Life in the Altiplano

Bolivian bus travel is quite an experience after the comfortable bus rides in Argentina. In Argentina you pay 10 times more but buses are mostly new and comfortable and they serve wine and food on board and always have toilets. This is not how it is in Bolivia. Buses are old, the wind blows through the walls, windows don´t stay shut, buses are packed with people and sometimes people just sit on the floor. Sometimes the bus stops for an hour without an explanation at the most random little village. Sometimes someone yells “baños” and people run out and pee next to the bus and jump back in. We took a bus from Uyuni to Tupiza (travel time officially 6 hours, real travel time 8 hours) starting at 6 am. All the locals had huge blankets and warm clothes with them, and within the first minutes we knew why… A lesson learned: always take the buses during the day from now on. It is freezing.

We arrived in Tupiza in the afternoon. We were happy to sleep in a warm place for a change and just relax for a few days. Tupiza was the perfect place for that. It is a small town with amazing quebradas around it. People are friendly, food is good (even if every restaurant has exactly the same menu) and it is very safe. A river runs through the city, but in the dry season most of the water is hiding somewhere else and the dry river is used for different purposes: dumping rubbish, moving donkeys and horses around the city, some even drive trucks down there. You can easily spend a few hours just exploring the markets filled with textiles, shoes, spices, electronics, and whatever you might need. Besides watching local people living their lives, there is not that much to do in Tupiza. Which is a good thing.

After a few days relaxing we decided to do horse riding for 3 hours, which is a cheap and fun way to spend the day. Horse riding seems to be the safest and the most comfortable way to explore the surroundings of almost any town in Bolivia. Our guide was a boy surely no more than 13 years old, but the horses knew the route through the valleys already so it was easy enough for us even without any experience with these creatures.

From Tupiza we took a bus to Potosi, one of the highest citiest in the world at the elevation of 4,090m. It is historically an important city, because of the silver mines (also known as the most dangerous mine in the world) that brought wealth to the people and made it one of the biggest cities of 1600's. Even if the silver is gone a long ago, the mines are still working, now digging up other, less valuable minerals. Because of asbestos and all the other nasty stuff the miners breathe, they are likely to die 10-15 years after entering the mines. Over 8 million slaves and workers have died in the mines. Toxic gases, their devil Tio who lives in the mountain, high risk of getting silicosis and big explosions are still not enough to scare away the workers hoping to hit a rich vein of minerals. Average pay for all this is about $10 a week. Also young children, whose parents cannot afford school, work there. The children start their day the same as older miners: chewing coca leaves, that reduces appetite, helps to concentrate and helps working in the altitude.

You can do tours into the mines, but it is dangerous and quite sad. We thought it would be interesting to visit, but mentally bit too much for us, we decided not to, even if the miners are usually happy to get visitors. Later on we saw a documentary about the miners, and we were happy with our decision.

Instead of doing any tours, we spent days just walking around Potosi (enough excercise in these altitudes!), visiting a museum, enjoying good food and planning ahead. Soon we had enough of freezing cold nighs and constantly having trouble to breathe, so it was time to move on again, this time towards lower grounds to Sucre.

Introduction to Bolivia

After a week of relaxing in San Pedro it was time to pack our bags again and hop on a minibus, which would take us to the Bolivian border, where our 3-day adventure in a 4WD would start.

There is a big problem around here of tour guides drinking while driving and it is basically up to luck which driver you get. There have been accidents with a lot of people ending up dead on these technical roads when drivers are drunk or tired. All the tours go to same sights. What changes is the car, the driver, the food and the accommodation. We spent a day comparing different tour operators, and ended up taking the most expensive one just in case. The company (Cordillera travel) said they pay more for the guides for being safe drivers and not drinking, so we thought that is our best bet of getting to Uyuni alive. They also said they have good cars and a hot shower at the last hostel.

So at 8 in the morning our car came to pick us up from the hostel. It was just us and a Dutch girl we met at the hostel. After an hours drive we had breakfast in front of the Bolivian border control, got our passports stamped and changed into a 4WD with our driver Wladimir. Wladimir is a 21-year old Bolivian guy, who has done the job for 5 years already. On the way we saw other tours, and some of the drivers looked like 60+, some no more than 15. We were happy with our driver, but even he was getting very tired driving on the long roads.

First day took us through different lagoons: Laguna Blanca, Laguna Verde and Laguna Colorada. We also saw a thermal field with tiny geysirs and bubbling mud. Had a nice afternoon swim in a hot thermal pool. We spent the night in some sort of guesthouse in the altitude of 4,400m. As usual in deserts, days are warm even in winter, but the nights are freezing and the temperature drops well below zero. And it does so also inside the house. Because it was only 3 of us in a tour, we could steal some blankets from the empty beds, so totaling with 10-12 blankets each, it wasn´t that bad.

Next day we saw four other lagoons, lots of flamingos, a smoking volcano, a small town called San Juan and in the evening we reached the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the huge salt flat, the highlight of the trip. We slept in a hotel made of salt bricks (as cold as the last one, but with hot showers).

The last day we spent exploring the salt flat taking silly photos and being blinded by the whiteness. We were supposed to go on an island on the salt, but none of the tours went there that day due to some accident. So in the afternoon the tour finished in Salar de Uyuni, where we also saw a train graveyard, full of old, abandoned trains. After the tour we were happy to spend the rest of the day in Uyuni eating some good food and relaxing before hopping on a bus again the next day, this time towards a town called Tupiza.

Visiting Chile

Arriving to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, was a sensory overload. Driving down from the mountains gave an amazing view over San Pedro of a tiny desert town and the volcanos around it. We stepped out of the bus into the dry desert air in the heat of the late afternoon, feeling a bit dizzy and dehydrated from the altitude, just to queue at the customs until the sun started to set and we started to look for our hostel while the weather turned into a cold, starry night.

From the first moment we loved San Pedro. Quiet town, amazing surroundings, nice people. There is plenty to do: tours to geysirs, lagoons, Valley of the Moon, salt flats , stargazing and many other things. The biggest and the most popular of them all is to do a 3-day tour to Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, where you see many similar things as listed before. That was also our plan. Problem is that the big tour starts with an overnight stop in the altitude of 4,400m. Spending only a half a day on bus over the mountains gave us such headaches and weakness that we thought it is better to stay in San Pedro (2,400m) and get used to the altitude slowly.

So we spent over a week in San Pedro just taking it easy, doing a few small tours (geysirs and the Valley of the Moon) and renting bikes. Last one was quite of an adventure… we rented bikes to go to check out nearby ruins, but we ended up getting a bit lost and crossing a river several times with the bikes, going through a nearly crashed down tunnel and biking at least 40 km in the altitude of 2,700m without any roads, just following the bottom of a dried river just to find the way back before sunset with a pretty sunburn in the face. We were also looking forward to doing the stargazing tour. Apparently San Pedro de Atacama, being the driest desert of the world, is one of the best places to do this, but there is no messing with the mother nature. It was too cloudy for the star tour for 4 nights in a row before leaving to Uyuni.