Bolivia

I´m back in civilization for a while! Whew! It´s been an eye-opening past couple of weeks. We eneded up spending three days in the desert, mostly in Bolivia, rather than Chile. The bus ride through the Andes from Argentina to Chile was amazing, and surprisingly not scary (I had visions of curvy dirt roads with steep drop offs- those came later, in Bolivia ;) I loved San Pêdro de Atacama, a tiny town in the middle of the desert with the best food EVER. I had Quinoa with sweet tomatoes and mushrooms, and most places were open-roofed with at least one or two fire pits scattered around the local. Everyone was wearing their llama hats and the ambiance was cozy. I´d love to go back there with Juan and just spend a week trying all the great restaurants and doing fun desert activities during the day, like sandboarding, geyser and salt flat visiting, bouldering, etc.

We then spent three days traveling via 4X4 jeep through the Bolivian desert. It was not what I had expected at all. First of all, it was soooo cold!! Although the sun was shining, the altitude was so high and the winds were just ferocious... But in spite of the cold, we all got into our siwmsuits and jumped into some natural hot springs one day while waiting for lunch to be prepared. I was quite proud of myself, considering how adverse I am to the cold... That first night, everyone but me had an awful headache from the altitude, and several people even got sick. I had started taking my altitude pills that day, and they obviously worked! Some other highlights of the desert: gorgeous lagoons in shades of green, blue, red, and white. (The colors are due to the mineral content). Contrasting with the color of the lagoons were the pink and white flamingoes that migrate there in winter from Chile. We also visted the Salt flats of Uyuni, which is an enormous white desert of salt that stretchs for miles. In the middle, there is a funky island full of cacti- a very surreal scene. The other unexpected aspect of desert travel was the constant shaking- rather than the fine, smooth sand you imagine in the Sahara, for example, it was rough and made for a very shaky ride. That, coupled with the worst bus ride ever from Uyuni to La Paz, really shook us all up- after four days of constant shaking and rocking in a vehicle, you felt like your brain had surely leaked out your ear.

While La Paz was some of the students´ favorite city we´ve visited, I was ready to get to the pampas, in the northeastern part of the country. However, things got a little complicated due to some local referendums that made traveling by plane (our original intention) impossible. So, it was back on a Bolivian bus for 18 hours through the Andes. Let me sumarize this experience by saying that there is no lighting, heat, or bathrooms on the bus, and stops are almost nonexistant. Add to this the fact that almost all the roads in Bolivia are not paved and you have constant shaking (not helping the no-bathroom situation). Oh, and the curvy road only wide enough for one vehicle, even though there is constant two-way traffic. So, every few feet the bus would have to stop as close to the edge as possible to let a truck or car by. And, no, there are not guardrails. I wasn´t super worried because the driver went really slowly, but I did breathe a sigh of relief when we arrived in one piece to Rurrenabanque, our jumping-off point for the pampas.

The pampas of Bolivia reminded me of the bayou outside of New Orleans my family visited a few years ago. After a three-hour jeep ride down yet another non-paved road, we got into a boat (finally! no more jostling around!) and saw tons of alligtors, crocodiles, caimans, a huge variety of birds and cranes, the largest rodent in the world, called the capavera, I believe, which I actually found quite cute. We spent a couple of nights in a camp by the side of the river and went anaconda hunting (we just observed, not to eat) and swam with the pink river dolphins (though most of us who went in were more proud of the fact that they were also croco-infested waters). We also fished for pirahanas and got the eat them for lunch. I caught three really small ones, so I threw them back, but there was still enough for everyone to have a fish at lunch. There wasn´t much meat on them, actually. The highlight for me was on the way back, down the dirt road again, we saw the strangest figure in the middle of the road- it looked from far away like a small man crawling slowly across the road, but it was a sloth!!!! We wanted the other jeep behind us to see it, so the guide picked it up so it wouldn´t crawl away, and a couple of us took turns holding it while we waited for the other group, who turned out to have a flat tire. It was the coolest experience ever- he looked like he was smiling the whole time and he just moved his arms around a bit, ever so slowly. It really hit home how vulnerable they are- he had no defense at all to protect himself against us, and luckily we weren´t out to hurt him.

The last stop in Bolivia was Lake Titicaca. By then, all the constant cold and rough travels had worn me out and I was exahusted. A couple of us had to take a day just to sleep- I literally had no energy left at all. I had lao spicked up an annoying cough i´m still trying to get rid of. But the next day I felt great, and we did a 6-hour hike around the Island of the Sun, believed to be the birthplace of the Inca civilization. It was my favorite part of Bolivia- I loved the island and the lake was just gorgeous. My foot was totally fine, by the way.

We arrived here in Cuzco, Peru at midnight last night. I´ll save that for another entry, though.