Salar de Uyuni

Here are some pictures from the 3 day trek across the Salar de Uyuni and into the High Andes in this white jeep. One driver, one cook and 6 sardines/tourists bounded across the mud tracks towards the Andean watershed. The flat white Salar (Dry Salt Lake) was the most comfortable piece of driving; over 100 km across the flats visting the Isla de Pescado in the middle (there were no fish incidentally, only cacti). The rest of the trip was more painful and eventually the shock absorbers gave up on the last day.

Nights in the high Andes can be passed shivering in your bed, harassing llamas or playing card games with your sardine-comrades, who you have got to know intimately by this point. We managed to aquire enough wine to make this enjoyable, even in villages in the high Andes. Although even in this remote area we were still forced to listen to some children playing the pan pipes over dinner. We were forced to pay them off.

At 4800m the atmosphere is too thin to chase flamingos around a lake, so my pictures of them do not warrent uploading. I am very fit now though. Back in Uyuni, the only food available is Pizza, so we escaped at 6am the next day on a bus that travels down a river bed towards the South. The journey took us into a long canyon of red sandstone, to the town of Tupiza.

Forgetting the horrors of off road jeep travel, we found some living transport in Tupiza. The host told us that this would be like riding a bike, but my horse kept trying to eat things; I have never had this problem on a bike. Occasionally it tried to bite Lou, or Lou´s horse, which I eventually learnt how to control. After 5 hours of this and trotting back into town, I found that horses have painful drawbacks too.

The taste of Sucre

Apart from its world heritage colonial architecture, great museums, local tribal festivals with colourful costumes and creatacious dinosaur footprints, Sucre is first and foremost a great place to eat. Here is a quick guide to some dishes which are best bought at the roughest looking establishments in Sucre. You can tell you´re in dull tourist cafes when the staff outnumber the customers and you can hear yourself talking, so best avoid them.

Mondongo - Beef in a spicy red sauce with rice and potatoes. Best enjoyed at the market where you can argue about the price whilst eating it. Someone will offer you a selection of luminous drinks to accompany it.

Chorizo - Enormous deep fried chorizo with enough spicy juice to soak into any bread on the plate. Comes with some salad so you can pretend it´s a square meal as you crawl out of the restaurant sweating fat.

Churrasco - Marinaded chicken cooked to perfection in a kitchen that regularly catches fire whilst you´re waiting for your dish. Served with Papas Fritas (Chips) and a vegetable if you´re lucky.

Salteña - Basically a cornish pasty but a more spicy. The cheapest local snack and widely available from stalls.

You can also spot whether you´re in the right kind of restaurant by the obligatory poster of a semi-clad woman on the wall. As usual in Latin America, this is advertising something unrelated to women´s underwear, such as a concrete company, oil refinery etc.. Sucre is also the first place I have ever seen both pornography and dinosaurs on the same advertisement - very innovative.

The market also stocks a wide selection of cakes for desert, should you wish to induce a heart attack.

If you don´t like the food (?) then you can go and see the dinosaurs. Here is one being incubated in the museum.

The dinosaur prints were discovered after the limestone behind the cement works was quarried, revelaing a fault line that used to be the bank of a tropical sea. Dinosaur trails over a hundred meters long are visible on the wall. Of as much interest though are the dinosaur models and sound effects all around the park.

As part of the world heritage site rules, everyone in Sucre has to paint their building white. Also, unike most other towns in Bolivia, the buildings are generally finished. Both rarities make the town very nice to walk around. I took some photos but had to delete the ones inside the Bank of Bolivia, as they assumed I would be coming back to rob the place later.

The highlight of our visit to Sucre was a local festival in Tarabuco, 2 hours outside the town. Tarabuco folk are famous for their woven clothes and dancing, and everyone from around the region gets together to dance, play traditional music, talk Quechua and drink Chicha (yellow maize wine). The male dancers wear large spurs on their boots that resemble circular saw blades and make a lot of noise. These are best avoided after too much Chicha.

Lou also had her fortune told by a lady and her two canaries. The canaries pick cards from the drawer under their cage, and reveal , very generally, your future. What a privilage for only 10p.

Real Potosí

After a few long us journeys around Bolivia visiting some friends in Cochabamba and enjoying the altiplano, we arrived in Potosí. Potosí is famous for its mineral wealth, and especially the silver mines on the hill ´Cerro Rico´outside the city. These were discovered by the delighted conquistadores in the 16th century, who immediately put anyone disposable down them. The Spanish still use the expession ´¡Es un Potosí!´ for being aghast at something´s wealth.

The mines have been worked continously and dangerously since before the Spanish arrived. Some estimates predict a large cave in quite soon as there is little control of the rats´ nest of workings. Naturally we had to have a look ourselves, and here we are ready to go down the pit.


Beforehand we were allowed to purchse large quantities of dynamite, fuses and Ammonium Nitrate (adds more power to the explosion) from the local market. Potosí is a good place to buy such goods and anyone from speaking age upwards can get hold of as many sticks of dynamite as they can count up to. Most of the dynamite went to the local miners we visited, but some was ignited for fun outside the pithead. If I had realised just how powerful it was, I might not have held it while our guide lit the fuse.



Two hours down the pit was more than enough for both of us, as the air gets more rancid, hotter and dustier the lower down you get. The miners work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. The death rate in Cerro Rico is aout 40 miners a year, however many more die from asbestosis and lung diseases afterwards. Thousands of miners work in the hundreds of mines on the hill. Some of the tunnels are pretty tight and we crawled around avoiding loaded trolleys and miners doing real work such as pushing and tipping 1 tonne trolleys, shovelling rock into buckets and hammering blasting holes. We managed to avoid falling down the shafts we saw, which have been worked by electric winches, rather than manpower, for the last 5 years.



I will save the pictures from the processing plants for my mineral process engineering friends to get excited about later. There was no need for health and safety in the plant, and any waste (arsenic/hydrochloric acid...) was easily disposed of in the local river.

At the end of a hard day´s mining, Potosinos go to watch the local football team. Real Potosí have proudly dug their way to the bottom of the Bolivian national league. We caught the action in the Copa Libertadores, which is for clubs from all over Latin America. Potosí started well by putting 2 goals past San Lorenzo from Argentina, and everyone was happy at half time. We presumed that 90 minutes at 4200m would be very hard for any visiting team, and looked forward to more of the same.
Cerro Rico illuminated behind the packed stands

However the referee thought differently and sent off a Potosino shortly after half time. Despite a determined stray dog trying to waste time by running round the pitch for 5 minutes, San Lorenzo got two goals back. Late on, the referee awarded a dubious penalty to San Lorenzo, and it was all over. I doubt the referee slept well that night as he was escorted from the pitch by riot police and might have been dynamited later that night. Even the abuse coming from the Family Stand was a good education for our Spanish.

The Noisy but Industrious Bolivianos

So, we left Cusco behind and continued on the Gringo trail. The railway from Cusco to Puno is the highest in the world, and the bus overtook the sluggish, expensive train before the watershed at 4335m. We drank free sugary yellow Inca Cola to celebrate and try to relieve the light headache. Puno turned out to be very cold and, like lots of Peruvian towns, full of half finished ugly buildings. We didn´t stick around long, but did go on the lake to see the Yuvari - a London built steamship brought upto the lake across the Andes from the Pacific in pieces by mules (took 6 years). The ship ran on Llama dung, as there was no coal around here. Thankfully someone coverted it to run on diesel.


A trip around Lake Titicaca brings you into Bolivia. The first town is Copacabana, where boats leave for the Isla del Sol. This island is where Manco Capac, the first Inca (King), was said to have been born - or rather sprang from the sacred rock at the temple of the Sun. Now there is a good hot dog stand to commerate this event. The island is bleak and we walked from one end to the other using a map from a leaflet and thus not managing to find any more food until very late in the day. It´s no wonder Manco decided to head to Cusco to set up the Inca empire.

Just south of Lake Titicaca is La Paz. The coach descended into the valley and we found our way through swarms of people, buses, stray dogs and market stalls to somewhere to stay. This was probably because we decided to arrive on Friday night, but La Paz does not generally live up to its name. A search for good food next day took us to the markets. I managed to get some fried whitebait potatoes and ubiquitous Corn for a few pence and Lou found some bread and cheese, although obtaining change small enough to be able to purchase anything took longer than eating it. Bolivia ranks amongst the cheapest countries visited, and we had trouble spending the money left over from Peru, even when Lou started investing in pottery and Llama wool weavings offered insistantly by women in bowler hats.


The noise of the market on Sunday could only be topped by a dancing parade with a band, setting off fireworks at every road junction to ward off the aggresive traffic.

We escaped for a mate de coca (coca tea) and discovered a museum dedicated to Bolivia´s main industry. Apart from breaching the peace, Bolvians also spend a lot of time making top quality Cocaine from the rich supply of andean coca leaves. In the Coca museum we were taught what chemicals to use, and what the start up costs and risks of such an enterprise are. Here is a picture of their mock up jungle laboratory. I was glad to see them using only the best English made Hydrochloric acid for this process, pictured here.