The beautiful, exotic Bolivia

So, I suppose you are curious about my new travel mate. Don't worry, it's not going to be a love story of the century. I'm still planning to use my return ticket. (Although I wouldn't have anything against continuing my trip a bit longer.) Andrés and I are just travelling together through Bolivia and trying to cope with our cultural differences. I think the Chileans might after all be right about Argentinians being arrogant and Andrés is annoyed by my level of organisation. An independent, but sensitive Nordic woman and an Argentinian man with a strong character is a challenging combination. Andrés is a trekking guide from Patagonia, no Antonio Banderas - more like Danny DeVito, or maybe a combination of both -, likes cooking and is very social. The last two months he was doing voluntary work in Chile, building houses for the people who lost theirs during the earthquake. He's a real Argentinian: mate, asado and football are sacred to him. At this very moment he's watching the Worlcup, Argentina playing against Nigeria.

We started our journey to Bolivia by taking a tour to Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on earth. It meant sitting for three days in a four wheel drive vehicle on unpaved roads - sometimes just tracks in the sand. We saw colourful lagoons, volcanoes, geysers, weird rock formations, beautiful blue skies and the vast blinding white salt flat - some of most fabulous landscapes in South America, according to my guidebook. I'm surprised and happy that I didn't suffer from altitude sickness, even though we went to almost 5000 metres above sea. In San Pedro and later in Potosí I felt some fatigue and other mild symptoms, like loss of apetite. During the tour some other people had serious headache; the feeling like their head would explode.

The Bolivian border:

Blue skies and mountain landscapes, driving on the sandy/gravel terrain without proper roads:

Laguna Colorada:

Salt flat of Uyuni, looking like a frozen lake:

Our Toyota 4 WD, Johan from Belgium, Teo the Bolivian driver/guide, Isabel from the Netherlands, me and Andrés:

Now I've seen three Unesco World Cultural Heritage listed cities during my trip. The first one was Valparaíso in Chile and the two other ones are Potosí and Sucre here in Bolivia. I've really liked all of them; they are beautiful places. Potosí - once richer and bigger than London or Paris - is a mining city dominated by Cerro Rico, where mining still continues, four centuries after the first mines were started. I didn't have the courage to visit the dusty mines. Instead, at the hostel I watched the movie 'Minero del Diablo' (The Devil's Miner) telling about a 14-year-old boy working at a mine. I really recommend anyone to see it! What cought my eye in Potosí was the big amount of law offices. After Potosí we visited the capital, Sucre, "La Ciudad Blanca", where we could admire the buildings in the centre painted in their original colonial white.

After the European-like countries of Argentina and Chile, the poorer Bolivia feels exotic, more like the "real South America". Here you can see women in traditional clothes with their long hair in two braids, carrying a child wrapped in a colourful cloth on their backs. One traveller said the old women in their wide skirts look like bells when they walk. Ding-dong, ding-dong. :-) In one bus a local woman had two live chickens in her bag. The hostels and public toilets can be very basic, and internet connection is frustratingly slow. Outside the town of Uyuni there was a lot of rubbish on the ground - it was like a graveyard of old plastic bags. But the mountaineous landscapes between Uyuni, Potosí, Sucre and Samaipata were absolutely beautiful.

A street in Uyuni:

A street in Potosí:

What a busride the other night! We took a night bus from Sucre to Samaipata, a small town south of Santa Cruz. At 8 pm a wheel came off in the middle of the road!!! Luckily we were not in the mountains... We waited for half an hour on the roadside and in the next town I sat on the pavement for two hours waiting for the bus to be repaired. Later, on a narrow mountain road in the dark I was repeating in my head a prayer from my childhood and protective mantras I've learnt from my yoga teacher. Usually I'm not scared on my travels, but this time I was. Another time I woke up when the bus had stopped and the police were searching the bus. But don't worry for me, now I'm safely in Samaipata and have one more exciting experience to tell from my travels.