UYUNI
Uyuni was where we finished the salt flats tour, despite the whole acute mountain sickness thingy, the salt flats
were amazing and we arrived in Uyuni in a nice hotel with the Kiwi couple Gav and Alanna. The place was really nice and we probably should have realised that we were going to have to pay far more than we thought, but hey ho you live and you learn and all that, on the plus side the hotel had an amazing pizza restaurant in the back run by a yank and we bumped into travel chum Sophs again. The town was pretty ordinary really and the highlight was Nick and my trip to a weird train cemetery, so yea we moved out pretty fast once myself and Alanna were no longer being weak and feeble.POTOSI
Potosi is a small mining town where most travellers go down the mines, look at the incredibly poor conditions, and blow up some dynamite! being claustrophobic I didn’t really want to go down the mines (think nick still holds that against me slightly) but the town was a good place to stop between Uyuni and the town of Sucre. The hotel we stayed in in Potosi was weird to the extreme, run by an inordinately smiley hobbley old woman, our rooms looked like ex hospital wards, so again we kind of flew through this city pretty damn fast.
SUCRE
From Potosi Nick and I, along with Gav and Alana got a taxi to the de facto capital Sucre. What a lovely surprise Sucre was after Potosi where everything was cold and dark and the altitude made it hard to breath walking a foot. Sucre was sunny and beautiful with an amazing central park and courtyards galore, full of choccy shops and great restaurants, and what’s more we stayed in a lovely lovely place where there was a sunny "quadrangle" (Nick has been taking the piss ever since I used the word but I think it is perfectly reasonable!) We had a brilliant few days here, relaxing in the sun, drinking lots of beer and wine, and going on a brilliant dinosaur tour to "Cretatious Park" in no way affiliated with Jurassic Park of Course.
We took this tiny truck to the dinosaur park which had a fake dino head on the front and Nick and I thought we were fucking hilarious humming and whistling the Jurassic Park tune ad nausea. The park actually has real dino foot prints that are still being excavated near a cement plant, and there are loads of to scale models of dinos around which were cool, but the best bit by far was when our South American guide told us, with no sense of irony that one of the dino´s was distantly related to the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland... BRILLIANT!COCHABAMBA
In true retard Flo style I was sick again in Cochabamba, a town which was meant to be very interesting and has a huge Rio Style Jesus on a big mountain. Our first day here we arrived at 5 in the morning and had to wait out side a hotel for it to open, so a good start there! we then went to an all you can eat Indian restaurant (of course) which was weird and next to a sex shop and I think I might have got a bit of food poisoning, just to throw that into the mix. Anyway the next few days were spent with me ill in bed and Nick running around town using internet and buying food for us both, most of which I didn´t eat. Anyway as soon as I felt better we moved on to La Paz Horrah!!!
La Paz
Upon arriving in La Paz there is the most amazing view. The City is built in a valley and it just looks stunning, we arrived at our hostal called the Adventure Brew hostel, which has a brewery down stairs and an amazing bar upstairs with free beer for it’s visitors! We got chatting to another couple and went out for Turkish grub with them, as you do in Bolivia, but it was really nice. The next day Nick and I went for an adventure around the city, checking out all the beautiful monuments etc... unfortunately yup you guessed it I got altitude sickness and was in bed for the next three days, so Nick worked his way through most of the hostals DVD selection. As soon as I was being less retarded and unwell Nick and I saw a poster for Cholita wrestling in a nearby district, Cholita´s are traditional Bolivian women, so we thought this would be amazing, we went with a big group and the experience was amazing.We were basically piled into a sports hall and watched about 6 wrestling matches. the crowd and the wrestlers go mental throwing anything into the ring, chairs, planks of wood, cans of beer, bones, orange peel, and all the time these women are in traditional dress, brilliant! When we got back to the hostel and were recovering from the days proceedings we drank a stupid amount with some Ausies that we met which probably wasn´t a great idea at altitude but it was sooo worth it. The same day we also went to a BBQ where we met some really nice people. Ben and Geordie had managed to get kidnapped two days before we met them and were held at gun point for a couple of days before being released in an alley, so they were understandably still fucking shaken up, and our bar man Ollie had brought Dynamite from Potosi into the capital after it hadn´t been used, and no body would take it off his hands, in la paz it was spotted in his bag and the police were called, he has now been in La Paz for 3 weeks whilst interpol clear his name as a terrorist!
La Paz is a really cool City, it has two completely apposing sides, the really poor district, which has a lot of stuff for tourists and a witches market filled with lama foetus’s, and the really businessy district where the embassy’s are and they are pretty swish with some really nice restaurants. There is also a kind of fake Trafalgar square which is filled with pigeons and the locals seem to love them. Nick and I spent quite a few days just exploring the city and buying you all stupid gifts.
When we fist arrived in La Paz Nick and I saw a poster advertising a mountain bike tour which is world renowned down the allegedly "most dangerous road," where an Israeli guy died a week ago. Anyway I said initially no way, I am shit on a bike and if anyone is going to spas out on a bike it is going to be yours truly,
sure enough 5 days later I was there on the top of a mountain geared up to the max shitting myself, within 5 minutes I had fallen off and I managed about 2 hours on the bike before having to give up. Nick absolutely loved it of course, he fell off whilst going faster than he should have done, but I think he thinks the injury was worth it. I spent a good 2 hours in a bus alone with a south American called Marco who spoke no English, I was actually impressed with how much Spanish I knew and we actually got on really well despite his questionable taste in music, and I had to ask him to look at the road more times than I would have liked. Anyway I met up with Nick and the rest of the group at the e
nd of the trip and Nick was a very happy bunny, he kind of had that 5 year old´s face that says "did you see me, did you see me!" we went to an animal sanctuary where we had lunch and were surrounded by parrots and monkeys and donkeys and much more, it was really cool, apart from the fact there are fuckers called sand flies around, whose bites I am still scratching today. We got back to la Paz late that night, ordered another pizza and headed off the next day to Cocacabana on Lake Titikaka!
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