Adventures in Bolivia

My two weeks in Bolivia was filled with adventure in one form or another - however a lot of it was transport related.

Firstly, La Paz. All of South America has crazy traffic, but La Paz is more hectic than the rest. Cars are literally bumper to bumper, people make lanes where there are no lanes, and people use their horns constantly. My first and second day in La Paz was spent checking out the witches markets (dried llama foetuses anyone?), buying presents and trying to organise a jungle expedition. My third day was spent mountain biking down Death Road, the world´s most dangerous road. It was a lot of fun and only a little scary - there are no longer cars on the road so it´s more the danger of sliding over one of the sheer cliffs as you come careening down the hill. I´m glad the tour guides waited until after we´d done the ride to tell us about the tourists who had died - some recently.

From La Paz, I flew to Santa Cruz with a couple of people I met on my tour of Peru. I´d booked a hostel online, however when we showed up, they said they were full, wouldn´t acknowledge the booking I´d made or deposit I´d paid and we had to squish into one room with two beds. After visiting the office to pay for the 3 day trip into Amboro National Park (part of the Amazon Basin) I had to go and buy the ugliest shoes known to man on the insistence of our tour guide (apparently we needed them for climbing on wet rocks). They were those kind of sandals with the velcro straps. The kind of sandals some people wear with socks. The kind of sandals I make fun of people for wearing. Needless to say, they went straight in the bin once the tour was over and I tried hard to avoid there being any photos of me wearing them. The jungle trip was certainly an adventure. Just getting into the park was a feat in itself. We went by van, jeep, boat, horse and cart, waded across rivers and hiked. It took us a full day just to get to the gates of the park. And then it started to rain. And didn´t stop. We spent the second day hiking to a waterfall - we waded across countless rivers and climbed waterfalls, all in the pouring rain. Just call me Indiana Jones. After lunch, our guides suggested we do a further 3 hour hike to another waterfall, making the total trek back, 5 hours. Something I have learnt is that Bolivians don´t really have much of a sense of time. When they say "oh, it´s about 20 minutes away", that can mean anything from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. The first waterfall was apparently 2 hours away - it took us about 7 hours to get there and back. The jungle was pretty amazing - very lush, green and tropical with vines and huge trees. And huge mosquitos. We didn´t see as much wildife as I had hoped - no toucans or monkeys, but we did see a frog and a snake and some beautiful butterflies. We were supposed to trek further into the jungle but there was too much rain, so we camped in the same place and then spent the last day trekking out again, in the same way as we trekked in. Definitely an adventure although not exactly what I had hoped for.

The next adventure was trying to get to Sucre for Christmas. We thought it would be very simple to be able to get an overnight bus. Oh how wrong we were. The tickets were only sold on the day of the trip, so one of my friends went to the bus station at 6am to get tickets for that night. Sold out. Everything was booked up, even flights. We discovered that there was another group of 3 staying at the hostel who were also trying to get to Sucre, so we hired a van to take us. And this is where the nightmare began. Bolivia has one paved road. We were not on it. We drove for 18 hours (it was meant to be 15) on a windy and bumpy dirt road. No sleep was to be had by anyone. I have never been happier to arrive somewhere. Christmas was a relaxed affair - we decided to splash out and stay at quite a nice hotel and we spent the day watching Christmas movies on cable tv (when we could find English ones) and eating a lot - pretty standard really. We even found a restaurant that did a turkey lunch - not very Bolivian I know.

Sucre is where I left the girls I´d been travelling with for the last week and headed to Uyuni. Getting there was a 14 hour mission on 2 buses. I arrived at 2am and luckily befriended some American guys on the bus so I didn´t have to walk to my hostel alone. The next morning, I left for a 3 day tour of the salt flats. What an amazing experience - one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. The weather was perfect - there had been a little bit of rain the day before meaning that the was a few inches of water on the salar, making for beautiful reflections of the sky. We stayed in a salt hotel and also saw red and green lakes and millions of flamingoes. Then came a tough 24 hours. My tour returned to Uyuni (a 9 hour bumpy 4WD ride) at about 6pm and at 11pm I got a train to Villazon, the small town on the border between Bolivia and Argentina. The train was supposed to arrive at 7am, but for some reason, it stopped at a station for 3 hours at 4am (something to do with rain I think - although since when that´s affected trains, I´m not sure), so it was 3 hours late. I was very glad I´d gotten a ´first class´ticket (a reclinable seat, a blanket and pillow, and breakfast). When I got off the train, I headed for the border. My guide book said it ´couldn´t be easier´ to cross to Argentina here. Yeah right. First I had to get my Bolivian exit stamp - there was a line so long it double backed on itself and after 45 minutes, I hadn´t moved. I heard that other travellers had been paying the guard at the front to stamp their passports. So I bribed an immigration official with 5 pesos and I got my stamp. Then I got in the line for the Argentinian immigration.....and spent 5 hours in that line. At one point I actually thought I would never get to the front. This was followed by a 7 hour bus ride to finally arrive in Sucre.

So Bolivia was definitely choccas full of adventure for me, and now that I´m in Argentina, I am looking forward to some down time. Bring on the wine and steaks!