Bolivia, you makin me dizzy

5:42pm
Posada de La Abuela (Grandmother´s Inn) Breakfast Room and Internet Cafe
La Paz, Bolivia



Que tal, everyone. I´m in Bolivia...In La Paz, the highest captial in the world. I´m 11,913 feet above sea level. I´m looking down at all of you. Especially you David Falato with your 200 Euro dinners.

I just was at a very smoky British Pub here in La Paz with my two new Aussie friends, watching the World Cup Rugby Finals between England and South Africa. After watching 80 minutes of non-stop action, I can honestly say...I still don´t get rugby. But Corona´s are $1, so goooo green guys.

I can´t believe I only have 5 days left in South America. La Paz for 2 nights, then Lima for 2 nights, then home. Tomorrow is going to be nuts. More on that later. Mom, please don´t worry, no one has died or been seriously hurt from doing what I´m going to do. Those of you who know about La Paz might be able to venture a guess.

A quick pictorial review of the last 7 days:

Saturday afternoon, went to Viña del Mar in Chile, and saw a couple of cool things. They actually have one of those stone Moais that they brought 2,200 miles here from Easter Island. It´s one of the smaller ones, but it´s still impressive. There are hundreds of them on Easter Island, erected to overlook and protect the people of Rapa Nui. This Moai in the middle of Viña del Mar overlooks and protects the locksmith and frozen yogurt shop across the street. All of the other Moai statues back on Easter Island are obviously jealous.



Saturday late afternoon: I took a bus to Santiago, and then boarded this sweet ride to San Pedro de Atacama, in the northern Chilean desert. For the 24-hour ride, I got a spot in the best section, first class, for $48 bucks.



The problem is, that my seat is directly below the speaker for the movies they show, dubbed in Spanish. This time we watched Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie and some movie called Shooter with Marky Mark. Twice. Each. The worst is when the guy forgets to take the DVD out at the end, so for an hour you hear the 20-second title screen music...over and over and over.



I have been careful with buses since the camera incident a couple of weeks ago...so as other passengers entered the bus leaving Santiago, I was just casually checking them out, making sure this was going to be a safe ride. With departure time passed by 2 minutes, and the bus engine starting to rev, I looked around and decided the passengers on my level were completely harmless. Awesome. Time to relax.

But as the bus started to pull away, I saw this one character who looked completely suspicious, tall dude, hat down low, strange scowl on his face, and a big dark brown leather jacket, slung over his right shoulder, and approaching MY bus. Oh no, driver please don´t stop for him.

The driver stopped and he boarded. There was one empty seat to the left and behind me one row. Please, don´t let that be his seat.

He walked in. Yep, that was his seat. He looked around suspiciously at everyone, stopping for a few seconds on me while keeping that damn jacket over his shoulder.

The first 2 hours of the ride, he sat there, jacket over his shoulder. He went to the bathroom six times. Six. Everytime with that jacket over his shoulder. I was freaking out.

I had no evidence, other than my absolute certainty that this guy was going to hijack the Tur Bus at sundown and deposit us all into the desert to walk 50 miles to the nearest town.

He kept looking at me. He knew I was on to him. But what´s he got under the jacket. A 12-gauge shotgun? A rusty machete, which would surely mean a slow painful death as he cut us all to pieces? Maybe a bomb rigged with an egg timer?

Nightfall came. Our opportunity to band together in the Cama section (that´s the reclining bed section) came to an end as all the other middle-aged Chilean men seated around me fell asleep from eating too much ¨chicken¨for dinner. Great. Now the safety of everyone on the bus and possibly the entire nation of Chile was on my shoulders. I was like Keanu Reeves in Speed. Except I was never an academy-award nominated actor. Or maybe that was Jack Nicholson. I get them confused.

I didn´t sleep. 2am. 3am. 4am. I tried but couldn´t sleep. The guy kept getting up and going to the bathroom with his jacket. Probably to arm his bomb. My mind was racing.

Finally, I fell asleep...and woke up around 8am. Holy crap, who was on watch while I snoozed? Has he made his demands yet - a briefcase full of Chilean Pesos - small unmarked bills, a twin engine Cessna jet filled with gas in the next town, ready to escape the country, or someone would DIE every 5 minutes?

I gathered myself, took a deep breath, and turned around...and in a flash, saw what he had been hiding in his jacket...I turned around and saw this:



He obviously was planning his attack by creating a diversion with a cute furry puppy. Diabolical. I felt like such a dummy.

So anyway...this is what the terrain looks like in Northern Chile. Very dry, no vegetation really, only around the small rivers...



Here´s San Pedro. A old town, but with charm. These are the store fronts.



Here´s my ride to go sandboarding. Does this look like Star Wars to anyone else?
R2? Three-PO? Where are those damn droids?



Here´s the sand dunes. I saw two mountains. A very tall mountain. And a smaller mountain. I´m no snowboarder, so I chose the correct mountain.



...which happened to be used by three 12-year old girls and their aunt Yanet.
Yes, I shred everyone. And I am to blame for teaching them the horrible ¨shredder¨hand jestures.





Tuesday I took a full day tour to the San Pedro salt flats and the Altiplanic Lagoons, up by a group of volcanos. It was dizzying being up there, around 4,200 meters. I got nauseous. Lots of people did. But it all got better when we came back down to 3,200 meters and we all got to pet a llama. Or maybe that was just me.



Wednesday morning, I woke up early, checked out of my hostel, and was picked up by a small van, taking me to the Chilean-Bolivian border and the start of a 3-day, 2-night 4WD trip to the Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flats.
On the van I met an Australian couple, Chris and Lisa.

And when we got to the border, we met up with our ride, our driver Richard, and two German girls, Kati and Regina. It was a cool group and we were excited to start our adventure. Although the border is at 4,200 meters and we were all feeling dizzy and a little sick.



We stopped a few times along the way to our first night. Here´s me and Chris at the mineral springs in the mountains. The water was niiiice and warm.



Here´s another stop, at Laguna Verde (green lagoon). The water was this color because of some mineral deposits coming down from the inactive volcano behind it.



So here is where we stayed the first night. It was FREEEEZING. And we slept in what felt like a cave, all in one room, Me on a noisy bunk bed (everyone thought it was raining outside during the night - it was me tossing and turning on my bed, which was lined with aluminum foil below it). The rest literally slept on stone slabs. With the altitude sickness, and the wind and the cold, nobody slept more than an hour. The two Germans called it the worst night of their lives. I would rate it top ten. Also in my top ten was the night my parents took me to see Kenny Loggins at the Mountain Winery. ¨Footloose¨ as an encore?

Our room is the third window from the left. Notice the rocks holding the roof down.



Here´s what our view was though. Of the Laguna Colorado (red lagoon). Really beautiful.



Here´s the four others at dinner the first night. It was about 35 degrees inside of our dining room. And dinner was some soup, moldy bread, cucumbers and tomatoes, and cold hot dogs. We had all heard not to eat vegetables in Bolivia, so we moved them around with a fork to appear like we ate them. How bad are we? Left to right: Regina, Kati, Lisa and Chris.



The place was run by our driver´s aunt and uncle, an older traditional Bolivian couple, who were very quiet and seemingly very traditional. The aunt ran a small store next to our room, where you could buy water, beer, and cigarettes. I bought a liter of water and then on my way out, saw this:



Check out the Derby promotional cigarette poster. If you can´t see what´s going on, it´s a woman in a sarong/bathing suit combo thing...and it seems to be falling off of her. So you should buy Derby cigarettes before the whole thing comes off. I love how I was paying this elderly Bolivian woman for my water, and behind her, in her OWN STORE, was a nudey poster.

Here the group is all having a good brush after dinner.



We were so glad to see the sun the next morning and headed out to see the incredible desert landscape and this, the Arbol de Piedra (Rock Tree). Please don´t fall over.



More lagoons and flamingoes (Didn´t get too close to the flamingoes, they kept walking away from us).



With concerns over dehydration, we all drank a TON of water. But, with no bathrooms along the way, we used nature. Richard told us it´s called ¨Baño Libre¨(free bathroom). We did a lot of baños libre along the way. But, at one of our stops, apparently the locals in the area were down on this idea. I wanted to take this sign home with me. Is that fire in the lower left? No putting out fires with urine people.



We stayed at a hotel made of salt the second night. Literally, the whole thing was made of salt. And was actually quite comfortable. Very good insulation, and with the salt flats about a mile away, plenty of resources.

The next day, we headed to the main event, the Salar de Uyuni. 12,000 square kms of salt flats. It was otherworld-like:



Here´s me and Richard. He was very quiet the first day, but after Lisa offered him some Pringles and when ¨Rock with You¨by Michael Jackson came onto the stereo through my iPod and I asked him if he heard of Michael Jackson and how he likes to have ¨relations¨ with llamas, he warmed up to us. It was probably just the Pringles.



One of the things you have to do when you are at the salt flats, is make goofy depth-perception pics, because there is no horizon. We did a few cool ones, that Chris and Lisa got on their camera. I´ll post if they send to me before I come back next week. Here´s one of everyone trying to set up the perfect shot with beer cans and rum bottles...Notice Richard sitting to the right, bored out of his mind:



This is me crushing Kati underfoot.



Sadly, the trip came to an end as we came onto the town of Uyuni around 2pm yesterday. I felt ill from the altitude, the food, and just wanted to sleep in a bed in a warm room...so by luck I found a bus that was leaving to La Paz last night...but it was supposedly 12 hours and I heard a tough ride. It was pretty bad. No heat, the bus was bouncing around like crazy for 6 of the 12 hours on dirt back roads, and we only stopped twice for bathroom breaks. The second one was about 4 hours after the first one and people went TEARING out of the bus to use the bathroom at the late night restaurant at our stop. I went wandering into the darkness to look at some stars and as I turned back towards the bus, in the moonlight I saw the silhouette of an elderly Bolivian woman, squatting next to me about 10 feet away. Before figuring out what she was doing, I decided to turn back around and look at the stars for about 30 minutes longer.

But it all got good when we made it to La Paz this morning.



I´ll have more pics next time on La Paz, a big big city...time for steak and beer for $4. goodnight everyone!