 30 untill our van came ( apparently the others that were waiting had to wait till 5. ) and it was packed. We reached the geyser field at 6 so i got some sleep..but apparently the road was too rocky for the others to sleep. The first thing our guide told us was not to cross the stones that were around the geyser because if you do you could die. I was not to excited about the dying part of the news because the geysers were so amazing ,that i thought, while i would be gaping at them i would walk backwards into one and die a horrible death. The geysers were really amazing.... it was exactly how i thought it would be, although i thought i could sit on one just before it erupted and then go up into the air with it...that would be cool. The next thing was the thermal pool...it was supposed to be 30 to 35 degrees centigrade in the pool. I could not wait to get in as it was freezing outside....but once i got in....i double froze. buit later on i found a warm spot and it was good. We then went to a village which was not like a village..it was small but it was completely urban. I got to eat llama meat.

 The next day we went to the pre inca ruins. It was hard to get to as there were many roads to chose from but eventually we found it. The main trek up was not hard...probably 45 mins. But that was worth it. the view was amazing. we could see the highway going to bolivia, sasnd dunes and salt dune kinda things. It was great.

The day after that we went to valley of the moon and we were the luckiest people in the world. In san pedro there are 6 cloudy days in the year and we got one of them.:-(. The tour was a disaster as the co9mpany did not send a tour guide with us so we almost got thrown out of a plac3e for climbing a dune that we were not supposed to. we did it cos we did not know how to go, But the whole thing was beautiful.

Once we got back our friends Maree and Clint had prepared an amazing dish with all kinds of things in it. It was amazing. It was a good way to end our days in San pedro  

 

CHILE BOUND

From Bariloche we took a bus to Mendonsa, the wine capital of Argentina and home to the Malbec. We decided not to spend any time here even though it is supposed to be quite beautiful Patagonia had taken its toll and we desperately needed to get to cheaper haunts. 

We left our backpacks in the bus station and spent the half day we had free exploring the city centre in Mendonza. It seemed like a pretty city, a little laid back but with a certain nice energy.  Anyway, very quickly we had to catch our next bus and were soon headed into the Andes to cross over to Chile. 

The crossing is one of the most stunning routes I have been driven on. The actual border is at some 4900 m which means we drive up some 2000m in a few hours. The air is thin and breathing difficult. The chilean border security doesn't make it any easier with their checks for fruit , vegetable and to top the list of prohibited items hard bound books! We declared the masala we were carrying and luckily it wasn't on the list of banned items.

Finally we reached Santiago!

Anu had a bad migraine from a macdonalds sandwich we had eaten that morning, compounded by altitude sickness. Yannick and I were a little worried and so really happy that we were staying with friends, albeit friends we were yet to meet. The taxi to their place ran straight into a student protest rally against a planned Damn in chilean patagonia! 

Naaz and Mauricio lived in a pretty upscale residential area of Santiago. Their flat was really comfortable and they made a huge effort to make us feel at home. We ate a dinner they had cooked for us with a bottle of really good Chilean wine known as the Carmenere and we were already in love with the city. 

Santiago was a great refueling point for us. We hung out at home, ate great food, laughed a lot with Naaz, Mauricio and their friends and generally lazed without an agenda. Strange as it may sound, after a few hectic months on the road we hadn't realised how badly we needed a break! We really liked Santiago as a city. It was calm, beautifully constructed, very modern without being all glass and steel and the food was great. The city has been rebuilt so many times due of its penchant for earthquakes. 

We did take a small trip to Valparaiso, a very pretty town a few hours outside of Santiago.

Valparaiso has some of the best street art I've enountered. The day we were there was cold and gloomy but the streets were filled with school marching bands. This port city is precariously build on the hills surrounding the ocean. The houses are made of tin, including the walls, and are brightly coloured, giving the whole city a very festive look. There used to be ascencions or whinch driven trams in many places in the city to take the citizens up the hills but unfortunately most of them have been shut down now. We did ride up in one of the functional ones. 

Finally recharged, but a little reluctant, we decided that we had to continue soon or we woul grow roots. We were north bound to San Pedro de Atacama, one of the driest places in the world. 

Naaz and Mauricio had made Santiago a really special place for us.