Day 55 - we flew in Bolivia and did not die

We made a special effort to be up super early on the morning of day 55, in order to bid farewell to Sucre and fly onwards to Rurrenabaque in the Bolivian Amazon via La Paz. Our efforts were all for naught, as Bolivia’s legendary flight delays did not disappoint, and we were left sitting around the airport for a good couple of hours. Luckily, we had the foresight to leave heaps of time between our two flights, and we landed in La Paz just in time to get our next flight. Which was terrifying. About 10 of us were ushered into a plane so tiny that even the tiny old Bolivian ladies had to hunch in order to make their way down the aircraft. This was possibly the coolest flight I’ve ever been on, as we briefly broke through the thick mantle of clouds about 10 minutes out of La Paz and realised that we were flying only slightly higher than the jagged mountain peaks around us. Crazy stuff. After about 40 minutes, we began our descent into endless green punctuated only by winding brown rivers snaking through the thick jungle to eventually join the main branch of the Amazon River thousands of kilometres later.

Here I was, being terrified by how small our first plane was. Little did I know.


Interior of the second tiny plane (single seat on each side of the aisle)


Suddenly, a snowy mountain peak breaks through the clouds practically right next to us


Yay trees! Haven't seen many of you in a while...


Touchdown in the jungle in our even tinier plane

Stepping onto the tarmac at the tiniest airport, we immediately began stripping off our high-altitude layers as the heat and humidity of the jungle smacked us soundly in the face. Yep, this was the jungle, alright. We were met at the airport by a guy from the company we’d booked our tour with, and it turned out that 2 of the girls on our flight were also doing the exact same tour, with the same company, as we were. We were all doing the 5 day/4 night jungle and pampas combined tour with Mashaquipe, a company which I chose because they were eco-certified by the local Green Action Alliance. Although not the cheapest option (but by no means the most pricey!), we’d read really bad reports about dodgy guides from the more budget companies doing terrible things ranging from letting tourists feed the wild animals to keeping animals in captivity just so tourists can have a look at them. None of that shit for us, thanks. After sorting out logistics for departure to the jungle come morning, we had a brief wander around the town, prepared our bags, and went to bed nice and early after a delicious dinner of Amazonian catfish (the local specialty).

Plantain salespeople on the riverbank. Plantains are the best!


Cute tree! It was nice seeing lush colourful vegetation again after so long in barren-ish highland areas


This slice of fish was about 70% as thick as my waist!

Days 48-49 - weekends are still weekends when one forces school upon oneself

Taking a rest from Spanish lessons on Saturday, we spent the day exploring a couple of different parts of the city. First up was the Mercado Campesino, an overwhelmingly huge market a bit further out from the city centre that sold pretty much anything anyone needed for daily living. Everything except for the electric razor Jeremy needed in order to replace the one he’d lost somewhere along the way. We visited the cemetery in the afternoon. I was under the impression that this would be like the one in Buenos Aires, full of historical graves of the rich and famous. However, this one was actually still very much in use, with recent and unused graves everywhere. It was the day before father’s day, so the place must have been especially busy, and we saw large numbers of people adding fresh flowers to tombs. We even came across a funeral service, complete with a mariachi band playing mariachi Simon & Garfunkle covers. 

Graves


Ladders are available on demand for those wishing to tend to the more elevated graves


This kid (I assume) must have really been into Pokemon :(




Such a cute tomb

Later on, we walked uphill to the lookout point outside the Recoleta Museum, where we got a beer at the cafe while watching the sun set over the city. We decided to splurge on dinner after a week of cheap-ish eating, and headed over to supposedly one of the fanciest place in town - a (Bolivian-)French restaurant called La Taverne. Less than $50AUD bought us 2 huuuuuuuge steaks and a bottle of wine. Bolivia prices ftw.

View from the lookout


This steak was so huge I couldn't move for a good 12 hours after eating it


Jeremy's epic bacon-wrapped steak

We dragged our still-overstuffed asses out of bed early on Sunday morning in order to attend an excursion organised by our Spanish school. We were off to visit Tarabuco, an indigenous town a couple of hours away, where they happened to be holding their annual Pulljay festival. This is held at the end of the wet season to celebrate what I understand is the harvest and the historical defeat and possible consumption of some Spanish conquistadors. People from villages all around the region come to Tarabuco in their traditional clothing to sing, dance, flirt, and get absolutely smashed. We did none of these things, apart from maybe get a bit tipsy. Wandering around a super crowded and sun-exposed town became too much after a couple of hours, so when we spotted the beer tents, we headed straight for them in order to indulge in some super cheap beers ($6AUD for 2 litres) and delicious BBQ (such good grilled pork, my stomach still whines when I think about it).

Ponchos for sale


A stall selling the cute petticoats which are part of the traditional Bolivian cholita outfit. See here for an interesting article on cholitas. I think it's seriously cool how many Bolivian women choose to wear their traditional clothing in an authentic not-just-for-tourists way. Plus, the outfits are pretty cute (as in vaguely similar to clothes I actually wear when I'm not dressing like the slob I am).


Textiles for sale


These chickens for sale were so cheap I was tempted to buy them all, eat a couple of the unlucky ones, and set the rest free


So many colours!


Huge bags of coca leaves for sale


The crowd gathered in the main festival area


There was a tower strung with huge quantities of foodstuffs, including entire cow and sheep carcasses, that everyone danced around


Epic shoes


Epic hats


Youths in traditional garb enjoying the festivities


People playing interesting instruments


Detailed embroidery on clothes

Days 43-47 - Adventures in food and Spanish language failure

We initially signed up for 4 hours per afternoon of private Spanish lessons (separated, as my Spansh is better than Jeremy’s), and by day 3, this had reduced to 3 hours per afternoon (because learning is hard work!). Jeremy worked on the basics, while I reviewed all the stuff that I already knew and worked a bit more on my listening and speaking abilities (basically, I paid a guy to speak repetitive Spanish at me really slowly and only in 5 out of 14873489273 tenses while I tried to tell him about all the cute dogs I’d seen recently). Meanwhile, we spent a nice week not seeing too much of the city but managing to consume some interesting foods. We thought that Sucre would be the best place to eat some dodgy-ish things, as we would have a private toilet in which to have the runs in peace if required. We also "splurged" on some pretty luxurious meals, because Bolivia is so damn cheap.

A traditional Bolivian breakfast - api (thick sweet corn drink) with a cheese empanada


Picante pollo - a traditional dish of chicken cooked in some sort of non-specific spicy sauce


Mondongo - a traditional dish of pork bits stewed in a bright red sauce. Jeremy was determined to sample this at every stall in the market (he managed about 2)


The juice aisle in the market. One of the drinks they served was a crazy beer shake (not great, far too malty)


We hit up local chocolate place "Chocolates Para Ti" perhaps a little too often for their delicious ~$2AUD chocolates drinks


Ok this is probably a very controversial stance, but Bolivian salteñas > Argentine empanadas any day. Salteñas have a delicious salty-sweet flavour, the filling is slightly soupy and they are usually consumed for morning tea (most places stop selling them after midday)


A papa rellena - deep fried potato stuffed with egg and cheese.


A tucumana - a fried pastry thing filled with (in this case) veges.


An epic watermelon and goat cheese salad. Like the other 2 items above, this was from Condor Cafe, a super cheap and delicious vegetarian non-profit place that we may have ended up at far too often, where a meal could be had for $2-$5AUD and the uncooked vegetables did not result in food poisoning


We tried a "chifa" (South American-Chinese fusion cuisine) place and it was super average. Our meal was served with these weird sauces (a weird watery mayo, a weird watery sweet chilli sauce, and a weird watery concoction of non-spicy chillies soaked in vinegar)


Attempt 2 at "pique a lo macho". The chillies on this thing were so spicy I nearly died after making the mistake of putting a whole slice in my mouth at once


The queue by "Siete Lunares", the world-famous-in-Sucre chorizo stall in the Mercado Central


Jeremy looking stoked with his Siete Lunares choripan (very different from Argentinian choripan)


We had THE BEST tiramisu at this restaurant which was basically this Italian guy's living room, which had the tiniest sign outside the door and you had to ring the doorbell to be let in if the chef was in the mood for customers. The pastas and panna cotta were very good too

We also went to the movies one night, where we paid less than $4AUD each to see the new Kong (or in my case, perve on Hiddleston) in 3D. And completely in Spanish. Luckily, it’s not like this was a film that had huge amounts (or in fact, any) character development or even much exposition of storyline via dialogue. We also tried Bolivian fast food (a luxury item here, costing as much as a 3-course meal in an average restaurant), and now I completely understand why McDonald's was so unpopular in Bolivia that it was banned.

Holy crap the patty in this burger actually tasted like beef and not whatever overprocessed cardboard they put in McDonald's burgers. Because I'm terrible, I also had "the dark waters of imperialism" (not even joking, this is what the president of Bolivia calls coca cola)

Friday market St Paddy’s day, and to “honour” Jeremy’s Irish heritage, we visited a couple of “fine” drinking establishments in Sucre. After a somewhat disappointing pint in the Irish pub, we quickly left as the oonce oonce and the hordes of wasted young backpackers arrived. We shifted our disappointment to Goblin, a craft beer place decorated with murals of... you guessed it, goblins. Then it was onward to Florin, where we’d had a nice IPA a few nights ago. We were no less disappointed here, as they ran out of IPA and we had watery stouts instead. 

He's pretty tall for a leprechaun


Such a dainty beer


Beer level up!

Day 38 - Salt flats tour part 3: Rocks are a fine substitute for lakes

Our drivers had given us 2 choices for day 3 of our tour: either the usual route visiting a bunch of lakes and the much-photographed Árbol de Piedra (basically a rock that is supposedly shaped like a munted tree), or a more “hands on” route featuring a bunch of interestingly shaped rocks where we could do a bit of walking and climbing. We all agreed that the second option sounded more appealing after 2 days of mostly sitting. This choice did not disappoint. We spent an excellent morning clambering over all sorts of structures without any safety equipment in a way that my mum and various tourism safety committees back home would strongly disapprove of (dpn't worry mum! No one got hurt!). The drivers were super helpful with showing us good hand and footholds in the rocks, while yelling “Chinchilla! Chinchilla!” as encouragement after we kept spotting furry little chinchillas scampering amongst the rocks. Modesta hung out in the car, as the climbs were “much too easy” for her. 

Rock shaped like a camel!


Rock shaped supposedly like the World Cup


There were lots of hoof and paw prints in this half-cave thingy, including some suspiciously large feline-looking ones


Quinoa!


Going up!


Eep upskirt shot! Admittedly I only wore this skirt because I ran out of other pants and these tights had a weird non-fitting crotch that needed to be hidden


Made it!


Strange shapes in a rock overhang


There was this weird-as lake in the middle of heaps of rocks in an otherwise totally dry area. So strange, so cool!


Aww check out the Mona Lisa smile on this llama. I bet it knows a secret that you don't know.


Aww wee tiny llama. It looks so soft, I just want to give it cuddles


On top of another thing I climbed which I perhaps shouldn't have


This looks like a promotional shot for some shitty nu-metal album or something


O hai there, more flamingoes. Fancy seeing you guys here

Throughout the morning, I had faced my fear of heights, but I was insufficiently prepared to face my fear of old chicken. When Modesta presented us with chicken for lunch, my pre-weakened digestive system (which had been feeling on-and-off ever since the food poisoning episode in Salta) was extremely skeptical. Wtf was this chicken doing for 3 days in a hot vehicle?! Or was this fresh chicken that she had somehow managed to wrangle in the desert?! Helmut claimed that it was some of the flamingos we saw yesterday. I ate it anyway. It was yum and I did not die in a salmonella poo explosion. The afternoon saw us race onwards to and beyond Uyuni, as Helmut was scared that the salt hostel near the salt flats would be full if we got there too late. We still found time to stop at the train graveyard outside Uyuni and have a decent look through the  rusted corpses of the retired trains. For some reason, this area was swarming with flies, and the rest of the drive to our accommodation halfway between Uyuni and the salt flats was spent waging a valiant battle against the insectoid horde that had invaded our car. 

Choo Choo!


Don't ask me what a Crous is, I have no idea


Rusty...

It turned out that Helmut’s fears were unfounded, as the only people that got to the hostel before us were the other half of our group in the other car. When they said “salt hostel”, they weren’t kidding. The buildings and the furniture inside the building were all made from blocks of salt. This is fucking crazy and we questioned its long-term viability (salt + water = hmmmm….), and our skepticism was proven not to be unfounded when someone lifted up the tablecloth on the dining table to reveal that a huge chunk of it had dissolved off! Insane stuff. We had previously been warned that the accommodation was going to be very basic, with no running water or electricity. This was a huge lie: we got private rooms instead of having to dorm, the power was plentiful, the toilets flushed, and the kitchen even had an over much to the delight of Modesta, who proceeded to cook up a vege lasagne for dinner with the help of the French+Spanish couple from the other car. The rest of us played a crazy card game known as the “travelling Israeli card game” which the German+Spanish couple learned from a bunch of travelling Israelis. We were interrupted by the arrival of a group that unfortunately had within its ranks a super loud, super rude, super American-accented man who proceeded to yell at his poor wife about how boring his day on the salt flats was (wtf this is one of the greatest natural wonders of the world!), how insufficient the accommodation was (see my notes above about how awesome it was), why their group wasn’t being served dinner as early as ours was (we had arrived a good hour before them), etc. He then insisted on talking to us during dinner about whether there were any rivers he could go fishing in for the rest of the trip (he was doing the tour in the opposite order to us), and condescendingly replied “you’d be surprised” when we told him that the tiny rivers we came across were barely a foot deep and not likely to house the one special Amazonian fish species he was looking for (not to mention that we were in the altiplano, 4000m above the bloody Amazon). Thankfully, Helmut, bless him, procured some wine for us to have with dinner, which helped take the edge off this douchebag’s rantings, and we went to our salty beds tipsy (one feels the intoxication much faster at high altitude) nice and early in preparation for our 5AM departure time in the morning.

Everything ere is edible, even the Jeremy in the doorway. But that is called "cannibalism" and is frowned upon in most societies.


Even the bed was made of salt

Bonus Jesus for extra XP: Check out this epic Jesus bus we came across in the middle of nowhere!