Ok first of all, I'm writing one blog for all of Bolivia (6 days) so brace yourselves-it will be a long one.

Secondly, we are just coming out of the worst tour yet, 3 days 2 nights in the salt flats, so excuse me if the tone of this blog is a negative one. I will try to save the negativity for later.

From Puno, Peru we took a bus to Copacabana, Bolivia. We crossed the border into Bolivia with no problems. After a couple hours we had to get off the bus and visit immigration and the police station before we were permitted to walk about 300 m across the border. Then we went through immigration on the Bolivian side and hopped back on the bus for a 15 min ride to our destination. When we got to Copacabana we were pleasantly surprised to see our hotel had sent a van to pick us up! We checked into our hotel and found it was really lovely. They had big beds and really nice mattresses, a hot shower, and a heater for the room! They also had laundry services and the included breakfast was really great. We got pancakes, bread and jam, tea, scrambled eggs, ham and cheese, and fruit! There was also a table in the lobby with free bananas, oranges, water, and werthers caramel candies. It was a really great hotel! And for only $15 a night. We only spent one night in Copacabana and didn't have any tours or anything there. It's a very small little town with one Main Street full of restaurants and tourist shops. The first day we went to find lunch and chose a nice looking coffee shop/restaurant. We usually choose based on the number of people sitting in the restaurant and this one had quite a few compared to the others so we went in. It was a bad choice. Haha we decided to share nachos so we ordered "nachos mixtas" which the menu said was nachos, cheese, chicken, beef, and veggies. Sounded pretty good, but we were sadly mistaken. The nachos turned out to be some kind of Dorrito knock off, the veggies were tasteless, watery, frozen beans and carrots, and the entire pile of nachos was drenched in KETCHUP. Wow, it was the most disgusting thing I think I have ever ordered at a restaurant. We tried to have a few bites but the ketchup just totally ruined it so we abandoned it and went in search of another restaurant. We decided to go across the street but by then I had pretty much lost my appetite so I just ordered a grilled cheese sandwhich hoping it would come out somewhat normal looking. And it did, so that was a bonus. After that we just went back to the hotel and chilled out. We were very tired from the past couple weeks in Peru and needed to relax. For supper we looked up a restaurant on trip advisor so we wouldn't make anymore mistakes. It turned out to be pretty good. I had trout stuffed with a spinach/bacon mixture. Everything is even cheaper in Bolivia than Peru, so a really good meal is like $7 for food and drink. After supper we went back to the hotel and I attempted to Skype but Internet was pretty crappy there so I ended up just going to sleep pretty early. The next day we bummed around some more, walked along the beach, and caught our bus to La Paz at around 1 pm. We rode for about an hour and then had to disembark and cross a strait on a boat while our bus was rafted across on a barge type thing. I was glad the boat ride was only about 5 mins because it was super crowded and a really sketch boat. The motor blew up too many fumes to be healthy and Shelby and I were stuck in this tiny cabin at the front where a little boy was vomiting, running around, and then proceeding to suck on his mothers breast. It was rather unpleasant. Then we had another 2 hour ride until we reached La Paz.

My first impression of La Paz was that it was a really big, sprawling, busy, and dirty city. We got dropped off on a random street downtown (not a bus station) which was weird and too bad because the bus station was actually 1 block from our hostel. We tried to catch a taxi but it took a few tries because the drivers kept waving us away when we got close. I don't think anyone wants to tote around 2 white tourist girls who can't speak Spanish. But eventually we got picked up and dropped off at our hostel. The hostel we stayed at was called the Adventure Brew Hostel. It is a hostel and microbrewery combined. It also has a B & B a few lots down on the block where the Sky bar and communal kitchen were located. We checked into the hostel and were put in a 12 bed dorm room. It was fine but nothing special. It did have a nice big locker big enough to fit your whole back pack in which I really like. The hostel was really big. It had 5 floors with over 160 beds. The first floor had a pool table, ping pong table, foose ball table, and a dark sitting room with good wifi connection. The first night we went to the Sky bar where they were serving Mexican food so we both ordered a plate of that and we were also given our free beers (you get one free beer from their brewery for every night you stay at the hostel). I think I am growing accustomed to drinking beer because I finished mine both nights and didn't even grimace!

The next day we had nothing planned so we decided that would be a good day to go see a movie. I have really been missing going to the movies! We wanted to go to the new Monster's Inc. movie but it was only playing in Spanish so we went to the Hangover 3 which was playing in English (with Spanish subtitles). We went to the best movie theatre in the city(a city of 2 million) and still the theatre was not great! It was similar to something like Rainbow Cinemas in Saskatoon. When we arrived the line for tickets was SO long. Like probably 75 people were in line. But it ended up moving fairly quickly and we got tickets in about 15 minutes. Shelby stood in the ticket line while I went to get us snacks. The snacks were definitely different there! Your choice for popcorn was either sweet or salty (no butter) and you could get coke, sprite, or fanta to drink. I usually get popcorn with lots of yummy butter and root beer at home so it wasn't quite what I had imagined but it was still good! The "salty" popcorn was stored in these big styrofoam containers on the floor and the "sweet" popcorn was popped and kept heated (most likely so the syrup didn't stick together and become hard) in the same kind of popcorn machines we see at our theatres. After getting our tickets and snack we found our theatre and got in line. Another strange thing here is that they play the movies back to back to back with no break to clean or anything in between movies. I thought at first we were waiting for the theatre to be cleaned but then people started piling out of the theatre and then we were let in and our movie started right away. The Hangover 3 was a really funny movie. It was good to go to the theatre again! When we got back to the hostel we went back to the sky bar for supper (BBQ) and beer. The BBQ was pretty gross. It was just a really thin, tough strip of beef grilled with no sauce or anything and it came with dry rice and a dry salad. Not fantastic. The next morning we had our La Paz city tour.

We started the tour in front of the San Francisco Church which is also in one of their main squares. It was just Shelby and I and another girl on the walking tour with our guide. Our first "stop" was a plaque outside the church describing La Paz's early set up. When the Spanish came they divided the city into two areas. The Spaniards and the indigenous people were separated by the river (now a main road, with the river running underneath it). The indigenous people were really suppressed up until 1953. Until that point they were not even allowed access to the city. They could trade goods at the border and that was it. La Paz had a civil war in 2003 (because many of the indigenous people's rights were still being denied) between the police and the military. The military were sent on the people by the president and the police were fighting for the people. The president lost and fled to the United States where he is still currently hiding. If he ever comes back he will be tried for war crimes. Now Bolivia has an indigenous president and their people are recognized and even cherished now. After this explanation we walked past a huge crowd that was gathered in the square and walked up a few flights of stairs in a parkade like structure. We went to the edge and watched the crowd from above. They were gathered for La Paz's independence "month" which is July. We had the tour on July 1st so the celebration was big that day. Citizens, policemen, firefighters, and other city workers were gathered in the square with a band singing the national anthem. One group of city workers were dressed in zebra costumes. They wore white jumpsuits with black stripes and had a zebra mask on! We asked what that was about and our guide said they actually dress like that for their jobs and they patrol the "zebra walks" (the cross walks: white stripes painted on black pavement). So funny!! We didn't get to see any in action that day because they were all attending the celebration.

After watching the national anthem being sung we walked through the parkade like place which was actually a food market. They had rows and rows and levels and levels of tiny little kitchens with maybe 6 seats in them for customers who come to eat breakfast there. It was very strange but the guide said he comes to eat their every morning, as do most people. But lots of people don't like the way it was designed. I wouldn't either. Can you imagine eating breakfast everyday in a parkade? We walked out on the other side and walked down a commercial street, designed in European style, to a main square. This is where the government buildings are located and the president's palace. One of the buildings still had bullet holes in it from the civil war. We continued our tour down the Main Street of La Paz and he pointed out some interesting things here and there. At one point he pointed to Burger King and proceeded to explain how it was a high end restaurant! I was completely surprised! He said you will only find rich businessmen eating there because it is so much more expensive than eating from a market stall or even some restaurants. I guess they keep the same prices there as they have in the Americas, so when compared to the price of local Bolivian food it is much more expensive. The McDonalds actually went out of business! We stopped for a typical Bolivian breakfast snack called an Epinyada (bad spelling I know) at a street stall. It was super delicious and cost about 80 cents CAD. It is in a calzone shape but the dough is not pizza dough but more like a pie crust, and it is filled with cheese, egg, gravy, chicken, and potatoes. It was so delicious and I was sad I couldn't get another one (we left that night and they are only served in the am). We continued on our tour past San Pedro prison. This prison is really strange and goes against all the ideas of a Canadian prison. It is situated right downtown (really weird) with a lovely square right in front of it and sidewalks surrounding it like it was any other building. The walls are very high though and there are no windows. It is only patrolled at the main doors so many prisoners have been able to escape. There are tin stalls all along the wall opposite the main doors and apparently prisoners dig through the walls of the prison, escape into a stall at night, kick down the door and escape! Our guide told us 95% of the prisoners in this prison are there for drugs (cocaine is huge in Bolivia). The prisoners who stay there have to PAY for their stay. This means that they either stay in a tiny room with nothing, or they get a beautiful fully equipped apartment with a jacuzzi... It just depends how much money they have. They can also bring their wives and children into the prison to live with them! So strange. They used to give tours of the prison but they stopped doing that a couple years ago and now you'll get in trouble if you get caught snapping a picture of it. After this we got into a taxi and went to the top of the hillside (La Paz is located in a valley and along the walls) to get a good view of the city. It is definitely a sprawling city and pretty ugly. The city centre is nice, designed in European style with many plazas and nice architecture but once you get out of the city centre the neighbourhoods all turn to little brick buildings with corrugated metal roofs held down by rocks. All the houses are squished together and the streets are just hoj poj, winding in and out and not making any sense. Also we didn't get to go to the tip of the look out point because there were three drunk guys there (even though it was noon) which was annoying. After this we rode to El Alto, a city of a million people which is now just part of La Paz but still considered its own city. Our guide kept telling us to be safe because no tourists ever come here (which freaked me out!). Here we just walked through a bunch of markets. The difference between these people's lives and ours is really mind blowing. There are tons and tons and tons of people with their food out on the streets trying to sell to each other. The streets are narrow enough without people lining the sides with tons of food so we were winding in and out of everyone like a maze. People were selling everything you could think of. Huge bins of spices, sauces, potatoes, onions, beans, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and fruits, light bulbs, toilet paper, medicine, and meat stalls and fish stalls (with no refrigeration). Then we went through a witch market. The stalls in the witch market sell dried llama fetuses (apparently everyone buries them under their homes for good luck) and other offerings. Depending on what you want (a job, a promotion, money, love, etc) you buy a bag that contains different offerings corresponding to that thing that you want. Then you mix it with different minerals according to a witch doctor and burn it in offering to Mother Earth (Pacha Mama). We went down another side street where witch doctors were actually performing these offerings. They were burning them in little pots on bricks and chanting things or flicking liquids of some kind over the burning flames. Our guide told us many people have a mix of religions, preferring to use offerings and still go to Catholic Church service on Sundays. After the witch market we got in a minibus and drove back down the hillside where the guide dropped us off downtown. That night we went to a nice French restaurant called Chez Moustache to celebrate Canada day! We had a celebratory glass of wine, onion soup, duck, and a dessert called Marquise Moustache which was similar to a chocolate mouse but more dense. It was sooooo good! The restaurant was also really cute. It had a bunch of posters of celebrities on the walls, with moustaches on them! After supper we caught the night bus to Uyuni (9 pm to 7 am) and that's pretty much where the nightmare started.

The night bus was horrendous. Usually I can sleep pretty good on the bus but not this one. For the first few hours there was a light shining right in my face so even when I shut my eyes it was blaringly bright. Finally that shut off and I slept for about 40 mins until we hit unpaved road. Then for the entire rest of the trip we were travelling on the bumpiest gravel road imaginable. Think the worse washboard gravel road you've ever driven on in Sask and multiply it by 10. My body was vibrating so bad that whenever we would stop, my body would just be tingling!! And you couldn't sleep of course cause your head was banging all over the place. When we finally arrived in Uyuni it was soooooo cold!! From that point on I wore three pairs of pants, 6 layers on top including two thermal long sleeves, a wool sweater, a bunny hug, and my wind jacket, two pairs of mitts, a toque, and 2 pairs of socks. It was so ridiculous. By the way, I wore that day and night soooo I have been wearing the same thing everyday for 3 days and I probably smell pretty bad but that's all the warm clothes I brought! It's so hard to pack for +30 AND -15. So we found our tour office in Uyuni and checked in for our 3 day tour that was starting that day at 11 am. Once we got there we learned, to the devastation of all 11 of us on the tour, that the 3 day tour was actually going to be 1.5 days and we WEREN'T getting a discount. In fact, we would have to pay MORE. Well I was right pissed off because we had just received our itinerary from Bamba the day before with all these cools things we would get to see, especially on the third day which was now going to be cancelled! Oh my god I was disappointed. But, the others were even more angry, and they had a right to be. They had only booked their tours a few days before and were not told of the change whereas Shelby and I had booked ours months ago (but I was still angry about not being told). The activities on the last 1.5 days were cancelled due to weather (supposedly). The tour office said that the road to the sights we were to see on these days (a red lagoon, geysers, boiling craters of mud, hot springs, etc.) was closed due to snow. They said it had been closed for a few weeks. It didn't seem to any of us like they were actually sure it was still closed and yet they were telling us how much our tour was going to change and blah blah blah. They said we wouldn't really know until we got there so we all just put it in the back of our minds and tried to start the tour in a positive mindset!

The first day did go as originally planned. We all piled into two Toyota jeeps, 5 of us continuing on to Chile in one (Shelby, myself, Adam, Jack and Joe. Jack and Joe are friends travelling together and Adam was solo, doing the same trip with Bamba as me but taking a little longer to do it. They were all travelling after finishing degrees) and 6 heading back to Uyuni in the other (Drago and Agnes (30 some year old friends) Dan and Helen (brother and sister also travelling after school), and two girls from Brazil, Sophia and her sister). We had a driver and an English guide in our vehicle and the other jeep just had a driver. That first day we went to Uyuni's "train graveyard". It was a part in the desert just outside of town, next to the existing train tracks, where old train cars had been left to rust. I guess when silver was mined out of that area they were in constant use but once they didn't need them anymore they just ended up there because they didn't have to money to move them elsewhere. It was a very cool spot for photographs because they were very old, rusted, and graffitied train cars. We then continued on to the salt flat of Uyuni. The salt flat was something like 10,000 km squared. It is literally just an expansive flat area of salt, from inches thick to meters thick. We stopped for a few pictures at a spot where they were "mining" the salt (I'm not sure what else to call it). But they just scrape an area into a cone pile about 3 or 4 feet high and leave it there for 10 days to let it dry out a bit, then they come along and collect the salt piles with trucks. We continued on to a small town called Colchani where all the salt miners have their workshops. We went for a short tour of one but its not much to talk about- its very simple and primitive. They bring the salt to their yard and let it dry out some more outside. Then they bring it in and put it on something like a flat grill top but its very big (maybe 12 feet long and 4 feet wide). They light a fire underneath and use a shovel to turn the salt around and around until it's perfectly dry. Then they move it into a third room where they package it. They don't have machines to package it so they weigh and bag everything by hand, then use a torch to seal the plastic bag shut at the top. After this mini tour we shopped for salt souvenirs and then had lunch. The guides made us all our meals and they were all really good. For this lunch we had llama steak, fries, and a quinoa salad with a really good apple crisp like dessert. We ate in a building completely made of salt, something we would see more of as we kept going. The houses are built with salt bricks and the chairs are bricks of salt stacked on top of each other to make stools and the tables are piles of bricks with a round slab of salt on top. It was quite interesting! After lunch we went out to the salt flats again and took funny perspective pictures. The salt flat makes it look like someone is standing in the palm of another persons hand if they stand far away... It's hard to explain but they were lots of fun and Shelby and I got some funny pictures. Then we went on to an island called Inca Wasy. The salt flats used to be a huge lake and the islands are actually made of petrified coral that used to be under the water! They are now covered with cacti (we are in the middle of a desert). We hiked to the top of this island and had a good view of the extensive salt flats on all sides. Then we continued on to a tiny town called Aqua Quisa where we spent our night in a salt hotel. This night was pretty fun even though I was so tired from getting no sleep the night before. It was very cold there but the whole group sat around the table and chatted and had hot tea and crackers for an hour or so while our supper was being cooked. It was 7:30 pm and we were really hungry so we went to the kitchen to see what was up with the meal. Well there was only one tiny woman in there trying to cook our dinner all by herself so we all offered to help! So now there was 12 of us in this tiny kitchen peeling and cutting potatoes, carrots, onions, beans and beef. It was lots of fun chatting and helping out with the meal. Finally supper was ready and we had a quinoa soup and bread along with a very interesting casserole consisting of fries, beef, onions, a few slices of green pepper and tomatoe, a few slices of hard boiled egg, and sliced up hot dogs... Hahaha it was so strange but I ate it! Then I had a gas heated shower (no electricity or reception or anything on this trip) and went to bed. I had rented a sleeping bag from the tour company for the trip because I knew it would be so cold so I had my fur-lined sleeping bag, two woolen blankets, and a duvet along with all my layers and I stayed warm all night and slept really well.

Next day was alright but nothing too special. We drove through the Chiguana desert and the siloli desert (highest and driest in the world at 4550 m). We stopped along the way a few times to take pictures of different volcanoes and cool rock formations. The one in the picture with this blog is supposed to look like a condor. We also visited two Andean lagoons which are home to hundreds of flamingos of three different species. I was surprised they lived in that cold climate (most of the lake they were feeding in was frozen over). At one lagoon Drago realized he forgot his camera bag with his wallet in it at our last site so we waited an hour at the lagoon for the guide and him to go check it out and see if they could find it, but it was gone. You have to be so careful traveling. I know I heard it a million times before I left but it really sinks in once you have something happen to you and hear first hand all the stories from other people. Adam told us on one of his overnight bus rides he had his laptop and glasses stolen from his bag while he was sleeping! The bag was just sitting under his seat. I've also heard of iPods being stolen right from a persons lap while they are sleeping. All this stuff really annoys me! Also I cracked my screen on my iPad today so I'm really annoyed at electronics and my luck lately. Anyway, at this point in the tour we were supposed to visit a red lagoon and some neat lava formations but these were inside a park in which the roads were supposedly closed. But like I said, it sounded to most of us just like the guides didn't want to take us there. So we ended up just visiting more rocks and then backtracking to a different hostel. That night we had a bonfire and wine out under the stars. It was really amazing! I didn't know the night sky could be any clearer than I have seen it in Saskatchewan but the sky is absolutely amazing here. No pollution, no humidity, thin air and high altitude make everything crystal clear. Also we see different constellations here than we do in Saskatchewan so that was fun to learn about those. Our guide joined us and taught us the Bolivian drinking song and told us some more history about Bolivia. The next day we were supposed to be in the park to see geysers, boiling craters of mud, and soak in hot springs before continuing to Chile. Since we didn't go to the park our guides took us to a different border crossing and all our day was trying to get to Chile. The guides were late driving us to the border(we were all waiting by the car ready to go but they are on South American time-they don't care) so we missed the direct bus to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. When we arrived at the border we found out that the other border crossing was actually open and we could have gone into the park so we were all pissed to have been cheated out of our paid for activities, having to now take a crappy and long bus ride, and having to pay extra to do it. So the entire process getting to Chile took about 8 hours when it should have been 4. Finally we did arrive (last night). We had quite a time trying to work the ATMs here and after asking 4 different people and trying all the ATMs in town we finally got one to work. We went for supper at a nice restaurant and booked a geyser and hot spring tour for this morning since we were bummed about missing out before. I will write about that later!