The end of our Bolivian adventure

Today was the day that Emma got on a plane to go back home from La Paz, and the day that I left Bolivia in completely the opposite direction: for Chile. I suppose she had to go back for her viva at some point, but that knowledge didn't make it any easier this morning as we said goodbye for another eight weeks. (I know, it's not that long, I'd just got used to having her around and I loved it!)

Bolivia is a country that we both came to love. It is undoubtedly my favourite country so far, and I'm sure it will stand out as one of the highlights of my trip. As well as the wonderful natural landscapes that we mentioned in the previous blog, and those that we saw on our trek last week, we came to love La Paz. It is a completely chaotic city - absolutely mental - but great fun to be in. Plus, you can get a half hour bus ride for 10p, which I think is great. On our trek we walked from a 4850m pass all the way down to the Yungas rainforest which stretches through to the Amazon. Along the way we saw huge butterflies, and I managed to see something I spent tens of hours trying to see at Los Cedros in Ecuador without success: a Capuchin monkey! Needless to say I completely failed to engage monkey habituation protocols (ie scratching yourself, eating leaves and so on), and the monkey scarpered before Emma could get a look.

In the time since we returned to La Paz from our walk, we've done some fun things. On one day we mountain biked what is officially designated as 'The World's Most Dangerous Road'. Until two months ago when a new and safer road (no less than twenty years in the making) was opened, this un-barriered road - in parts only one vehicle wide and with drops on one side of up to 300m - was the only transport route between the country's capital and basically everything to the north east. Our guidebook informed us that this road had an average of 26 vehicles per year disappearing over the edge. Well, it's fun to mountain bike from 4700m down to 1000m in five hours! And we've got the t-shirts to prove it. Yesterday we travelled back up to the pass at the start of last week's trek to catch the captivating views of the Cordillera Real, since pass was clouded over when we went the first time. When we weren't doing these things, we were exploring La Paz, experiencing some of its lively markets and colourful craft shops. We also splurged on a nice hotel for the last couple of nights. Before you snort in disgust, I ask you: would you pass up the opportunity to stay in a suite in a 5 star hotel in a capital city for 80 dollars a night? (On the topic of dollars, I'm loving the exchange rate that I've had for the last few months, because all prices here, even ones in local currency, seem to be pegged to the dollar).

This morning I repeated the trip I did nearly three weeks ago to meet Emma in Santiago. I'm now sitting in Arica, where I'll catch a flight down to Santiago tomorrow. On Friday evening I will finally be waving South America goodbye when I board a flight to Christchurch, New Zealand, via Auckland. I feel that with the border crossing out of Bolivia earlier today, I was prematurely saying goodbye to South America. I'm afraid that what I've seen of Chile just doesn't cut it compared to everything else I've seen. I might as well be in Florida - the roads are actually wide and don't have pot holes, the sun is relentlessly hot and there are McDonalds and Blockbusters everywhere. I'm sure Chile has its charms, but it doesn't fit in with everything else I've experienced in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. I've lately felt that my Spanish has improved a huge amount and I've been enjoying speaking to the locals in Bolivia. I'm going to miss improving on my Spanish, and to that end I've bought Harry Potter 1 in Spanish to try and improve my reading and vocabulary.

I'm looking forward to meeting up with a travelling friend in Santiago tomorrow, Nina, who I've repeatedly bumped into over the last few weeks. Then it'll be over to NZ, where I fully intend to go and live in the wilderness for a few weeks before my family come over to visit at the beginning of April. I will be armed with a mountain hut pass, in an attempt to see how cheaply I can live in a country I'm expecting to shock me quite considerably with regard to prices of things. It feels very strange and quite sad leaving South America. From initial feelings of anxiety and a bit of excitement about travelling on this continent, I've found I absolutely love the place. I hope that the rest of my travelling lives up to this experience (albeit most likely in different ways). Still, I can't wait to experience a new country, and the one that I was looking forward to most of all before my trip began, at that.

A quick hop down to Santiago and back (a meagre 2500km away)

Everything was going so smoothly...Mike was in La Paz writing his last blog entry, about to drop off his laundry and book a nice hotel for Emma's arrival, when things went a little awry. He spoke to Emma on the phone at 3pm British time (5 hours before her flight from Heathrow) to sort out final plans, when she dropped the bombshell that American Airlines weren't going to let her fly into La Paz. This was because the Bolivian miners were striking in the city and fuel supplies to the airport were cut short. Fortunately, she managed to negotiate flying to the same continent, but the best AA could offer was Santiago, a cool 2500km away. Mike had to make it down to Santiago within 48 hours. To accomplish this formidable feat, he had a rickety Bolivian bus not unlike one of these:



whereas she had one of these:



The race was on! When it became apparent Mike wasn't going to make it to Santiago before Emma, he got off the bus at Arica in the far north of Chile, and hopped on a cheeky plane the next morning to cover the final 1500km, thereby thrashing her to the finish line.

We had a lovely couple of days in Santiago, spoiling ourselves by staying in a surprisingly cheap 5 star hotel (shoestringers to the end), before heading back up to Bolivia. The question was, what means of transport should we use to travel back up to the border? We went to the bus station and were faced with having to wait over a day until the next bus, and then to spend about 24 hours on the bus itself. Hmmm, we thought. How about we get on a quick bus to the airport and see if there are any more cheeky flights? We got to the airport one hour before a flight, promptly bought the ticket, ate some tasty donuts and got on board. Once in northern Chile we made our way to the border town of San Pedro de Atacama, where we hoped to get public transport over into Bolivia. However, we found out that the only way to travel in this part of South America is by 4WD tour (since the whole area is one roadless barren wilderness). We booked ourselves onto a tour and got going the next morning.

It was rather fortunate to be crossing the border with a group as there wasn´t even a proper road there. Once in Bolivia, we got comfy in the back of a Jeep and rocked down the bumpy roads. The landscape was absolutely stunning with an incredible mix of snow-capped mountains and brightly coloured lakes.









On the second night of the tour we stayed in the Casa de Sal, a hotel built almost entirely from salt, brilliant.



The other highlight of the trip was the Salar de Uyuni which covers 12000 square kilometres, the largest salt flat in the world. When covered in water, the salt flat acted as a mirror, giving the illusion that we were in the clouds. Rather controversially, there are islands in the middle of the salt that are home to many many big cacti.











On arrival in Uyuni the driver announced that we were to visit the town´s greatest attraction, a train museum. We rolled our eyes a little but were thrilled to find that we were actually allowed to climb on the rusting old trains. It´s great to be away from England´s health and safety crikiness!

Bolivia: great first impressions

I've moved on to Bolivia, and so far I love it. Bolivia is one of South America's poorest countries, ranking only above the Guianas in its GNP, and the poverty shows. Yet Bolivia is a country of immense richness and diversity. It is one of the world's top eight most biodiverse countries, contains some of the world's highest and most spectacular mountains, shares one of the world's most impressive lakes (Lake Titicaca) with Peru, contains vast swathes of Amazon rainforest, is home to one of the world's largest salt flats and best of all has some of the world's best evidence of the dinosaurs' existence: dinosaur footprints! It is a country that offers so much to the people that come and visit it, yet very few well-off people from North America and Europe do come as tourists. Until a few decades ago, the only foreign visitors to Bolivia were mountaineers, utilizing the country's spectacular cordilleras. Let me demonstrate to you how cool this country is.







Where do you think these photos have been taken? The mountain picture, perhaps, is a view across to the Alps from some pristine mountain lake in Italy? And perhaps the images of ruins sitting above an idyllic beach and the sheltered cove were taken on a luxurious and inexplicably tourist-free Greek island? Wrong. They were both taken from virtually the same spot (in different directions) on Isla Del Sol in Bolivia. 'But hang on', you say, 'Bolivia is landlocked. You can't fool me. Bolivia has no coast. That can't be Bolivia.' Well it is! Hard as it is to believe, that water that you can see isn't the ocean. It's a lake. And it's not any old lake. It's quite a big lake, and it's called Lake Titicaca. It's so big that you can't see the far end of it, being about 160km distant. Lakes like that just don't exist where I come from. And the even more ridiculous thing is that this lake is a whopping 3800m above sea level. Let's think about this for a second. Here we have a lake 9000 square kilometres in area, containing an unimaginable 900 cubic kilometres of water, sitting nearly four kilometres above the ocean. What's more, there are mountains rising up from the lake, towering two kilometres above it! This is a country of astonishing proportions, famous for having the 'highest of everything', but it is a country that falls short of many a traveller's itinerary.

I arrived in Bolivia last Friday and decided to head out to Isla del Sol with my tent for a couple of days, to explore the relaxed but beautiful island. The walk to the end of the mainland was beautiful. This is what Isla del Sol looks like from the shore.



This two friendly locals helped me get there in their boat.



I'm now in La Paz, Bolivia's capital, awaiting Emma's arrival tomorrow evening. It would be fair to say that I'm quite excited! It's hard to believe that I'm catching a plane to New Zealand in three weeks. I really hope we can do this country justice by seeing a large part of what it has to offer for the curious traveller.