Salar de Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni is the world´s largest salt flat. It is vast, white and truly a natural wonder! Our tour landed us in a Land Cruizer with a slightly not too friendly Bolivian guide (who told me that because I´m white I don´t know how drive on dirt roads). However, once this misconception was swiftly corrected, we got on with an incredible experience.

The salt flats themselves seem to stretch into forever. The whiteness makes it a photographers hell, or playground, depending - there is no depth of field because of the endless white, and with a little (or a lot) you can get some really fun shots. We never ever quite got the focus down but had fun never-the-less! We visited Inca Huasi, one of the flats´ "islands". An incredible landscape awaited us "ashore" with giant, we´re talking up to 12m high, cactusses standing guard. It felt prehistoric.

Our tour took us past the salt mines, a train graveyard and areas that we thought only existed in Star Wars and Star Trek movies. Endless, weird and amazing! We took an outer galaxy-like trip past blood red Laguna Colorado, Arbol de Piedra and Desierto de Dali rock formations, thermal springs in the freezing desert landscape, the volcanoes of Licancabur and Uturuncu, the bright green Laguna Verde and ended in the smoking and steaming crater of the volcano Sol de Manana!

Truly indescribalbe landscape!

The old train graveyard outside of Uyuni.

Inca Huasi 

Our tasty salt walls!

Coral... in a desert... at 4500m?

 

Andean Rock Rabbit

Mountains of 7 colours.

Laguna Verde
When the wind is up it turns green because the high levels of copper and arsenic in the sediment are stirred up.

Dali´s Deset

Laguna Blanco

Laguna Colorado - The Red Lagoon. So beautiful!

Sol de Manana crater.

Thermal Springs

La Paz

The trip to La Paz from Copocabana was a pretty standard bus trip. Except for the ferry crossing over the  Tequina Straights! We all jumped off the bus, boarded a old boat and watched with fascination as our bus was loaded onto a small, very basic looking ferry. The 25 x 5 odd meter barge was powered by an old 60 horse power two stroke that proved that two strokes never quite die! How it propelled the barge across the straights remains a mystery!

We were lucky to have missed the recent strikes and road blockades which had closed the city off to the world for the previous week and a bit. Several fellow Gringo Routers who were ahead of us had warned us that they had been stuck in the city for days! Life was back to normal when we arrived.

We did spend some time walking the streets (although we decided to skip the rather dodgy illegal tours of San Pedro prison!). The colours in the stores and vendors stands were stunning. The markets in La Paz, like most Latin American countries, are an essential part of the culture and a vital part of the city. La Paz has several markets that stretch across the city. And you can buy pretty much ANYTHING! There are food markets, a flower market, an artisans’ market and even a black market where you can buy knock offs of big brands from North Face and Mountain Hardwear and Polo and Tommy.

However, the most interesting market and one of the more unique sights in La Paz is the Witches’ Market.

Also known as El Mercado de las Brujas, in Spanish, the Witches’ Market is an experience not for the faint of heart. Witches wearing dresses and dark hats sell a bizarre assortment of goods including potions, amulets, candy, silver jewelery, owl feathers, dried snakes, dried turtles, dried frogs, llama and alpaca foetuses, hooves, bones and many other strange items. But it really is the dried llama foetuses, which is used for Aymara rituals, that make the stomach turn.

Loading the bus at the straights.

Crazy costumes on the side of the road!