Last bit of South America Continued...

Okay, so back to La Paz, the largest and highest city in Bolivia, according to our guidebook. And I would like to add, the dirtiest. Wow, where do I begin with La Paz. Imagine a shopping mall that sells anything and everything you can imagine. Now imagine that all the shop owners take all of their goods and plop them on a table in the middle of the busiest street in town. And now imagine that all the goods are complete crap. Add in loads of shoe shiners wearing ski masks, vans driving by with 10-year-old boys yelling out destinations and prices, indigenous women in bollo hats rushing around, and a few men pissing on the street, and voila!...you’ve got La Paz. Ok, ok, I’m being a bit harsh. But I don’t think I’m too far off. It’s quite an experience. We did find a great hostel to stay in called the Adventure Brewery Hostel, a hostel and microbrewery in one! They have a BBQ every other night and make a seriously good burger on the grill. You can also find some good bites to eat if you stick to what the Lonely Planet recommends. And there’s lots of cheap shopping, of course. I think the scariest thing that we heard about being sold on the street were the Radio Taxi signs that cabs put on top of their cab. The local police and guidebooks always tell tourists to only take taxis that have the Radio Taxi sign on top of the cab, otherwise you risk getting into a fake cab and being temporarily kidnapped and robbed. And here they are selling these things on the street! Your best bet is to get your hostel or hotel to call a taxi for you. That’s certainly what we did.

One of the very best things about La Paz is that it is where Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking runs its trips down the “World’s Most Dangerous Road". After a bit of coaxing on Mike’s part, I agreed to give this craziness a try and we signed up. The road gets its name because it has the most deaths per year of any other road in the world. It is a long, winding, narrow, dirt road with drop-offs like you’ve never seen. And by the end of it, you are deep in the Bolivian rainforest. It averages about a bus a week that goes off the road. We actually saw a tour bus that had gone off the road the previous week sitting at the bottom of a ravine. Not a good sight to see. The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, but believe it or not, drunk driving is actually the leading cause of accidents.



We, however, made it safely down to Corioco and quickly began planning our next adventure into the Bolivian jungle. All of the other bike riders who weren’t staying on to do a jungle tour actually had to ride the Gravity van back up the World’s Most Dangerous Road to get back to La Paz that evening. We opted not to do that, for obvious reasons, and we were especially happy with our decision when it began to pour down rain right before they were loading up to leave. Imagine traveling that road in the rain? No thanks.

For our jungle tour, we went with a company called Deep Rainforest. We ended up really liking them and would recommend them. The first day, a driver drove the 7 of us to the river where we met our tour guides and the boat. Along for the journey was myself, Mike, 2 guys from Australia, 2 girls from England, and one guy from Spain plus one English-speaking guide, one non-English-speaking guide, a guy to drive the boat, and a cook and her son. We camped out two nights under a tarp, one night on the bank of the river and the other night in a small village with about 15 people and one sloth living there. During the day, we did treks through the jungle/rainforest with Ruben, our guide, literally creating the path with his machete as we went. We also went piranha fishing and actually ate what we caught that night for dinner. We even snuck up on a huge pack of wild boars at one point…around 100 of them!! Good thing they didn’t try to charge us. Mean buggers.



On the third day, we were in the boat most of the day, heading through the beautiful national reserve of Madidi. The views were spectacular. Madidi is supposed to be one of the most well preserved rainforests in the world. By the end of the day, we had made it to Rurrenabaque, the largest town in the Bolivian jungle…3 days and 2 nights without showers or toilets and we were very happy to be back in civilization. From there, we hopped on a tiny Amazonas flight (complete with a grass runway) and headed back to La Paz to begin our travels down to Uyuni for our final tour in Bolivia, the salt deserts.



After passing through the small towns of Sucre and Potosi, we finally made it to Uyuni. Traveling across Bolivia takes a REALLY long time, as there are very few flights anywhere and so everyone just ends up taking buses. And unlike buses in Argentina, there are NO nice buses in Bolivia…you’re lucky if you find a road that’s actually paved. More than likely, you’re traveling on a dusty and bumpy dirt road, packed into a dingy bus with locals sitting all along the aisles and probably on top of you if you have the aisle seat (sorry Mike). The bus proceeds to stop every 15 minutes to let someone on who will try to sell you something, usually some sort of mystery food. It also smells pretty bad...because of the mystery food or the locals letting their kids and animals pee on the floor. Unfortunately, if you open the window, you just get a swarm of dust in your face. Also, the bus NEVER leaves on time and so your trip almost always ends up taking longer than what they told you. Yeah…I think I’ve had all the Bolivian bus rides I can take for a lifetime. I don’t know, I hear Greyhound buses in the States are pretty bad…

But back to Uyuni. This is the town that everyone starts their Salar de Uyuni (aka, salt desert) tours from. Not much to it and it’s very, very cold. However, there is a fantastic pizza place called Minutemen, which is owned by an ex-pat from Boston. They also serve up some amazing pancakes for breakfast…with maple syrup! That was a first for us in South America. Anyhow, at this point, we had met back up with our Arizona friends, Erin and Cira, and so we decided to book a 4-day, 3-night tour together with Licanabur/Tupiza Tours, who were recommended in the Lonely Planet (but that we would NOT recommend). The way these tours work is that you have a guide who drives a group of about 6 people across the salt desert, spending the night in very basic accommodations in small towns along the way. Basically, we had no heat, no hot water, and no electricity. There was a cook that came along as well and cooked up all of our meals. It was so cold that we had to sleep with our hats and gloves on. But all of this was well worth it for incredible landscapes that we got to see, which hopefully you all have already checked out in our photos. Flamingos, geysers, mirror lakes, red & green lagoons, volcanoes, and lots of salt!! Bolivia, surprisingly enough, seems to have it all. Unfortunately, we struck some bad luck in that our guides turned out to be really bad. They hardly spoke to us and usually lied to us when they did. Very strange. But for some reason, lying seems to be a very common thing that Bolivians do to tourists.



By the end of our tour, we had made it down to Tupiza, which is in the very south of Bolivia. We were so anxious to get back to Argentina that we decided to immediately jump on a bus down to the Argentine border, crossover, and catch an overnight bus to Salta, Argentina. Around midnight, as soon as all of us were fast asleep on the bus, we get woken up for a checkpoint. Everyone is told to get off the bus, take ALL of our luggage off the bus, and wait in line for it to be searched by the Argentine border patrol. It was freezing cold and we were tired, but it’s understandable. I’m sure there are people that try to smuggle illegal items across the border. However, we weren’t so understanding when we stopped AGAIN at 3am to do the exact same thing AGAIN. Even funnier was that the border patrol didn’t even bother to search our bags as soon as they saw our U.S. passports.

So, needless to say, by the time we got our sleep-deprived and very, very dirty selves (none of us had showered in over 5 days) to Salta we were quite excited…we had made it to Argentina! Ahhhh…real coffee, real food, hot water…we were in heaven. As our luck would have it, it so happened to be Argentina’s 2-week winter holiday and the city was packed. It was 6am and we had to try around 7 hostels/hotels before we found a place with room. Luckily, a very nice cab driver helped us out and drove us around to all of these places. Love the Argentines. Sadly though, due to the holiday craziness, we decided to nix our ski trip to Bariloche. Next time, next time. Instead, we headed straight back to our home away from home, Buenos Aires, where we quickly adjusted to a life of WiFi cafes, boutique shopping, devouring delicious meats and empanadas, and starting our nights out at 1am. Our last 2 weeks in BA flew by and soon enough we were saying goodbye to South America, a continent that both Mike and I will definitely be returning to at another time in our lives….hopefully sooner than later!

As of now, we are in Aussie country. After a quick 17 days in New Zealand and about a week here in Sydney, we are headed to Melbourne tonight. We spent my b-day last night seeing Rigoletto at the Sydney Opera House and then eating seafood at a restaurant on the harbor. Really good!



But more to come soon about all of that as well as New Zealand!