The journey south began with a small disaster - Callanan spent the whole bus trip from La Paz to Uyuni getting sick. In between getting sick, he slept. But he was fine by the time the trip rolled about the following day. Uyuni is cold - colder than La Paz, and a couple of layers are needed in bed. The whole southern area of Bolivia is, because of the altitude and the openness of the land. We ended up booking a Spanish speaking tour, because the company was recommended to us, plus it saved us 200Bs. And unlike other tours, it didnt start until 1030 in the morning, which made a nice change from being up at the crack of dawn for these kind of things.
Our group was led by the likable Sandro, and we were bundled into the back of a Land Cruiser with an Argentinian girl and three German lads. The first stop off was a quick look around the locomotive graveyard, a glorified scraphead outside Uyuni with rusted trains piled up on top of one another. We got to see the salt being extracted from the salt flats. Huge piles of salt dot the plains for collection by local men who shovel the salt into trucks. After that, it was off to a cactus island in the middle of the Salar for some lunch and a small hike. The hike goes to the top of a small hill, but you get a great view from the top of how vast and flat the Salr de Uyuni really is.
Then, the fun begins. We drove out to a dry part of the flats and took some photos. Because the flats are so, well, for want of a better word, flat, you can get some cool and funny shoots if you are clever with the perspective. Some of ours were good, some didnt quite work, but we had a laugh trying to make them work.
The second day was lagoon day. We enter the national park and drive past six or seven lagoons. A few are populated with flamingos, one in particular has several thousand. This one is called Laguna Colorado and is also red is colour, because of the algae and minerals in the water. Approaching the lake you could be forgiven for thinking that the red water is because there are so many flamingos, as I initally thought. Another lagoon is called Laguna Verde, and is green in colour for the same reasons, but because of different minerals it has a different colour.
The nights on the flats are very cold, and it gets dark very quickly when the sun disappears. Thankfully, on the second night, it being my birthday, there were a couple of bottles of rum to keep us warm. One was courtesy of Callanan and one courtesy of the Germans - cheers lads!
The third and final day of the trip was a long one. It started off well, with a trip to the geysers and the hot baths, and we contined south to the Chilean border. Here the Germans left and continued into Chile, but we had to turn back and drive the 700km back to Uyuni. It was a long boring six hours, and the travelling didnt stop there, because we hopped on a bus to Potosi.
Potosi was a record breakingly short stop over. We arrived at 2AM, got some sleep, organised a silver mine tour, ate, did the tour, and got on a bus to Sucre - a total of 16 hours in the city. The eating was a major success - probably the cheapest meal of our trip. A four course almuerzo for 40Bs - thats around E4 for two starters, a main and a dessert!
The silver mine tour is the main attraction of Potosi, but the city itself is a nice place, for all of it that we got to see - its the first place in Bolivia that we thought was nice to visit. The silver mine tour was interesting too. You feel slightly bad taking the tour, like I imagine a favela tour in Rio will be like, because essentially you are just going to look at how the poor people live and work. The men in the mines work in small groups, for themselves, and share whatever money they make from mining the silver ore. They can work anything from six to 24 hours a day.
We arrived in our safety gear with our bag of gifts in the afternoon. Everyone taking a tour brings gifts, but depending on the day, each tour brings different gifts. The 96% alcohol that the miners drink is only drunk on Tuesdays and Fridays, and our tour being on a Thursday we were told to bring juice and biscuits. We did get to taste the alcohol and the smallest sip will blow your mouth off! Miners we met along the way stopped and said hello and they each got a gift. One group we met had blown up some dynamite two hours previously and were still waiting for the dust to settle before inspecting the rocks.
We arrived in Sucre to meet some friends, a couple we had meet on the Pampas tour, and we had a good time hanging out in the hostel with them. The hostel was a nice, chilled out place, but we did little of note in Sucre. Its a very nice city, but there is nothing you visit there solely to do. There is the dinosaur park, which features some original dinosaur footprints, but that has not been recommended to us by several people. We tried to visit a famous market in the mountain village of Tarabuco, but the bus tickets were sold out, and making our own way there in the back of a truck for two hours didnt appeal to our relaxed state of mind. The only thing of note we did was visit the mirador for some nice views, and thankfully it was a very sunny day. But we really enjoyed our time in Sucre, and also got to see a multi-try winning Irish performance, which only made it better.
The road from Sucre to Santa Cruz is notoriously bad and we had been warned about it by many travellers. It can take between 15 and 25 hours and I have no idea where the missing ten hours goes. With that in mind we decided to take a leisurely 30 minute flight for a paltry sum of E50.
Santa Cruz is hot! As weve been moving east over the past several days, it has been getting slowly hotter as we have been losing altitude. But the jump of about twelve degrees from Sucre to Santa Cruz took us by surprise - it was 38 degrees the day we arrived so we were back in shorts as soon as possible. The people have also slowly changed as we have moved east towards Brasil, becoming less Andean or traditional and more latino. But it is a lovely city, and although we will only be here for a day, we would like it to be more - if only to enjoy the cheapness of the Boliviano a bit more, before the dreaded expense of Brasil hits us!