On arrival in La Paz we made a b-line for our hostel which had been recommended by Matt and Emily back in Santiago, after hearing stories of express kidnappings by taxi we were glad that the hostel was within easy walking distance from the bus station.   After the horror bus ride the first thing to do on our list was a shower and a bit of a sleep.  Gen didn’t really feel like doing much for the rest of the day so I hit the streets armed with Gen’s compact camera and little else to have a look around La Paz.

Loading up on our final morning

Immediately noticeable was the vast expanse of nothingness, at some points as far as the eye can see all you can see is salt.  Our first stop on the salt flats was Isla de los Pescados,  home to giant cacti, from there we headed across the flats in the direction of Uyuni.

Gen posing with a massive cactus

Along the way we stopped for the customary photos of someone small being held by somebody big.  Made possible by the massive distance to anything recognisable.

Grant on chips

Gen on chips

Don't squash me!!!

Chip from a Giant

After short stops at the old salt hotel, now no longer used because it was polluting the salar, the salt mines and Colchani for lunch we were on our way to our final destination, Uyuni.  Or progress was halted briefly to replace a flat tyre, our second for the trip but after some expert team work by our drivers we were back on the road.  The final location we would visit was the train graveyard on the outskirts of Uyuni, a bit of a tribute to the rail history of Bolivia, or maybe a heap of rusting metal, you be the judge.

Salt mine

Yep its f..d

Flat numero dos

Train graveyard

Standard train graveyard pose

Mike, Olivia and one big pizza in Uyuni

To summarise our trip, were we glad we did it?  For sure!  We didn’t really have too many complaints, the food was all pretty fresh, the salads for lunch were a welcome break from the endless bread of Chile and Argentina.  Perhaps my biggest complaint was that the driver seemed more rushed than he needed to be, on some sections of the track we were travelling pretty fast with the second car in our group travelling a whole lot slower but still getting as much time at each viewpoint.  All in all though we had a great time, saw some amazing sites and met some fantastic people.

Flamingos in the mist

Flamingos

The famous stone tree

Desert Highway

Flat numero uno

By the end of the day we would be sick of taking photos of flamingos as they were to be seen at nearly every stop during the day.  I found taking photos of wildlife I’d get a bit of camera envy when I saw someone with a nice 300+mm lens…then I’d see them try and stuff it in their bag and be happy with my choice of an 18-105mm.

The crew from our CruiserFlat numero uno

Flamingos at lunch...or maybe it was Flamingos for lunch

Nothing comes for free in Bolivia, in some places you can’t even pee in the bush, instead you must pay a few Bolivianos to the hygienically clad lady manning the toilets at your lunch stop.

Bano (toilet) fee

Day two finished at a salt hotel, yes the hotel is mostly made of salt, salt bricks form the walls, beds, chairs and table legs, the floor is also covered in crushed salt..great for getting dry skin off your feet.  It was here that we were promised a hot shower, we were told that although there was hot water there wasn’t heaps of it.  As a group…we’ll more to the point a few of us blokes decided that each person should have their shower limited to three minutes, mainly because we were being chivalrous and letting the ladies go first and wanted some hot water left for our showers.  Having a countdown feature on my watch I was appointed official timekeeper with ??? as backup to ensure that the water was cut off at the end of the allotted three minutes.  As it turned out only a few of the ladies, Gen being one of them, had a hot shower with the rest of them and most of us blokes having to make do with a cold shower.  The final insult was when Mathew let me jump the queue and have a shower before him as reward for my efforts with timekeeping only for the hotwater to come back during Mathew’s shower, the shower time that should have been mine.

We got caught in a spaghetti western

Salt hotel

The Russians

Stars

Welcome to Bolivia

Loading up morning of day one

The first day began at 8am with a bus collecting us and our 15+ litres of water (travellers have to take their own water as this is not supplied by the tour companies) and taking us on a short drive to the Chilean border crossing.  From here it was about an hour in the bus and about 2000m in altitude to the Bolivian border.  San Pedro sits at approximately 2300m and the Bolivian border is at about 4300m, because of this sudden altitude change we’d started taking some drugs to help us acclimatize to the sudden change in altitude.  Not really sure if they helped or not but for the cost of having to piss at every stop I think they were worth taking.

Laguna

At the border we were greeted by a fleet of 80 and 100 series Toyota Landcruisers, if you’re an Nissan Patrol fan Bolivia probably isn’t the place for you as they are few and far between.   Our tour group consisted of Mathieu and Audrey from France, Mike an Olivia from the UK, Yulia, Natasha and ?? from Russia and John and Karen from Seth Efrica and Fan from the US  We were directed to jump in a Cruiser with Mike, Olivia, Mathieu and Audrey.  Audrey and I being the shortest we were given the back seat…three days later my legs were well in need of a good stretch.  The others all piled into the second cruiser.  Our driver didn’t speak a word of English so fortunately for us Olivia was originally from Mexico and spoke excellent Spanish, Mathieu could also speak pretty good Spanish so we were pretty sorted for translations for the next 3 days.

Stinky!

Hot mud

This probably fell off a Nissan

Our journey on day one took us to the highest point of the trip, a little over 4800m near some geysers spewing sulphur and other wonderful gasses into the air, I’m sure if you stood downwind of one of the vents for too long you’d be feeling a whole lot more than altitude sickenss.  We also passed some lagunas and visited a high altitude hot spring. 

High altitude hot springs

Our first night’s accommodation at Laguna Colorada was in  pretty basic hostel, no hot water or electricity for anything other than lighting.  I struggled to get to sleep due to the altitude but judging from the snoring in our room everyone else was coping pretty well.

Night one accomodation

Our group (minus the Russians)

Relaxing under the shade in our hostel at San Pedro

San Pedro de Atacama is a bit of a dust bowl tourist trap, the place was swarming with backpackers either coming or going from Bolivia or there to see the sand dunes or surrounding desert.  Fortunately we had done some shopping in La Serena for some supplies for our salt flats trip but there were still a few things we had forgotten to get, ie extra paracetamol that aren’t that easy to come by on a Sunday in the Atacama desert.  For us San Pedro was just a starting point for a tour of the Uyuni salt flats.

Our hostel

Our chosen tour company for the Salar de Uyuni

Wind Harp on irrigation dam in Elqui Valley, wind passing through causes strings in the harp to vibrate and make quite an irritating noise

Our meals at the solar restaurant were cooked in these solar ovens

Solar hot plate

Gen sampling some Pisco

The moon..taken with Gen's compact, it actually did a better job through the telescope than the SLR

The day after our observatory tour (and a good sleep in) Gen decided she’d like to have her photo taken with as many of La Serena’s churches as possible.  We made it up to seven and that was more than enough.

Uno

Dos

Tres

Cuatro

Cinco

Seis

Siete

The highlight of this was a trip up the funicular railway to the summit of Cerro San Cristóbal to see the view of Santiago from the steps below the giant statue of the Virgin Mary. 

The Virgin Mary watching over Santiago

Santiago from San Cristobal

We also checked out the Museo of Pre Columbian Art which was full of artefacts from the various civilisations that have called South America home throughout the years.

Surprisingly another highlight of our stay in Santiago was our hostel Eco Hostel, for some reason there was a completely different vibe in the hostel than all the places we had stayed in Argentina.  It was here that we met an English couple, Matt and Emily who were in the last few days of their stay in South America.  It was good to talk to people who had recently been to some of the places we were planning on going and who had a similar attitude to ourselves.

Gen's brother Michael told us we had to have a Submarino before we left South America

Gen with Argentina's biggest goon layback

This took us to a large winery that mainly makes wine for the domestic market and is one of Argentina’s oldest wineries, a small organic winery and an olive oil factory.  The olive oil factory was a bit of a surprise as we weren’t told we would be visiting there, it was definitely a highlight as the tastings were way more generous than the wineries and the olive oil tasted really good.

Gen trying to look like she knows something about wine tasting

I only made it as far as the door with this one

This is how the proper wine snobs look when they taste their wine

The following day we had decided to do a romantic sunset horse ride and BBQ, this gave us the morning to have a look around the city and eat  numerous empanadas from the market near our hostel.  The horse ride was about an hour out of the city, when we arrived we were given a 5 minute how to ride demonstration then directed to a horse. 

"If the horse goes to this angle you will probably fall off the back"

I’m not really sure how much we needed to know as the horses seemed to know who to follow, when to stop and when to go a bit faster.  

Gen contemplating getting on the horse

Success!!

Gen’s horse was somewhat docile though and needed a lot of encouragement to do anything past a slow walk.  The BBQ dinner was probably one of the earliest meals we’d had in Argentina and must have confused the Argentineans on the tour…what dinner before 10pm, how will our body’s cope???  The meal was a pretty simple but tasty affair meat with tomatoes in a roll, I thought the meat must have been marinaded in something but was told that all that was on it was salt and the flavour from the coals it was cooked over.

Meat over the coals

 To get to Cerro Cartadel you can organise transport or save a few dollars and jump on one of the local busses which is what we did.  There are plenty of places to hire gear from on the mountain, all of similar quality.  Gen decided that Argentina wasn’t quite ready to see her skiing ability so she spent the morning reading a book and in the afternoon caught a lift to the top of the mountain to check out the view and the masses of people on package trips, complete with matching jackets, pants, bags etc.

It hadn’t snowed for  a while so the snow wasn’t super fresh, the groomers were a bit of fun in the morning to find my feet again, by the afternoon the snow had softened up a little making some of the steeper stuff a little less icy.

The day after Cartadel we headed out of town in to rent bikes and ride the Circuito Chico.  This lies to the North of Barliloche, in summer there are busses that run around the circuit allowing you to get on and off to check out the little bays, walks and views.  In winter the busses don’t run so you have two options, walk the circuit between the end of the bus routes or hire bikes and do the full circuit. 

The bike rental guy gave me the honour of riding the bike with the pumpkin horn

Luckily the day was nice and there was little to no wind making the riding pretty enjoyable.  The first few hours definitely called for a windstopper as the temperature was pretty low and there was frost on the side of the roads but it soon warmed up as the sun rose above the trees.

View from a little side trip where we stopped for lunch.