Adios Bolivia, hola Argentina

Bolivia is a fascinating, beautiful country but trickier than any other we have encountered in South America for travelling around. There is a huge gap between the lives and culture of most Bolivians and those of tourists. We found that most people were pretty wary and unfriendly (for many, their first language isn't Spanish which doesn't help) and the main interaction with people was them seeing how much money they could get from us.  We certainly don't regret going to Bolivia but our enjoyment was definitely tainted, particularly by the bus robberies.

It was with some relief then that after a comfortable night train from Uyuni, a long queue and bag searches, we stepped into Argentina without having had anything else stolen.  

We had heard that Argentina is expensive but with lots of delicious all-you-can-eat steak deals. We hadn't heard about how beautiful it is, how friendly the people are, how relaxed it is (siestas for all from 2-5pm, evening meal at 11pm) and what good value it can be to eat and drink out. This is what we have found so far and we are very happy. Our friends Clemmy and Ed who are moving here from London in the summer have made the right choice!

Food and drink in Potosi, Bolivia

On arriving late into Potosi, we set out for a night cap. The bar was full of locals gathered in groups with mugs in hands around thermos flasks. As it was a bit chilly, we decided to join in. An hour later, we staggered, light-headed out of the bar. The thermos contained a potent mix of national super-strength spirit, singani, with hot lemon.Of these 3 yummy soft drinks, one was pineapple flavour, one was a nice, full flavoured cola, and the other a take on Irn-Bru/Kola. Potosi has its own brewery and soft drinks industry, as does La Paz. It is difficult to find a La Paz beer here. There is a nice retro feel to the designs.Tahua tahua - a tasty bit of street food - glazed and fried dough balls with sugar.
My birthday meal in a great restaurant - a converted industrial building. I tried llama for the first time and it was delicious. Tender and not too tangy meat skewered on kebabs with peppers, onions and bacon; accompanied by potatoes, vegetables and tomato. Not as good as a birthday on the farm, but it came in a close second.
Simon opted for a meat feast of steak, chorizo sausage and a black pudding sausage. A little heavy for some maybe but Simon polished it off with no difficulty.I overexcitedly blurted out to the waiter that it was my birthday. I was rewarded by a switch from cheesy love songs to 'Happy Birthday' on the stereo and a gathering of waiters and diners singing to me with this rich, tiramisu cake.

We had heard that there was a hot and filling drink made of maize, called api, to be sampled in the local market along with fried crispy dough (in the background on the photo). Simon was a big fan, I thought it was alright for a couple of sips, and would no doubt be more appreciated had we spent the morning down a mine. As we had only just got up, it was a bit heavy and cloying - drying out the inside of my mouth. 

Salt flats, red and green lakes, volcanoes and flamingoes

Bolivia has the largest salt flats in the world. The huge, prehistoric salt lake dried up but left behind an awful lot of salt. We decided to take a four day tour of the salt flats and surrounding areas of natural beauty. 

Before hitting the salt lake, we went to a little village that had geared itself up for tourism with a couple of museums and lots of salt ash trays etc. We were amongst the few people to pay to enter the museum and an enthusiastic local guide showed us around the mini-models of llamas, alpacas, and blonde barbie-style tourists enjoying their time on the salt lake. 

  

We spent the first two days on and around the huge salt lake. It's an incredible environment to be in and a lot of the time it's hard to believe that the surface isn't snow or water. The lake, the sky and mountains merge as one and the horizon becomes difficult to make out as the salt captures the reflections in its blinding surface.

With our lovely cook, Claudina and her father, our driver and guide, Benitno. They were with us for our first couple of days before we joined up with another jeep and group to head south to lagoons, volcanoes and flamingoes.

We rode around in a jeep with fellow tourist couple, Adam from Hungary and Annike from Trinidad, our guide and a cook. There are no roads on the salt flats so drivers can go wherever they want, although we were warned that if the clouds close in, you become enveloped in a white world and inexperienced drivers have got lost for hours with tour groups. Fortunately, this didn't happen to us.

There were rumours that on the day we set off, there was due to be a rock concert somewhere on the salt lake, organised by Brazilians. We didn't see or hear anything and didn't fancy setting off on the salt, which freezes at night, to try and find it. However, there were coaches and lots of jeeps heading onto the salt at the same time of us. A bizarre spectacle. Apparently, they weren't rock stars but journalists on a press trip to promote the many minerals thought to be in/under the lake, including lithium, which may be used to power cars in the future. Environmentalists are concerned that the lake will be plundered.

Coachloads of press and tourists and salt piles. Locals extract salt from the edges of the lake, drain water from it in this way, before treating it for use in Bolivia and exporting it to Brazil. Lots of tourists were unhelpfully standing on the piles to have their photos taken (as well as stripping to their pants and running around - people went to fairly extreme measures to get their perfect salt photo).

Fortunately, we soon left the crowds behind as we had opted to do a slightly different tour. We spent our first night in a hotel made of salt, which was surprisingly warm and cosy given that it looked like ice, on the edge of the salt lake next to a volcano. We had a peaceful evening wander along the salt 'shoreline' spotting llamas, a great eagle, viscachas (like rabbits, a photo of one on our Machu Picchu entry) and mysteriously, a pile of human bones and skulls arranged next to a rock. According to local legend, the moon only ever shone by the lake, the sun didn't come out. When one day it did for the first time, the people who lived here thousands of years ago in the caves all died.   The sunset reflected in the water at the edge of the lake and in the salt

The next day after walking part way up the volcano for some great views over the lake, we went to 'Fish Island', named so because of its shape, in the middle of the Salt Lake. It was covered with enormous cacti, some of them over 1000 years old. It was here that we were to meet our second group and jeep who were to be our companions for the next few days of the tour. They turned up pretty late and we thought we had been abandoned but happily not. They had booked a better tour than us and fortunately we had been slotted in with them to make up the numbers. It's all made of salt. Apart from the cactus wood.

We spent our second night in a fairly luxurious salt hotel and were treated to some dancing from local children who turned up at the hotel all dressed up. It verged on begging but we got stuck in. 

Caves near to the hotel have been turned into a museum, with pre-hispanic mummies, their pots and hunting spears and a few armadillos hanging from the roof. Apparently, there are still quite of few of them living in the area but we didn't spot any.

As we headed south from the Salt Lake the scenery was equally spectacular. The whole of the flat land in this region at one time was under water. The photo above is Simon standing on coral rock. It was hard to believe that this was once under water - it felt quite apocalyptic to imagine that all this water could just disappear.

More caves - this time filled with petrified algae. 

The six of us and our guide covered a lot of ground bouncing around in our jeep over a couple of days. The landscape was quite otherworldly with no people around, very few plants, but a fair amount of llamas and flamingoes. We were at an altitude of 3,500-5000 metres. 

Flamingoes in flight over a red lake

On our fourth and final day, we were up at 4.30am and in the jeep by 5, off to see geysers (sulphurous steam shooting out of the ground) on a volcano which are most active around sunrise.  

The geysers emitted a strong sulphurous whiff and the steam was hot, there were also a lot of bubbling cauldrons of mud. It was an incredible place to be at sunrise. After this, we dropped down to a thermal spa and although also a bit whiffy and crammed with tourists, it was amazing. I didn't get out until my feet had turned utterly pink.

Our lovely group split up at the Chilean border as Ralph and Maren, a German couple, went south, and the rest of us, William from the UK and Nico from Colombia, returned, dusty and tired, but awed by what we had seen, to Uyuni.

The Train Cemetery

"Such is life"

"Such is life", reads the graffitied message on the rusting engine. This seems quite apt, especially here in Bolivia. Dreams of a modern railway network at the core of an industrial and tecnological revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries were never materialised. Now, just outside of Uyuni lie a great line of disused carriages and engines. It stands as a constant reminder of the failure to bring riches and stability to one of Latin America's poorest and most long suffering countries. The majority of Bolivia's exports continue to be primary goods with no added value - metals, minerals and agricultural produce. Despite what it signifies, the trains do at least make a fantastic playground and an incredible sight as they stand, rusting away and slowly sinking into the desert sand.

We walked along to the train cemetery in the afternoon, long after the morning's tourists jeeps had disappeared over the Salt Flats. There was only ourselves and a few local children and families clambering over the engines and carriages.

Many of the engines were probably manufactured in the UK. No doubt we did a lot better out of it than Bolivia.

The railway is hardly used today - five trains a week, mainly filled with tourists. There is also the odd van-sized goods train, like this one - goodness knows what its purpose is or what the original railway engineers would have made of it. It seems pitiful as it rattles past the old, majestic engines lying abandoned in the desert. 

Uyuni

From Potosí, we spent 6 bumpy hours on a bus bouncing through the mountains in rain on muddy dirt tracks. We were relieved to get off the bus, but our destination, the small desert town of Uyuni, was no treat. Our first discovery on checking into a hotel was that someone had systematically gone through our big backpacks during the journey whilst they were checked into the hold of the bus and stolen our camcorder. Hmm, it was getting difficult to be cheerful about the disgraceful and seemingly permitted robberies on Bolivian buses.Uyuni was built up in the 19^th century around the Bolivian rail industry. It was to be a major interchange connecting Bolivia with Chile, Argentina and Peru. As in all of Latin America, the rail project did not progress as envisaged – the Andes are really not the terrain for it. Today, most tracks lie abandoned with just a few in use, mainly for tourists. The train ‘cemetery’ just outside Uyuni serves as a powerful testament to this, where dozens of carriages and engines made of great hulks of steel lie abandoned. Uyuni is a pretty depressing place. It lies on flat, barren land and the outskirts are strewn with abandoned plastic bags and rubbish that packs of wild dogs pick over in the evenings. All of the streets are unnecessarily wide, presumably because they expected the town to one day be a major centre of commerce, and poorly lit at night. Most of the buildings are one storey, stretched houses made of mud bricks with tin roofs. The place is awash with backpackers who come here to go on tours of the nearby Salt Flats. There are over 50 tour operators, 15 pizza restaurants and not a lot else. The mornings are a hive of activity as backpackers are sorted out into jeeps and packed off for a few days. It’s like a ghost town then until the next load of tourists flood into town in the evenings.

We stayed in Uyuni for an extra day before out Salt Flats tour to sort out our robbery insurance claim. We spent a great few hours at the train cemetery, and heading back into town, bumped into an Easter parade that the whole town had turned out for. A ceramic Jesus was carried through town in a glass coffin/case to the fourteen stations of the cross set up along a central avenue.Uyuni is a pretty strange place. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live here. I think unless you were born here it would be difficult to adapt to it. We were relieved after our Salt Flats tour to be on the night train out of Uyuni and to head down to the Argentine border.  

Down the pit

On the morning of our mining tour we met up with our vivacious, chatty guide, Roberto, and having followed him around town for half an hour, we finally got on a local bus along with 9 other assembled tourists (2 Argentineans, 2 French and 5 Israelis). Roberto claimed to have mastered many languages, including French, Hebrew and English.  He gave them a good go, but in reality, we understood more of his Spanish than his English. He certainly didn’t lack enthusiasm or knowledge though, having worked down the mines from the age of 9 for 10 years to support his family as he was the eldest of 12 children.The first port of call was to a mining cooperative processing plant. It used to be all private mining companies but following the revolution in 1952, mining was nationalised and miners have been organised into cooperatives, of which there are 40 operating today. The plant was basically a yard where they crushed rock, sorted it and packed up the good stuff for sale. This is largely zinc, copper and tin. The bottom has dropped out of the metal market recently leading many miners to leave Potosi and look for work in agriculture in other parts of the country or Argentina. Some of the workers were not too pleased to be hassled by our group and tried to wave us away which Roberto took not notice of whatsoever.

Next it was time to get our high quality mining equipment sorted. On our way to the equipment shop we passed a group of tourists wearing fine matching overalls. After 20 minutes in the shop we emerged sporting tatty shell suits, wellies and hardhats, looking like a cross between Gazza and Bob the Builder.

Looking like this we were taken to the miners market where we were encouraged to buy strong fags and coca leaves for the miners. There was plenty of big bottles of nearly pure alcohol for the miners to offer to the devil of the mines and to get hammered on (neat, pure spirit brings luck for finding pure veins of mineral, proves how manly you are and is cheap). We also picked up a little dynamite at the corner shop, as you do. The coca leaves are part of life for the miners and go hand in hand with the history of the mines. By chewing coca leaves, workers can stay in the mines all day, working and staving off hunger. The Spanish used to control to distribution and price of coca in order to control the miners. A little mini bus, struggling on the winding mud track, led us to the entrance of a mine. So with lamps on and shell suits crackling with static we trooped into the hole in the rock. The tunnels were occasionally high but mostly necessitated walking with a stoop. Near the entrance was a shrine to the Christian God- the God of the world outside. Miners believe that God cannot see deep into the mines. Beneath the Earth is the realm of the Devil, or ‘Tio’.Shrine to the Christian God

The air was damp and dusty with a distinctive smell- arsenic. Due to the arsenic, damp and dust, a miner working full time in the mines is unlikely to live much over 40 years of age. We passed several miners chipping away at the rock by hand as we followed our guided tour. One of these men we spoke to had worked in the mines for nearly 30 years. He had a cough and as our guide pointed out afterwards, this was due to his lungs being clogged with dust and he would probably be dead within the year.

Further into the mine we came to the Tio. Every mine has a Tio and all miners make offerings to Tio every Friday asking for good fortune and protection. When a miner dies or is injured in an accident it is Tio’s doing. The Tio was first introduced by the Spanish mine owners as a way to keep slaves in line. As most slave workers were highly superstitious they were told they had to work hard to please the God of the mine. God in Spanish is Dios but there was no ‘d’ sound in the native Ketchua language hence Tio. I carried out some of the ritual with the strong spirit. First a swig (which I could feel burning down my throat for a good ten minutes), followed by some drips on the ground for the Earth. Then it was Tio’s turn: a splash on his left leg, for luck for the miners; a dribble on his large manhood, for virility (or luck with the ladies if preferred); and a sprinkling on his right leg, for my own luck. Real miners also light cigarettes for Tio and sprinkle coca leaves before getting totally battered on the neat alcohol.

After a couple of hours underground, we emerged from the darkness back into the rainy day, felling extremely glad that we didn’t have to work a 12 hour shift. Or indeed to spend 4 months permanently working underground sleeping 4 hours a day, as unfortunate slaves used to do.All that was left to do was the fairly needless activity of blowing up the dynamite purchased earlier. After a four minute wait for the fuse to burn, off it went with an incredible noise. This was at least a reminder of how harsh the work is in the mines, as the noise and dust underground when the dynamite goes off must be unpleasant to say the least.

Back down from the hill and out of our trackies, we reflected on a fascinating tour that helped to bring home the incredible and sad history of mining in Potosi.