El gran viaje 2007

It seems like a long time ago that Sergio and I arrived in Potosí after a relaxing few days in Sucre. Potosí is the highest city in the world, so they say, and it´s appropriately cold and bleak, but with beautiful scenery and a pretty town center that reflects Potosí´s (literally) rich history. The main square of Potosí is dominated by a huge colonial church and the surrounding streets are narrow and steep. The Cerro Rico is a perfectly conical mountain that stands over the city so that you can never forget that you´re high up in the Andes mountains. Potosí is really, really cold, and you have to pay at least $20 to get a room with heat, so of course we just made do with lots of heavy wool blankets in a cold backpacker hostel.

We only spent one day really in Potosí. As soon as we arrived on Friday evening we booked a mine tour for Saturday morning, randomly choosing one of Potosí´s tour agencies. We met early to head up to the mines, stopping first to change into very attractive bright yellow clothes to protect our real clothes from the dust and a hardhat, without which everyone would have hit their heads dozens of times in the narrow mine tunnels. After changing, our next stop was at the miners´market, where we picked up "presents" for the miners to make up for disturbing their work. All 10 of us put in about $2 to buy a bag full of orange soda, coca leaves, coca cigarettes, pure alcohol, and dynamite.

Potosí's mines have been in constant operation since the Spanish discovered silver in the Cerro Rico in the sixteenth century. For the next few hundred years, Potosí grew to be the biggest and richest city in the Americas as the Spanish extracted huge amounts of silver from the mines with the help of indigenous labor. Today there´s almost no more silver and the miners are mostly looking for zinc, and the city itself is like a ghost of the rich mining town it once was.

After the market it was on to the mines where the guide led us throught the dark, narrow tunnels. The tunnels were so narrow we all had to squish to one side as the occasional miner came through with their wheelbarrows. We stopped at a shrine to "El Tío", devil-like being that controls the fate of the miners´lives and their profits. After leaving a donation of coca leaves and alcohol to El Tío, we climbed through the rest of the mine and out into the daylight where a surprise was waiting for us.

Once a year each mine holds a llama sacrifice to ensure the protection of mother earth for the coming year, and crawling out of the mine our tour group caught the aftermath of this mine´s annual llama sacrifice. We climbed over the llamas, which we draped in fancy woven wool to have a celebratory toast with the miners and their families of (blech) pure alcohol. (I won´t put pictures of the llama sacrifice here because I know not everyone will want to see them).

The next day we took the bus to Uyuni-- another seven-hour ride on a dirt road. Uyuni is a tiny town high in the Andes mountains that serves as the starting point for tours into the Salar de Uyuni. There are tourists everywhere in Uyuni, mostly unshaven backpackers wearing Bolivian alpaca wool sweaters and hiking pants, but despite all the gringos Uyuni feels like the end of the world, like if you walked down the main street and kept walking you´d just find nothingness. Uyuni is freezing cold, even colder than Potosí, and Sergio and I stocked up on cheap winter clothes in the tiny Sunday market.

We booked our tour to the Salar right when we got to Uyuni, again using our favorite method of just walking into one of the 48 tour agencies in tiny Uyuni. On Monday morning we loaded our backpacks up onto the Jeep 4x4 that was to take us across the salt flats and into the desert but drama and controversy kept us from leaving right away.

After we were all loaded up, a Bolivian police officer and the two elderly women who ran the hostel we´d stayed in the night before showed up at our jeep, searching a couple´s bags who were supposed to share a jeep with me and Sergio. We didn´t know what they were looking for until they found it-- the couple had stolen a heavy wool blanket from the hostel. Much yelling and cursing followed, and finally the police officer escorted the couple to the police station down the street. The couple barely spoke any Spanish, and Sergio went with them to translate while the remaining three of us waited in the jeep. The police eventually let them go with just an apology (they got off very easy, stories are everywhere of unoffical "fines" of up to thousands of dollars for such things, and the police officer had also threatened to deport them). Finally we were on our way, an hour and a half late. We knew we were off to an especially bad start when our young driver confided to Sergio and me that he would have rather left the couple behind, that such things brought bad karma for the whole trip. At least for Sergio and me, he was wrong because we had a great trip after that (although we´re pretty sure our driver was miserable the whole time).

The first day was spent visiting the Salar itself--6,000 square miles of salt flat high up in the Andes. The salt looks a lot like snow and the whole thing is so flat you can see the mountains way off in the horizon. The second day was spent driving through the Atacama Desert, taking in the amazing scenery. Among the highlights were seeing a flock of pink flamingoes (who knew they liked the cold?) and the Arbol de Piedra, a rock that looks like it fell out of a Salvador Dalí painting. After the second night, in what must be the coldest place on earth, we dropped off two of our group members at the Chilean border and then started the long drive back to Uyuni.

That evening, upon arrival in Uyuni, Sergio and I, because we´re crazy and there´s nothing at all to do in Uyuni, decided to immediately get on an overnight bus to La Paz. But before we left Uyuni we made sure to have one last meal at Minuteman Pizza, a great little restaurant at the end of the world owned by a guy from Amherst who had the smart business plan of providing really good comfort food and chocolate chip cookies to backpackers who had spent three days eating dry chicken, quinoa, and instant coffee on the road.

We arrived in La Paz before dawn this morning and as soon as we got to our hostel in the backpackers´district of the capital of Bolivia I took the longest, hottest shower ever and then we went back to sleep for another six hours in our warm beds.

Well the truth is, Sergio and I have been in Bolivia for about a week and we haven´t done much of anything.

We finally got everything together-- train tickets, visa questions-- and crossed the border to Bolvia on Tuesday (no visa needed, after all). We went straight to the train station and started the trip to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia´s biggest city and the capital of the eastern part of the country. We were staying at a nice place in Santa Cruz, and the relatively exciting pace of a decent-sized city was a relief after being stuck in Corumbá. We ended up staying in Santa Cruz until Sunday, despite the fact that there´s not much exciting there for tourists. We just enjoyed relaxing in a comfortable hostel, eating good food, and wandering around the city.

We did finally check out and head for our next destination, though, and we´re now in Sucre. Sucre is Bolivia´s former capital (in fact, as a kid at Oyster we always learned that the capital of Bolivia was both La Paz and Sucre, although it seems to be 100% La Paz now), and our first destination in the Andes mountains where we´ll be until we head back to sea level in Perú. The journey here was probably one of our more adventurous. The bus we took was nothing nice-- it didn´t even have a bathroom-- and seemed to pack an unbelievable number of seats into the tiny space. In fact, I guess they don´t require kids to purchase a seat at all, because there were little kids sleeping in the aisle next to their parents. Anyway, eventually we made it through the 16 hour ride on a dirt road up into the mountains in one piece.

We spent yesterday, our first day in Sucre, trying to take it easy and let ourselves get used to the altitude. Just a walk around the main central plaza left us breathless, but today we´re doing much better. We are thoroughly enjoying how cheap Bolivia is... our hotel room here in Sucre, which is pretty classy (for us) with it´s own bathroom, clean towels, and HBO, is only costing us about $12 per night, and lunch yesterday at a place with white tablecloths was about $6 for both of us. We´re living like kings after Brazil, which isn´t much cheaper than home and had us staying in the cheapest places we could find, however gross the bathroom.

We plan to stay in Sucre for a few more relaxing days before heading up to Potosí and then the salt flats in Uyuni.

Well, we´re not in Bolivia just yet. Brazilian immigration is closed on Sunday, so we´re stuck in Corumba until tomorrow. Which is a good thing because Sergio and I are exhausted after three days in the swamp, and it´s a bad thing because there´s not much to do in Corumba, especially since it´s not just immigration that´s closed on Sunday but everything else too.

We had a really good time in the Pantanal. On Wednesday we got up bright and early to take a bus from Bonito a place called Buraco das Piranhas (which basically was a roadside bar that served as a bus stop) in the middle of the Pantanal. From there someone from our tour company picked us up in a truck to take us to the lodge.

The next morning we got up really early to take a boat trip on the Miranda River, followed in the afternoon by horseback riding through the swamp. Sergio and I are city kids and we´d never been horseback riding, but we really enjoyed it. The Pantanal is supposedly the best place to see wildlife in the South America, and we did see lots of animals. Mostly we saw alligators, though-- they were all over the place, by every single patch of water. We also saw lots of capybaras, the world´s biggest rodent (like a rat´s cute cousin). We also saw LOTS of birds.

The next day we went on an all-day Jeep safari and hike through the swamp, which we didn´t realize when we left that morning was meant literally. After about an hour of bird watching, the guide informed us that we were to take off our shoes and actually walk through the swamp (gators and all). The walk through the swamp turned out to be alternately not so bad and really awful, but we made it out eventually with no more than a red ant bite for me and a cut on the toe for Sergio.

Our last day in the Pantanal was far more relaxing. We started out the morning fishing in the river outside our lodge, pretty succesfully too I might add (I even caught a piranha, which I then had for lunch, of course). Then we floated down the river on inner tubes (again, gators and all).

Because the Pantanal is right on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, almost everyone we met at the lodge had just come from Bolivia, so all their stories and recommendations got us really excited about the next leg of our journey. Hopefully we´ll be on our way tomorrow, staring with the 16-hour train ride to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. If Brazilian immigration ever opens, that is.

Sergio and I finally made it to Rio last Sunday, and we immediately felt at home there. Our hostel was a mere four blocks from the beach in Copacabana and it was cheap, clean, and friendly. We spent a week there total, and we managed to do most of the requisite touristy stuff like visit the colonial churches and take pictures from the Christ the Redeemer statue, but we definitely spent most of our time hanging out on the beach.

Besides the beach, the highlight of our time in Rio was the Favela Tour we took on Friday. It seems a bit weird to go on a tour of a favela (translated usually as ghetto or shantytown), but our hostel and guidebook both recommended it so we decided to go. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of our trip so far, certainly one of the most educational. Plus the company donates some of the profits to the schools there.

We visited two favelas in total. First we went to Roçinha, the second biggest favela in Latin America with about 150,000 residents (like a city within a city). We visited a community art project there where local kids go to sell their artwork to tourists on favela tours. Then we drove around Roçinha a bit, looking at how houses were constructed, and how people got electricity, water and satellite TV (of course).

Then we went on to a much smaller favela called Vila Canoas where we visited a school the tour company helps sponsor and walked around the unbelievable narrow alleyways (reminded me a bit of Fez in Morocco, but with more graffiti). In the end, we felt like this had been a great chance to see something of the way so many people in Latin America and really in the world live. It was definitely a view you don´t always get as a tourist. The contrast between the favelas and some of the richest neighborhoods in Latin America,which are just minutes apart walking in some cases, was really amazing.

Anyway our time in Rio came to an end on Sunday when we boarded an executivo-class bus for Campo Grande, way out in the West of the country. After 21 hours on a VERY bumpy rode, we bravely boarded another bus (regular class, unfortunately) for the five hour trip to Bonito, a tiny little town in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul known as a great eco-tourism destination.

And that´s where the most expensive day of our trip so far comes in, which would be today. We hired a taxi for the day to take us first to the Blue Lagoon Cave, where we climbed down into a cave with an extremely deep, pure blue lake. Then we headed to the Sucuri River for a little hike and some snorkeling in the icy cold rain. The water was warm though, so the cold wasn´t so bad, and it was fun to just float along the river and look at some amazing huge Amazonian fish. All of this did not come as cheaply as I´d hoped, but we felt it was worth it.

Tomorrow we get up before dawn to take a bus to Buraco das Piranhas in the heart of the Pantanal for a 3-day stay at the Hostelling International lodge there. The guy who I booked the tour with told me three times that the lodge was "very basic", so I´m not exactly sure what to expect but that´s for the next entry, which I´ll probably write from Bolivia!