Simon & Louises South American Blog

This is a tourist train from Salta – something I had been looking forward to for a while (get this train fascination from my dad I think!!).

The scenery was spectacular – beautiful mountains and amazing bridges and the final viaduct was pretty impressive.

Although the question of whether it was worth the 15 hour round trip is debatable – and Simon certainly wouldn’t agree!!

On the way back the tour guide in our carriage got a little carried away … which didn’t help Simons mod in the slightest – we had entertainment for entertainments sake when all we wanted to do was read our books and snooze – it was all topped off by a quiz (!) and then finally a karaoke session (we weren’t impressed karaoke is only for drunken times!!!).

Greetings…

After kicking back in Potosi, we moved onto a wee place called Uyuni, which is famous in bolivia for the tonnes of white powder it produces, which is exported all over the world and is a vital part of the bolivian economy. Indeed, they have so much of the stuff, you can even stay in a hotel made of it!!!

The Salar de Uyuni, or “salt flats” in English, are the largest in the world, coveriing some 10,582 km² (4,085 square miles). Some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a giant prehistoric lake. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó Lake and Uru Uru Lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Uyuni. Uyuni is roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the United States. Salar de Uyuni is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually. Salar de Uyuni is also the breeding grounds for three species of South American flamingos: the Chilean, James’s and Andean flamingos.

We started out for the day by visiting the train graveyard, where there was quite a lot of old rusting trains from the good old wild west days (Butch and Sundance met their match in Bolivia, very near here), when they would have been a principle transport system.

Afterthis, we set off to the actual Salt Flats, where the landscapes really are about as strange and twisted as you can possibly get on earth.

After the initial shock and awe had worn off, we then headed to the first Salt Hotel, which is in fact an illegal structure which you`re not supposed to visit. It`s shameful that we all happily do, no one ever complains to the tour companies about it, and thus we all help to degrade the environment a little bit more. Having said that, screw it, this is pretty amazing…

After we`d had lunch, we then set off to have a play with camera trickery, as it`s completely devoid of any background you can do some rather amusing trick photography…

Even though the salt flats literally are, just that, we still managed to get a shocking number of punctures!!! We had two, and every other car also had at least one! God knows how the tires managed to blow, but they did… they also deflate very quickly, from full to flat in about 10 seconds, though of course it`s better than a full blowout!

After a few rapid tyre changes, it was off to “fish island”, which seems like a very odd name for an island until you remember this was pretty much a sea/lake for thousands of years! It`s pretty weird to walk around see coral, albeit covered in cacti now!!!! No idea where they find the water from though!

We set off again, and stopped near some volcanoes, and the train tracks that lead to Chile to the west and Argentina to the east. Theres only a train every other day though, so we weren`t too disappointed when one didn`t go past!!!

After all this excitement, it was time to move on, and see some of the remaining water pools or lakes that are still there, where they have flamingoes! Apparently the reason they are pink is because the flowers they eat are pink!

Then it was off again, to see some rocks, which were very nearly the highlight of our lives. Apparently the main rock is supposed to look like a petrified tree, though I think you`d need to eat most of the cacti in the desert to make it so…

The next morning, we awoke at 330 am (which I was overjoyed at!) and went to see some geezers. Expecting to simply be meeting a bunch of cockneys, I was surprised at my misunderstanding…

The reason they look so dramatic and we look so cold is that it was -10c at that time in the morning, even without any wind!!!

After the geysers, we took some time out to kick back and relax in some natural springs! These were about 30c, so were great for warming ourselves up as it slowly got light!!!

After this, we were finally off, after checking out the last lake we were going to see!

We did a 3 day tour from Uyuni to the Salt Flats and it was absolutely amazing! We were with a great group of people which always helps – there were 3 jeeps all travelling together with a group of 12 travelling as a tour group and another 6 people travelling independently like us.

The Salt Flats are supposedly where there used to be a sea once upon a time – after that dried up it left a whole load of salt just sitting there – to be precise 1200 square kms of the stuff!! One of the guides insisted that before we got to the salt flats we should blindfold ourselves so as to be in total awe when you first see the great expanse of white before you … so we did and we totally were … it is just unbelievable – so bright, so white and just seems to go on forever!

The rest of our first day was spent driving through the salt flats, first to a salt hotel (yes a hotel made from salt!!) for our lunch (bbq llama!!). Much of the day was spent taking photos of us eating each other and with giant chocoltae bars … that was alot of fun.

Then to the fish island (yes an island of what once was coral in the sea now covered in cactii!)

and further on towards the edge of the salt flats to another hotel (of salt) which was to be our bed for the night. The first day was topped off by an evening of cards and red wine – cant go wrong really!!

The second day was a long day of driving further south away from the salt flat through some amazing mountains and past some beautiful lakes and even saw a semi active volcano! The photos dont do it justice but here are some anyway.

The highest we went on that day was to about 4900m above sea level – pretty damn high and unfortunately for simon he got a bit of altitude sickness and felt quite lousy ( Still I think despite that he would agree we had an amzing time.

Our third and final day was something of an experience! It started with a 4am wakeup to drive to some live geysers … some kind of volcanic activity with lots of steam coming out of holes in the ground … you can only see it early in the morning hence the early wakeup but it was worth it.

That was followed by a dip in the thermal springs which was heavenly … the water was about 25degrees compared to the outside sir temperature of about zero!!! Beautiful if a bit chilly getting out and getting dry and dressed again in the open air!!

We then headed toward the green lake which had an amazing reflection of the volcanoie behind it. A volcano which apparently is used by NASA for testing since the conditions inside the crater are very similar to that on Mars!!

It all went a little bizarre after that. We came across a car crash – two jeeps that had by all accounts very nearly had a head on collision, that was avoided but both cars had still rolled. ONe jeep only had the driver (who we quicly discovered was pissed … at 9am in the morning!!) and one passenger the other has 6 gringoes in it on a tour just like us. Fortunately, after a trip to a nearbvy medical centre (nearby being a few hours away) the gringoes got away with just a few scratches and everyone else was ok. Unfortunately it seems that drunk tour drivers are a problem in the area … the leaflet from our tour company (Andes Salt Expeditions) specifically worte that their drivers arent drunk!

Shortly after that experience, one of the jeeps in our group discovered a brokenm radiator so we had to stop for a couple of hours while they fixed that! We were pretty lucky that our drivers were pretty nifty at these sorts of things … when we had a puncture it was like watching a formula one pitstop!

Anyway despìte all the drama we really did have an amazing time in the slat flats … quite possibly one of the best tours we have done on our trip!

I had the pleasure, though it is clearly the wrong word, of entering the silver mines of Potosi in Cerro Rico. Cerro Rico means “rich mountain”, though the local miners call it “the mountain that eats men”.

(Extracts taken from H2G2)

It’s unclear when exactly silver was discovered in Cerro Rico; one story goes that a llama herder lost one of his flock and had to spend the night on the mountain. He light a fire and exposed some of the silver. Whatever about the origins there is no doubt about the importance of the mine in the Spanish conquest of Latin America. From the 16th century until the end of Spanish rule approximately 45,000 tonnes of silver were extracted. The Spanish used slave labour to extract the silver and it’s estimated that 8 million people – mostly locals and African slaves – died either in the mountain or from illnesses related to working conditions.

Conditions in the mines have not improved markedly since colonial times. Cerro Rico remains an industrial area of considerable activity, but the workers are too poor to buy proper equipment. The mines are still crudely dug and badly ventilated. Pick-axes and Davy lamps are used instead of drills or torches. Individual seams are often dug vertically and descended using hands and feet. Ladders are only used to travel between different levels of a mine. Rail roads exist, but containers filled with ore have to be pushed manually. The mines are often water-logged too, especially in the lower levels, and cave-ins are a regular occurrence. Unsurprisingly, life expectancy for a miner in Potosi is a little less than 40 years.

The belief system of the workers today is a strange mix of local superstition and devout Catholicism. Above ground the miners are perfect Catholic Christians. Below, in the mines, they are nothing short of devil worshippers. Each mine has its own effigy of el Tio (literally ‘the Uncle’, a standard euphemism for the Devil) in place. The workers see no inconsistency in this. They reason that, if God is in charge of the world above, and homage is paid to him there, it makes perfect sense to pay homage to the god of the Underworld, especially when the miners spend so much of their lives below ground.

These are serious working mines, and not a tourist attraction. You firstly have to find a guide who will take you down, which is actually fairly easy. Pretty much all the guides are ex-miners, who somewhere or somehow have managed to learn english/french/german, etc, and now are “retired” and are willing to take gringos down into the mines. We are informed in no uncertain terms that this is being done entirely at our own risk, and that miners do indeed die all the time in caveins and the like, though to date only a few gringos have died alongside them.

We started off visiting the miners market, where you buy dynamite, fuses, and ammonium nitrate which is like a secondary source of fuel for the dynamite. You also buy 2L of pop, and a baggie of coca leaves, all of which are presents for the miners, which you use as an “entrance fee” I guess. The total cost of all this works out at about 2 quid. It`s a pretty strange feeling being sat on a bus with high explosives in your crotch….

We set out from the market, and got on a bus which would take us up to the mine entrance, at around 4500m above sea level. Our miner guide (whose name I am dreadfully ashamed to say I have forgotten) explains to us that we really all need to start to chew some of the coca leaves, or else we will start to get ill when we are inside the mines and struggle to breath and deal with the general conditions, so we take his advice and start to munch along on the rank alkaline substance.

Our first stop is a processing plant, where they convert the silver ore into silver, or a close approximation thereof. In colonial times, they literally just lobbed out the bits of silver, but today it`s pretty much all depleted. The miners mine about 2 tonnes of ore at a time, and for this they get maybe about $30. That`s $30 for a 12 hour (minimum!) shift, to be shared amongst the “team” which could be anywhere up to a dozen people. The silver ore is crushed in a crusher and then chemically processed (they even use cyanide, which I`ve never seen before. I didn`t taste it) and the silver is extracted.

Anyways, after this visit we head up to the mines. I already knew what the black “paint” looking stuff around the mine was, so I didn`t bother to ask, though I was curious to know if the guide would admit that they still slaughter llamas and spray the entrance with the blood sacrifice.

We enter the mine, and I immediately bang my head. I`m not the tallest guy in the world either, and these mines are very very tight, and this is in the entrance! We walk for what maybe a kilometer down the tunnel, until we arrive at the mines “Tio”. Every mine here has one, as explained previously.

We scrabble, we twist, we turn, we scratch, we suck dust, we itch, we bleed, we scrape and we scurrow for hours, through thick and thin passages, vertically and horizontally, flat and jagged for hours. We encounter a miner who was 4 hours into a 12 hour shift, who was making a hole using a hammer and a chisel into bare volcanic rock. He said that it would take him at least another 4 hours of rhythmic banging and clanging to have a hole sufficiently large enough to allow him to place the dynamite and the charges to blow up yet another bit of mountain. We give him a set of dynamite and some drink, and leave him to it.

Not much else can be said about my experience in the mine – I was left so shocked by it, that I found it difficult to explain to Louise over lunch, indeed it took me almost an hour before I found I could speak and construct sentences again. The conditions the miners work in are atrocious, so much so it even warrants me spelling the word correctly.

Regardless, after the mine tour we did have some lighthearted relief, in the form of bomb making training. For some reason everyone else was scared of handling dynamite and pulling it apart, though it may have had something to do with the fact that I managed to speak and understand enough spanish to learn that with the exception of the detonator, which needed quite a bit of heat and was otherwise stable, the entire “bomb” was completely safe, at least until the 3 minute fuse ran out. I was instructed in quite a bit of detail, which I probably can`t say here for fear of being hauled off to gitmo for my next holidays. Entonces, here`s the pictures showing the procedure.

And, almost finally, here`s a picture of me holding an ignited bomb.

Me, here, in the depth of bolivian countryside, with an ignited dynamite bomb, with my reputation? What were they thinking…

Lastly, here`s a link to a video of it blowing up. Enjoy!

Hola all from Argentina!!!

Still got a load of photos to upload from our recent tours in Bolivia … mainly the Salt Flats tour that we did that was just amazing … we are on the case so they will be appearing shortly!!!

We are now in Salta in North West Argentina shortly to be heading south to the wine growing areas of Cordoba and Mendoza!!! Nice!!!

Hasta luega!!

We were in Sucre for just over a week … Sucre is officially still the capital of Bolivia even though in reality La Paz is as government is there and stuff. Its a very relaxing city with lots of colonial buildings.

We decided to spend a week doing some more Spanish and did another course here which was a great help …. being in Brazil for so long and having to deal with Portuguese had confused us somewhat but we are back in the swing of speaking Spanish now!!!

We also spent a bit of time at the cinema … a massive novelty for us and a bit of normality!!! One of the films we saw was called Mirrors with Keifer Sutherland in it .. its a horror film and we found it pretty scary …. funny how the 5 or so under 10 years olds didn’t seem too scared by it!!! They obviously don’t have any age guidelines over here for films!!!

Here are a few photos of the city:

… here are a few photos from our Karaoke night in Vila Serrano and then the Tarabuco market with lots of indigineous people!!

Enjoy!!!

We decided to have a splurge from samaipata, and travel the Vallegrande Region seeing some famous places that people never go to. Our guide was the amazingly cool and well learned Ben (http://www.benverhoeftours.com/) who really knew his stuff. We met him and straight away liked him, so much so we were convinced to spend a full 4 days with the guy. He was clearly a serious socialista with an even more serious obsession with some guy called Che Guevara.

For those who don`t know who Che Guevara is, firstly shame on you, secondly check out wikipedia.

We were travelling on the Old Trade Road from Samaipata to Sucre, which we think is about 500km pretty much either off road, or on dirt track. The road was used, and indeed still is, by the indigenous people moving goods to sell and exchange at different villages and houses along the route.

We set of firstly from Samaipata (after a very rushed breakfast, as we had neglected to subtract the obligatory 30 mins from real time to Bolivian time when ordering the night before!) at about 8am. The bags were chucked in the back of the 4×4 pickup, and off we went!!! After a few hours we arrived at Vallegrande.

In Vallegrande we visited the Ché Guevara museum and the hospital, where we could see the laundry where Ché Guevara’s corpse was shown to the world press and his last letter to his children painted on a wall. After we to the mausoleum where Ché was buried for over 30 years, and the place where Tania Bunke, the only female guerrilla fighter, was buried. We also went to the “grave” where his body was discovered, Che’s body was mutilated and buried at a site that remained secret until retired Bolivian General Mario Vargas Salinas revealed in November 1995 that the remains had been buried in a mass grave in Vallegrande – precisely he said somewhere between the airport and the cementary, a pretty big expanse when you see it!

They´ve done a pretty good job of “securing” the site (weirdly Bolivians have no idea who he is or was! Apparently the only people who “pilgrimage” there are Cubans and Gringos! The hole in the ground is still there, and they have built a building-cum-shrine around it, filled with photos. It was quite a strange moving experience looking at a mass grave, even if now it is only a hole in the earth.

After a decent lunch, we set out again onto some serious dirt track, heading away from all civilization, and indeed electricity, to the tiny village of Pucará. It`s a pretty weird feeling to go to a very small town/village where people still live a very traditional way of life. We were in luck as the village seemed to be in absolute uproar! People were milling all around the square looking very excited, and it soon came clear why! Eggs! Yep, some enterprising couple had turned up in a 4×4 with a van absolutely packed to the brim with eggs, and people were buying them in the 100s!

We decided to leave after a walk around, taking a few photos, and carried on to La Higuera. Like Pucará, La Higuera also doesn`t have electricity, though thats all about to change on December 9th, when the town finally gets wired up to a small hydroelectric dam. I`ve got very mixed feelings about it, as it`s kinda charming to be somewhere where “rustic” doesn`t simply equate to “unwashed fetid shit hole”, but who are we to deny them access to electricity? The big problems of course will be social as always, as these people literally have everything they need at the moment, they`re not aware of an “outside world” as such, and course you can see how this will end – someone will manage to get a TV, someone else will want one, they`ll watch the dreadful aspirational programming they have over here, and then they`ll all descend into jealousy and spitefulness, or leave to go to the “big city” where no doubts they `ll end up on the streets like everyone else. Still, I digress…

In La Higuera there’s only one place to stay! Quite literally! La Higuera is a town of only 14 families, and of course everyone knows everyone else. Ben seemed to be in quite well with the locals, they all know him and talked to him and made us feel very welcome. The posada we stopped at was actually called La Telegraphista, and was actually the place where telegraphs were delivered and picked up from, and was the place Che sent a scout to find out if the Bolivian army knew they were in the area – they did, and the next events led to his death.

Without going into anymore details (hey, this is about us, not a history lesson!) the “terrorists” as they would be called today were all captured and or killed over a period weeks. We took a hike of about three hours into the Quebrada del Churo, the place where Ché was captured. It`s again pretty weird to be in a place where it happened, looking around at where he wrote the last entries into his diary, and trying to imagine him looking up at the hills where the army were shouting “I am the Che Guevara you are looking for, and I am worth more to you alive than dead!”. Talk about your all time errors of judgment…

We also went to the school house where he was executed, and Ben also took us to a little known museum (read, items pilfered by one old bloke) as he knew the owner. This guy had some artifacts there, literally just in a room off from his workshop, including the chair he was reportedly shot in, the guerrillas portable AM/FM radio, one of the vests they had, rucksacks, water bottles, all manner of stuff! We got the impression not many people got to see his personal collection of memorabilia, and we felt pretty honoured!

Of course it wasn`t all che che che… Ben took us to some of the other places nearby, including a very small yet amazingly social market that takes place, where everyone dresses up in their best clothes and try to pull the opposite sex! It was pretty weird, and people were paying us a lot of interest, which Ben later told us was because we were only gringo #5 and gringo #6 who had ever been there!

Later we went down to a school which seemed to be absolutely in the middle of nowhere, and then onto a water mill which was an hours walk downhill. The mill was amazing, very small and reportedly over a century old, which was used by the locals to grind their corn into flour.

After another night in La Higuera, we set out for the town of Villa Serrano, a good 5 or 6 hours drive through every micro climate you can imagine, from being in the clouds at +2500m to being in near desert conditions much further down. It was a truly surreal journey, and we drove through and stopped at a few villages en route to see the local folks live their lives.

Villa Serrano was very strange – so big and massive compared to the places we had spent the last few days, though it was only a town of about 2000 people! We had an extremely amusing drunken night in a karaoke bar, getting pretty messy with a couple of real life cowboys who had been competing in a rodeo that day in the area. We even sang “Summer of 69″ oh yeah! Must have been a good night as I managed to put my back out trying to lift him up, and we both fell on the floor in a drunken mangled heap, much to the amusement of the other patrons. We decided to leave pretty soon after that!!! It was also the first time Louise got very irritated with the machismo mentality over here – people were coming up and asking me if they could dance with her! Wanting to wind Louise up a little bit, I started off saying yes and it was clear no matter what see said, as a woman, her opinion didn`t matter, off she went dancing away with random locals! However, after it stopped being funny and Louise was clearly getting irritated I started to just say “no, she`s tired” at which point they just started to ask Ben for permission! It`s pretty weird coming from a country more in tune to the fact women are actually people too!

After waking up with raging hangovers at 6am, we set off to the market town of Tarrabuco. Theres a market every sunday, where all the locals wear their traditional dress (almost a uniform!) and they take all their purchases home by donkey!

After the market, and lunch, we headed of on the road (which actually was tarmac!) again, and headed to Sucre, the White City, which is where we currently (01/11/08) are now!

Samaipata was the first pace we really visited in Bolivia … we were in Santa Cruz for about 5 days but Simon was will so we didn’t really do very much and there isn’t a great deal there really!

So to get to Samaipata (a small town of about 4000 people) you go to a taxi place and share a taxi with some random people … it takes about 3 hours to get there and costs about GBP3! It was our first experience of Bolivian roads .. apparently only about 10% of the roads here are paved. The road went right through the mountains … pretty spectacular views and pretty spectacular roads… at some point the road just seems to disappear as they have a lot of landslides in this part of the world so the road could be there one day and gone the next. Hadn’t been much rain recently though so the road was ok … some of the drop offs were pretty scary though!!

Samaipata is only a very small town but we really liked it. It is surrounded by incredible scenery and a very relaxing place. The main thing we wanted to see was El Fuerte … an Inca site up on the hillside (or mountain side). It was really fascinating and very well set up for tourists.

Other than that we did a few walks around the local area, visited a local zoo where Simon got accosted by a friendly monkey!

And ate some very tasty Bolivian food … Pique al Macho (at the Vaca Loca! – translation the mad cow!)

From the Brazilian border (Corumba or Quijarro depending whether you are in Brazil or Bolivia) to Santa Cruz in Bolivia – the only choice of transport is the Expresso Oriental which was kindly nicknamed the Death Train in the 80s.

Apparently Brazil have been building a road for the past 12 years (well Brazil are finishing it off cause Bolivia kept stopping and starting and running out of money!) – a road which helpfuly opens next month!!! So the death train was our only option. Its supposedly called the death train due to the fact that it is rammed full of people, with contraband items, sitting on the roof (and falling off) and regular derailments and if it doesnt derail it is described as a bone jarring, back breaking journey…… things seem to have changed quite a lot fortunately!

First of all – it was busy – but not that busy …. people with a few bags … but not masses of contraband items! (maybe thats for coming from Bolivia??) There was noone sitting on the roof – the seats are relatively comfortable and even recline, there are TVs in the carriage and waiter food service so you dont have to brave switching between carriages. Ok it is a little bit bumpyt and pretty damn slow and after 16 hours you are ready to get off ….but no where near as bad as it sounds I am pleased to report – left on time and arrived on time … probably better than Virgin Trains!!!

Heres to Bolivia then!!!