Sucre, Bolivia

Saturday to Tuesday, 23 - 26 February 2008

Our next stop is Sucre in central Bolivia. This city is meant to be a nice spot to spend a few days in, particularly for soft gringos like ourselves who are yearning for creature comforts. Bruised and battered after the Salar de Uyuni trip, we are looking forward to the respite. We are so keen to get there that, as soon as the Salar tour is over, we get on an overnight bus there. We have to change at the mining city of Potosi in the wee hours. At 2 am we shuffle out of the bus into the darkness and are met by a Diego Maradona lookalike who says "Sucre" to us and motions to a bus from a different company. A lady who who has been cradling a couple of labrador pups on our bus from Uyuni, also seems to be going to Sucre, boards this bus and so we trust her judgment. It's not a pleasant journey. Food poisoning strikes Dara with a vengeance. He spends alot of the journey leaning over his neighbouring passenger with his head out the window. We finally arrive in Sucre at 5 am and, after 10 minutes of vigorous door-knocking, manage to wake the guy at the reception of the Grand Hotel. Compared to the spartan lodgings Pamela Tours had us in for the last few nights, it's pure luxury and worth the US$20 a night. Dara is laid low for the next few days, on a strict regime of flat lemonade. It's not pretty and the makers of Immodium may well have bumper profits this year. To our shame, we don't end up doing alot in Sucre, although you can't help but notice the spectacular architecture in the city centre. It's difficult to understand how a visibly wealthy city like this, can exist in an otherwise extremely poor country. We fuel up on comfort food in the Joy Ride Cafe and Kulturcafe Berlin and book a flight with Aerosur to avoid having the 16 hour gruelling bus journey to La Paz.

For more photos click here.

Arica, Calama, San Pedro de Atacama (Chile); Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia)

Tuesday - Friday, 19 - 22 February 2008

We get a collectivo the next morning from Tacna bus station. Our fellow passengers are Matt, Brenda and Morgan, a friendly American family who are just after passing over to Peru from Chile. They are now doubling-back on themselves, having learned at the eleventh hour from their tour company that their package tour to Macchu Pichu has been cancelled due to protests around Cuzco, in central Peru. They are understandably disappointed. We are supposed to be doing the Inca Trail in two weeks time, back in Peru, so are wondering now whether this will happen.

The city on the other side of the border in Chile is Arica. On the basis of the malls and chic pedestrian shopping stretches in the city centre, the average Chileno seems to be alot better off than his Peruvian cousin. We find the Gustav Eiffel designed church in the centre of town and catch up on emails. We can't find anything on the English-language internet about the disruptions in Peru. We bump into Matt, our fantastic Canadian interpretor from the previous day, and have a few cervecas with him before catching the overnight bus to Calama, about 10 hours south of Arica. Although the bus is comfortable, baggage checks with no obvious purpose in the middle of the night by Chilean officials and the bus steward's insistence on playing back-to-back martial arts movies until the wee hours (including a real gem in which Jean Claude Van Damme is cloned to help a US cop chase down the original JCVD who is a psycho-killer - a real mystery as to why this didn't win a Palme D'Or) do not make for a restful night's sleep.

We spend a few hours the following morning in Calama, which looks a lot less well-off than Arica, having the feeling of a mining town on the decline. We then get the bus to San Pedro de Atacama. The latter is the tourist destination in northern Chile and it shows. It's a small village with narrow unpaved streets, lined by quaint mud-walled houses and shops, no doubt producing the desired effect of a tourist's fantasy of what a South American pueblo should look like. In return for sacrificing their village to a Bunratty-makeover, the locals get the opportunity to fleece the moneyed tourists, both Chilean and foreign. Accommodation, food and tours are expensive. We are not staying too long though as the next day our plan is go on the three day tour to Uyuni in Boliva, taking in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. The Lonely Planet sits on the fence when it comes to recommending a 4WD tour company for this. The message is that all of the companies are equally bad and that it is pot luck as to whether you get a good driver on the day. We ask at the Thaka Thaka hostel we are staying at and are told that Pamela Tours are not too bad. We talk to them and they don't seem too suspect so we hand over the US$110 per person for the tour. In a portent of what is to come, the guy behind the counter says with little conviction that our driver will be able to speak English "mas o menas" (rough translation: yes he will, more or less).

The next morning we meet our driver Daniel and a guy with an unpronounceable name beginning with "p" (let's call him Pomegranate) who helps Daniel on the tour. Sami, from France, is the only other tourist on the trip. He can speak a fair amount of Spanish. This is a blessing because Daniel's ability to speak English is more "menas" than "mas". He can't speak a word.

The border crossing out of Chile into Bolivia is a static queue for an hour before 9 o'clock followed by a choatic rush when the one bureaucrat opens his kiosk. A Frenchman behind us opines loudly about the moral deficiencies of South American queuers and then, at the first opportunity, trys to jump ahead of us.

It is all unsealed track as soon as we leave Chile. The Bolivian border crossing is very low-key. A Bolivian flag flutters above a small building in the middle of a plain. We swap our Chilean jeep for the one that is to take us on our trip for the next few days. It's a rusty battered bucket on wheels, although not significantly worse looking than any of the other tour companies' jeeps. Worringly, Daniel and Pomegranate are immediately occupied with with something underneath the bonnet of the jeep. This is a sight we are to become familiar with over the coming days. In any event, they manage to resolve whatever the problem was and the first day of the tour is quite good. We pass through desolate sand-covered plains, ranged by bare snow-capped hills. We stop off along the way at brilliantly coloured lakes - the Laguna Blanca and Laguna Verde - and the Rocas de Dali (rocks scattered on the plain, real student bedsit gallery material). As we pass each sight of interest, Daniel launches into his commentary with the preamble "Mis amigos". We cannot understand a word of it but reply in chorus like schoolkids, saying "Si" and solemnly repeating the name of the sight as he utters it. The final stop of the day is at Laguna Colorado, a beautiful red-coloured lake, the colour coming from algae and plankton that live off the minerals in the water. We are at 4278 metres in altitude and it's cold. The lodgings here live up to their reputation of being really basic and really cold. There is no heating, the toilets are bleak (plenty of unidentifiable biohazard on the floor and walls) and the beds don't so much have mattresses as unyielding wooden planks. As we are a small group, not all of the beds in our domitory are occupied so the 5 layers of thick woollen blankets that we thieve from other beds help against the cold. We meet another tour group that night, including Derek from Cork, and huddle around the table.



After a poor night's sleep, we wake to find Daniel and Pomegranate under the bonnet of the jeep. A group of men from the settlement have grouped around the jeep and look at it with the sympathy normally reserved for a terminally ill patient. Daniel seems to be an industrious mechanic and has already taken out what Derek identifies later as the alternator. Pomegranate sprints around the place as Daniel shouts orders at him. An hour into the procedure, things are looking grim. The jeep is not showing any vital signs. Daniel has the brainwave of draining battery acid from another jeep and seems to be able to get the jeep going. After this, we get our breakfast and hit the road. Daniel seems pensive as we set off and the forever-smiling Pomegranate is also a bit subdued. About 20 km into the journey, the jeep dies again. We are smack bang in the middle of nowhere. Ahead of and behind us stretches sand and mountains. There is no mobile phone coverage. A fine place to get stuck. We are also the last jeep of the tour groups to set off for the day so the chances of another jeep coming to our aid are nil. Daniel and Pomegranate think it's a great laugh and don't seem to acknowledge the lunacy of setting off into the great unknown without a roadworthy jeep. There follows an hour of different interventions - mechanical by Daniel, tour guides and group trying to push the jeep into a jump start from various angles. None of these work and we sit on the rocks beside the track while Daniel and Pomegranate chuckle to themselves about the silly fix they have got themselves into. Straight from a Hollywood movie, the sound of a jeep comes from over the hill. It's a wayward tour, which has come over from the Argentinian border. We are saved. We borrow some battery power from this jeep and then travel in convoy for the rest of the day until we reach Uyuni, our stop off for the day. Along the way the jeep breaks down a number of times. With the threat of being stranded somewhere for the night in the cold ever present, we don't enjoy the day. Eventually Daniel finds a telephone and calls the base in Uyuni to get Pamela Tours to send out a jeep to get us to our hostel for the night. No information is given to us about where or when we are getting dinner and what time the tour is to resume the next day. Three hours later, a elderly lady arrives with some dinner and rambles good-naturedly in Spanish to us. She tells us that breakfast will be ready at 8.30 am the next morning. In fact, we get it at 9.30 am. At 12 noon Daniel and Pomegranate materialise in a replacement jeep. It is no healthier looking than the last one and the brakes don't seem to work. We head off to the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. It's a fine sight. It is an endless expanse of blinding white below us and blue sky above us. A word of advice: bring flip-flops to walk on the surface. Apart from the well-trodden paths to the bits where tourists like us take photos for their mantelpieces, in bare feet, it is quite sore, like badly set concrete. Despite all the drama and disappointment over the last few days, it's been worth it to see this. The jeep chuggs its way back to the mainland and breaks down along the way. While the running repairs are being done, alongside us workers brush and shovel the salt into piles for trucks. We are dropped off in Uyuni and say goodbye to Daniel and Pomegranate. We think they might have been expecting a tip but we have been a pretty sullen bunch so they are not too shocked when none is forthcoming. We don't know who would be a good company for this trip - Pamela Tours, it certainly ain't.

If you want to see photos click here.

Arequipa to Tacna, Peru

Monday, 18 February 2008

Our plan is to travel down south into Chile to get to San Pedro de Atacama, from where we will do a tour to the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in south western Bolivia. We don't plan on spending much time in Chile itself and have a few long bus journeys ahead of us. The first one should be relatively straightforward though: a 6 hour journey from Arequipa to Tacna, the last major town in Peru before the border with Chile. All goes to plan until about an hour and a half into the journey when the bus stops abruptly on a road in the middle of nowhere. There is plenty of chatter amongst the Peruvian passengers so clearly something is up. We hop out to have a look, expecting an accident scene or other reason for the traffic jam. Instead, we are confronted by the strange sight ahead of us of about a mile of roadway covered with small rocks and stones. There is enough there to make it impassable (see footage here). There are about 50 people on the roadside carrying more stones and rocks to the blockade. This is some sort of protest but we are not sure what it is about and how long it is going to last. The Peruvian passengers and the Cruz del Sur bus driver are pretty philosophical about it all - apparently this sort of thing is fairly commonplace in Peru - and seem to be happy enough to wait it out. One guy though (we find out later that he is from Poland) heads off a few hundred metres into the sands beside the bus and strips down to his dazzingly white y-fronts. He is no bronzed Adonis so cuts a very strange figure during this whole episode. Maybe it's his way of coping or maybe he decides to make the best of a bad situation and catch a few rays before he heads back to Polska. Anyway, we christen him "Naked Guy" and he provides plenty of comic relief. At intervals, it seems as if the vacillating bus driver has decided to do something and the wife of Naked Guy roars over to him to put his clothes back on and return to the bus. As soon as the bus driver's new-found decisiveness dissipates, Naked Guy returns to his spendid stripped isolation back in the sands. Two, three hours pass and the local policia have not made an appearance. Even the relaxed Peruvians start to get a bit upset. The bus driver becomes the centre of a maelstrom of finger pointing and shouting. Some of the buses behind us seem to have turned around to go back to Arequipa. Others still discharge their passengers onto the road in the midday heat and leave them on the uncertain and potentially perilous walk through the blockade towards a village in the distance and maybe a connecting bus. There is talk that this protest is part of a co-ordinated national strike. The grievances are price increases (bus tickets and water) and the plan by the government to allow private operators take over some of Peru's tourist sites. Eventually a 3-strong police team arrive (3-strong might be overstating it - there is one guy who seems to know what he is about, the other two guys who waddle behind him look like they are on a two-man mission to support the nascent Peruvian doughnut industry). Obviously and understandably the local police are in no mood to aggravate the protestors, probably their neighbours, by trying to get the bus through the blockade. Instead they offer to escort us on a diversion around the village. Some of the passengers nearly lynch the driver on hearing this suggestion as they made this suggestion to him a long while ago. We get to the other side of the village without being ambushed and the police wave us off, having received some pre-packed meals from the bus steward in exchange for helping us through the minefield. We breathe a sigh of relief and hope that the rest of the journey will be clear. No such luck, as another half hour down the road there is a 200-person strong road-block. Apparently these people are a bit more militant and steadfast than the previous crowd and the police at the village before the roadblock suggest that we wait it out until nightfall as the protestors have no food or shelter and will most likely want to go home at some stage. A masterful strategy indeed. There is no appetite to confront the protestors. The tiny village we stop at enjoys the boom times as passengers from three buses are stuck here and need to be fed and watered. We wait for hours on the roadside. The hearsay and speculation amongst the group gets worse as the light dims. Some passengers take their luggage off the bus and try to get a taxi that might be able to get through the protest. A small group of gringos, ourselves and a Danish couple, Rune and Anna, and our interpretor, Matt, from Canada try to figure out what is going on. Night falls and our bus driver, after another brow-beating from the passengers-representative group headed by a giant Peruvian guy in no mood for dilly-dallying, decides to bite the bullet and head towards the bridge where the blockade is. There we meet riot police who tell us we can't cross the bridge. Apparently the protestors have lined the top of the hills at the other side of the bridge and may throw rocks on any vehicles that try to get through. A tourist bus would be a juicy target. Things are a bit scarier now. Matt has heard about these protests before and says that the protestors can be pretty determined, blocking roads for days. Eventually, the 15-strong team of riot police hop into their vans, put on the sirens and head across the bridge to try to negotiate safe passage for us across the bridge. It's a ghostly scene. Shadows come across the bridge at intervals - people who have walked for miles to get to our side. They confirm though that no cars or buses are being left through. Things begin to look even more desperate as the siren lights are switched off at the other side of the bridge. We prepare ourselves for a few days of sleeping on a bus on the side of the road. But the darkest hour is just before the dawn and the police return triumphant, telling us that an arrangement has been reached. Within minutes, a jubilant convoy of buses, trucks and cars heads off into the darkness across the bridge. There are a nervous few minutes as we drive through the valley on the other side. We stay well away from the windows just in case somebody gets an itchy-finger and rolls a boulder our way. Thankfully we get through unscathed and arrive in Tacna at midnight - we have been on the road for 17 hours and are exhausted. If this sort of thing is going to happen alot in Peru over the next few weeks, maybe Chile mighn't be a bad place to be. We stay near the bus station in Tacna in Don Romano's, a decent hostel with a friendly owner.