More of Chris's photos rolling in

I will remind everyone that the link to check out the photos on Chris's Flickr site is over there --> on your right at the top of the side bar. Same for me.

Looks like he posted some more last night in the wee hours while I was asleep! (I really want to know how he found so many totally clean penguins. All the ones I saw were covered in mud.)

The last couple of days

Pictures from these two days can be found in the La Paz set, since that is where base camp is.

The last couple of days have been hectic as we went on a tour to Isla del Sol on Lake Titcaca yesterday and to Tiwanaku today for a "1/2 day" excursion that went well into the afternoon. I now sit in my room, on my hard, hard bed, listening to drunk Bolivians scream-singing (Carnival starts here tomorrow, just in time for us to get the heck out of here!).

So, Titicaca (which means "gray cat", much to my disappointment) was beautiful, and some of the journey was really lovely country-side, but, basically, we traveled for 10 hours (5 hours both ways) to go visit an Inca temple that isn't much to look at for 30 minutes. It was cool to be where Inca were and to see their temple, and the boat ride there was awesome, and we drank from a spring of eternal life, and we got to do a little shopping and had a great lunch. There's also the very beginning and the very end of the trip, where you go through the city that feeds into La Paz, called El Alto, where you sit in crazy traffic, made worse by preparations for Carnival and the anniversary of the town celebration, where you really just become so on-edge that you become exhausted, so it's sort of a even-out day for me at that point. I think that Chris is in about the same boat. However, now I can say that I have sailed on Titicaca, been to Copacabana, and visited Isla del Sol, so I consider it a day well spent.

Oh, also, our tour guide is kind of insane. We had him all 3 days and he firmly believes that dinosaurs and people walked the Earth at the same time, that crop circles were made by aliens, and that the rapture will happen in 2017 and that FOR SURE something bad will happen next year (2012). By the end of the day I was really trying hard not to tell him that he was nuts, but I managed to make it. It was amusing for a while, until it made me start to think that I should really consider pretty much every other thing he was telling us about where we were and the culture and stuff, and sure enough, Wiki has proven him wrong on a number of accounts. Still, I am happy to have seen what I have seen in person. *sigh* We Have piece of paper with lots of interesting facts in Spanish that he wanted us to read. I think we are going to translate it and post it here after we get back as an amusing exercise.

Bolivia is actually really cool. I don't feel unsafe here at all. Most of it is really beautiful, and some of it is a positive slum, but you have to expect that in a 3rd world country. La Paz is possibly the most beautiful city that I have ever seen at night. El Alto is insane and I would not ever think to go there without a handler. The landscape is simply stunning here though and people should not be afraid to come and see it for themselves.

Here's some sights from the Titicaca trip.

Water taxis:


Copacabana and Titicaca (don't be confused, the lake is so huge that you can't see the other side, this is just a small passage to another island):


Candle offerings in the Copacabana church. One of these candles was lit for a dear departed friend, The Whew, who left us while I was away:


Reid Dragon Boats:


4,000 year old terracing, that is still in use:


Inside the Incan temple:


Today we went to Tiwanaku, which is a culture thousands of years older and before the Inca. I think the place had bad ju-ju because I entered the area, got a really bad stomach-ache which stayed throughout the whole time that we were there, only getting worse, and disappeared minutes after we left. :-) Anyway, the temple was largely in ruins thanks to the Spanish tearing it down to use the stones of a 3,500 year old building to build a church (damned conquistadors!). However, some monoliths were still in tact and the site was very interesting, given what was left. The Bolivian archeologists are rebuilding some of the walls, and excavating a bunch of it, so as long as funding keeps showing up, they should be able to do really great things with the site. Then we came home in the afternoon and packed up to come home.

Here are some sights from today:

El Alto traffic from our car. This goes on for miles:


Sun Door (evidently, it's a calendar):


Monolith action (these are calendars):








Circled-up, chanting, ritual-making people who our guide (of course) thought was contacting aliens (I'm pretty sure the Tiwanakans would have somehow made these folks into a calendar too, if they were here):


Here's a wall:


and a door:


These poor folks were just trying to get ahead (in the temple of the underworld):




Some Bolivian ladies:


and some men (they were getting their blessings before Carnival so were in their Sunday finest):


And lastly, this is just a cool pic from the side of the art museum in La Paz:


Anyway, that about rounds out this adventure. I think Chris has a couple more posts to do about the Atacama, and I'm sure he'll post here when he uploads pictures from this trip, or possibly been others that we have done in the past. I'll do a wrap up at some point when I decide to reflect on what I have seen, so if you are RSSing, keep it up, and if you are checking in, well, it might be cool to check in every once in a while. We intend to use this blog for all of our trips, so there should be more content rolling in from time to time. If I get wifi in the airports, I will update about our progress for our 23 hours of traveling back home, and I am sure that you can expect a post on how much I love my bed! So, stay tuned!

La Paz

Today we slept in and then went on a city tour of La Paz. I thought we were just getting your run of the mill city tour, but it ended up that we had a private tour and a "handler" who came with us to be a guide and negotiate with people if necessary. I started a Flickr set here.

We went to the valley of the moon (of La Paz - not to be confused with the one in Chile):


And there was a guy singing, playing flute (I bought one) and guitar on top of a peak:


We went to a high point to see the city, which is indescribable. This picture does not do it justice. It's huge and runs up every mountainside in every direction:


Then to the city center to see the Congress building:


And ran into some trouble that was for the birds:


We went and saw Inca and Tiwanacan gold and couple of other museums in the Spanish part of the city:


And then wrapped up at the witches market, where they will sell you vicuna fetuses and other offerings for Pachemama:


As well as a lot of other hand-crafts from Bolivia at really crazy cheap prices. We had a good time and learned that La Paz is not really very scary at all.

Tomorrow, we go to Lake Titicaca to visit Copacabana and Isla del Sol. It's going to be a long day of a lot of driving, but it seems cool to go check it out for a few hours and we have again a private tour so that's pretty awesome. I will probably report on that on Friday as we are supposed to get back from that pretty late tomorrow. We'll see.

Photoblog about the three days in the Altiplano

Chris is developing a detailed report in which he wrote down actual names of stuff and thorough accounting of things, but until that happens, I will show you pictures of what we saw and you can refer back to these when he tells the story.

So we get picked up by a dude at the appointed time, who speaks no English, but I know enough Spanish to get that we will go to the Bolivian border, which is at the summit of the pass and it will take an hour. there we will find our guide and driver for the Altiplano. Ok, sure.

We are tooling along, looking at the awesome fog rolling over the hills when the outside starts to look like this:


So I say "well, at least the road is paved." Almost immediately, we turn off into the snow. The paved way goes to Argentina, we are going to Bolivia, so yay, snow driving it is. Then we see this:


There we met Daniel and France, who were totally rad. After the whole visa (get it later), passport thing settled, we headed off into Bolivia. The snow wasn't around for long and soon our driver, France had us tooling along... the best I can call the is "trails". There are not many real roads where we were going, and at best you drive where someone else drives and at worse, you drive where you want. We did a lot of that. Thank god for 4x4!

We went to see the Green Lagoon, which didn't really have enough wind to turn green while we were there, but was super beautiful:


A hot spring that you could put your feet into:


Some hot pots (hot bubbling mud):


Then we went to the red lagoon where we saw two boy llamas trying to get some action from a girl. They chased her all over the place, including into the lagoon, and they ran right past us, which was really cool:




There were also many, many Flamingos here:


Then to see the stone tree (It's a stone, not petrified or anything):


Our guides found us some Viscacha, which look like bunnies, but are closer related to chinchillas, who were not to afraid of us to let us take pictures of them at pretty close range:

We were told that we'd never see these guys, and we actually found them twice, so we were really stoked because we came wanting to see them if possible.

Can you see the tiny building in this picture? That was our hotel:

For the record, that was at 15,000 feet. Both of us got altitude sickness, although Chris got it early and then got over it fast, and I took until the morning and really just got a headache and felt like I could not breathe. Our guides ad a tank of oxygen though, which fixes you right up, along with a local tea that had herbs meant to help with the sickness.

You might like to note that when my friends and I skydived a few years back, we jumped out of the plane at this same elevation.

This is France, our driver. Hes the man. We 4x4'd through rivers, mud, and across some really bumpy places, but his car was super comfortable and he was a pro driver and I'd trust him t drive me anywhere:


We started day 2 with more viscacha:


and a family of vicuna:


Then to the stinky lake (yes, translated, it actually is called this), which had this crazy sign:


and a walk through some awesome lava formations:


This is just a cool picture:


Then we went to a ghost town where an entire Bolivian town hid from a Chilean army for 50 years after the army burned their town down, and it was only like 5km away. I don;t think the Chilean army was trying too hard.


And then to our hotel, were there were llama right outside the window:


On our last day, we went to a small museum and saw a native mummy.

The rains had come the night before so the road got washed out. No problem for France!


we saw wild burro:


We went to the train graveyard, where it was raining, but after 10 minutes or so, the sun came out:


Then we went into Uyuni to have lunch and get the visa issue sorted (we did, after much haggling by our guide about the condition of our US currency - bring new bills, kids, it's much easier):


And then to the Salar. Now, to preface this, the guy who made our tour rout said that we could go to the shore but that it was full of water at this point. I expected to go there for 20 minutes, to take pictures of the giant mirror that it becomes and to bail. We spent 3 or 4 hours there. The guy booking the trip never said that we could do this:


or walk out there:


So we could do this:


This is the view back to the car from where we walked:


And it really is a giant mirror:


And then France said to get in the car, so we could do this:




And then we stayed to watch the sunset:


And the amazing clouds here:


And that is why we think that Bolivia is awesome and beautiful!