El gran viaje 2007

Anyone who has ever been to La Paz knows about the World´s Most Dangerous Road, because I´m pretty sure it´s forbidden to leave La Paz without going down it on a mountain bike. Even if, like me, you haven´t been on a bicycle since you were a kid. A little kid.

Anyway, we started early Tuesday morning at La Cumbre, the start of the road down to Coroico in the tropical Yungas region of Bolivia. La Cumbre is definitely not tropical, and we all started flying down the road bundled up in warm hats and fleeces. After just a few hours, everyone was wearing t-shirts and we had descended thousands of feet. That was about the point in the journey when the smooth, paved road turned into a single lane dirt road with stunning cliffs on the left side-- the World´s Most Dangerous Road (it´s also called the Death Road, by the way). Our guide assured us that no one had ever died on the ride with them (although there had been lots of broken bones and some rescues over the cliffs), which made me feel a little better flying around sharp corners at what felt like full speed to me.

We made it though, after about five hours on the road, to the Senda Verde, an animal refuge at the end of the road where we had lunch and got our free beer and t-shirt. The climate was completely different from La Paz-- humid and hot, with tropical trees and flowers everywhere. Sergio and I took advantage and stayed the night there, hanging out with the spider monkeys and the volunteers and hitching a ride back to La Paz with the group that rode down the next day.

So after our little detour we´re back in La Paz for a few days, which we´ll be spending doing things like backing up photos and laundry, getting used to the altitude again, and recovering from the World´s Most Dangerous Road.

We´ve been in La Paz now for almost four days, and there has not been a boring moment. Not one. Well, we did watch American Idol last night but that wasn´t really because we were bored. Just tired.

We spent our first two days in La Paz just taking things in. We wandered down the Prado, ate some excellent food, visited the archaeology museum and La Paz´s famous Witches´Market. The Witches Market is amazing because it´s a actually pretty authentic (nothing like you´d find in say, Salem Massachusetts). In fact, we wandered down the street gawking at the dried llama fetuses, the potions, the candles, and the talismans too intimidated to get too close. I think we´ll have to go back and actually buy something there.

Yesterday we woke up early, planning on jumping on a tour bus to Tiwanaku, an important pre-Inca site between La Paz and Lake Titacaca. It was not to be however-- the tour company had overbooked the tour and left our names off the list. We were going to insist on getting our money back when they offered us a free tour to Chacaltaya, a ski resort (it´s not ski season) outside of La Paz. We agreed because we like free things, even though we hadn´t been planning on checking Chacaltaya out.

The tour stopped first at the Valle de la Luna, a well-kept park just by the southern suburbs of La Paz with a weird lunar landscape. We walked around the park, which had beautiful views of the city, and then it was off to Chacaltaya, in the opposite direction north of the city. It took us two hours to get there, and our van had to fight traffic all the way through El Alto, a city right next to La Paz, poorer and scruffier but with a bigger population than La Paz itself.

Finally we made it to Chacaltaya, which turned out to really be a ghost of a ski resort with barely any snow. The attraction here is really the views of the mountains around La Paz. We climbed the last 100 meters (trust me, at 5,000 meters high this was not as easy as it sounds) to the peak of the mountain, where we could just barely see Lake Titicaca on the horizon.

When we got back to our hotel, we let ourselves have a quick rest but then it was back out on the streets for the biggest festival in La Paz, el Gran Poder. The festival was essentially a parade down the Prado with group after group of traditional dancers in elaborate costumes. Or so we were told by people who could actually see it. Undemocratically, the view of the parade was blocked by huge tarps, reinforced by security guards yelling at anyone who tried to peek through the plastic. To really see the parade, you had to wait in a huuuuge line and, of course, pay for a seat on the bleaches. Sergio and I were happy just walking up and down the Prado, observing the mayhem, and peeking through the tarps when we thought we could get away with it. The party went on well after dark, but not for me and Sergio because we were exhausted and we had another early morning on Sunday.

This morning we got up early in order to finally get to Tiwanaku, which we actually did manage to do this time. Our guide to the site was generally informative, but he got a few rolled eyes when he insisted that Macchu Picchu was really a Tiwanakan site and that the Aymara people had come on boats from China 20,000 years ago and had a language and writing system that was similar to Chinese (the one they had 20,000 years ago?). It reminded me of the "Lebanese invented purple" spiel all the tour guides gave in Lebanon, except with less truth to it. Tiwanaku was not a disappointment, but aesthetically it wasn´t too exciting, since the Bolivians have only just started excavating the site and it mostly just looks like lumps of dirt. And I don´t think Sergio appreciates lumps of dirt as much as I do. But it was nice to see a major pre-Inca site, and hopefully it will give us a context for the many Inca sites we will see in the next few months.

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.