Day 35 - We went black hat but did not scalp anyone

To anyone who hasn’t seen Westworld:
1. Sorry for the reference
2. Stop reading this shitty blog now and go binge the entire first season, it’s so excellent.

Despite feeling a little unstable in the gut (damn you lingering effects of food poisoning + possibly not very clean salad from dinner at a weird-as restaurant the night before), we signed up for a 3 hour horse ride around the outskirts of Tupiza. Thankfully, we did not shit on ourselves or on any horses. Horses, heights, freaky diseases, and being mauled by a pack of wild dogs are my greatest fears (apart from the usual nausea of existence and gazing into the abyss, etc etc), and these things do not seem to be in short supply in Bolivia so far (exposure therapy ftw). The horse I was issued with was quite calm (and probably quite bored with all the inexperienced tourist riders like myself who freak out over anything faster than a slow trot), apart from when it really wanted to eat and decided to ram me into a bamboo thicket in order to get at its meal, and the only injuries suffered were a couple of bamboo scratches and really sore butt and thighs (how the hell do people do this for days on end?!?!). Supposedly, horses sense your fear and will panic along with you, so my inner monologue put on a Southern drawl and my face assumed an Eastwoodian scowl for 3 hours in an attempt to become more acceptable to my horse.

Yee-haw!


My dorky cowboy pose

The landscapes around Tupiza were amazing, I’m not even sure what else to say. Erosion has resulted in a huge amount of otherworldly structures in the rocks surrounding Tupiza, which we failed to get good photos of because I didn’t know how to wrangle a camera and a horse at the same time (average quality photos in this post courtesy of Jeremy's phone). These structure included huge phallic columns (complete with a knob on the end) known as “Los Machos” and a gap in a huge sheet of rock called “La Puerta del Diablo” (“del Diablo” seems to be a trend in naming things in Spanish). We also saw 5 or 6 condors circling around as we rode, so it must have been a good day for air currents (apparently, condors can stand on a cliff for days on end, waiting for the air to change in their favour, as it takes way too much energy to keep their huge bodies in the air just by wing flapping).

Riding off in search of the Maze


He has become the Man in Black

Nursing our sore asses after the ride, we wandered into one of the only restaurants that was still open (it being the Sunday after the town was buzzing with Carnaval festivities the night before), and pretty much ate whatever the friendly waiter put in front of us (huge meal featuring soup, salad, 5 different types of carbs and a large slab of roast meat for about $7AUD each). Apparently in much of Latin America, lunch is the most important meal of the day (many locals only having a soup or small sandwich for dinner), and certainly the most cost-effective way to fill your belly for the day, with most restaurants doing a substantial three-course meal including a drink for $3-8AUD in the bits of Bolivia that we have been to so far. Hunger sated, we went in search of an ATM that didn’t charge withdrawal fees (a common theme running throughout this trip so far), and found Banco Union, where the ATM in the small secure room was blaring out some terrible catchy early-90s-esque pop-glam-rock set to a music video featuring happy people going to the bank. I may or may not have had a brief but enthusiastic dance in the ATM room, before I realised that a middle-aged Bolivian couple who were waiting to use the ATM after me were looking on in horror. Oops.