| Potosi |
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| Potosi, 21 May 2005 Ola chicos y chicas, It has been a very very long time you had more news from us but the internet connections do not always allow us to update our website. In one of the cities it took 15 min to open the main page of our mailbox and then still we had not read our mail, so no way we were able to put pictures or a report on the site! Yes yes, we visited a lot of fascinating places since the last time we wrote you! A bit more than a week ago I got my temporary passport to travel around in South America so I'm again as free as a bird and it feels good! After San Juan we traveled to Salta, our last major stop in Argentina! We stayed in a really nice hostel with a nice bar and terrace on the roof and a ping-pong table! It was good fun and as it was sunny I could even sunbath in my bikinis! Wow, it seems already so long ago that I really have to dig into my memory to remember what we did next! Oh yeh, Salta is known for its really famous 'tren a las nubes'. The train only runs on Saturdays and starts in Salta, 1200m above sea level and goes up to 4200m! The turning point was on a big bridge made of steal! There is only one track so to go back the train just runs backwards and it was really funny because the seats could just be turned in the other direction and it looked as if the whole train had turned around. Even tv-screens were put the other way around! The trip was very impressive and the scenery was beautiful! We saw huge cactus's and as they only grow 1 to 5cm a year, most of them were about 200 to 300 years old! Amazing! We stopped in a small village along the tracks and as we were not that far from the Bolivian border everything already looked quite different than the rest of Argentina! The women wore the funny hats and tried to sell the handmade hats, socks and gloves we also saw in Peru! On the train we met Ray, a 'young' retired Canadian we met before on our trip to Antarctica. We had a great time before and as he also wanted to explore the area north of Salta, we decided to rent a car together for a few days! We took off early in the morning and enjoyed the beautiful nature of the Jujuy-province of Argentina! We drove through magnificent canyons, visited some small cozy villages and saw some impressive colorful rocks. We spent the night in Tilcara, a village where a lot of artists used to live and still live! There were some nice little art shops with lovely things but being a backpacker saved me from buying almost the whole store! One of the other villages we stopped by, Iruya, could only be reached after driving on a winding dirt road for more than 2 hours but it was really worth! The tiny village had a beautiful little church, very small cobbled streets going uphill and a few hostels! Everything and everybody was so relaxed in that little town far away from the rest of the world that it was a pity we had to leave again! Being in Salta again, we had to stay one day extra because my passport had not arrived yet! In the meantime we are already in Bolivia for more than a week and it is really as great as people told us. The villages are more authentic, nature is beautiful and the people are very friendly. Everything goes a bit more slowly and the Bolivian way of living is very basic. There are no big supermarkets or paved roads. Taking the bus from one city to another is a real experience! The roads are completely dirt road (although main roads) and really bumpy. Your whole body shakes from head to toe. I guess it must feel like being on a vibration plate in the gym.:-) Crossing the border from Argentina to Bolivia was another thing. We took the night bus from Salta to the Bolivian border and everybody assured us the border would be open by the time we arrived there but... it wasn't like that at all. The bus arrived earlier (around 4 am) and the border only opened at 7 am, so three more hours before being able to get a stamp in our passport. It was really cold at night and everything was closed. The only thing we could do was waiting in the bus terminal! So, we unpacked our inflatable mattresses, got our sleeping bags out of our backpacks and played luxurious "clochards" for a couple of hours!!!! The first little town we arrived in, was Tupiza. Not much to see but quite a chance to the Argentinian villages. No paved roads, lots of women in traditional clothing and a very relaxed atmosphere. The weather was beautiful and our hostel even had a swimming pool but the water was really cold. We decided to go horseback riding the next day to explore the quebradas (canyons) in the neighborhood. It was wonderful! In our group were five people; a English couple and a Belgian guy. Although we did not have a lot experience we did a lot of 'draf' and gallop and I really enjoyed it! We crossed some rivers and sat for 5.5 hours on the back of the horse! The next day ours legs hurt from the shaking on the horse but it was fantastic! Our 4-day trip to the 'Salar de Uyuni' was also wonderful! The Belgian guy, Tom, from the horseback riding trip joined us and there was also a nice French couple (Judith and Matthieu) in our jeep. We crossed some amazing landscapes and saw quite a lot of animals. Lots of llamas, vicuņas, vizcachas and flamingos! The lagoons and mountains we saw had beautiful colors. We saw some amazing rock formations like 'el arbol de piedra' and 'el desierto de Dali', these were all natural shaped by the wind. And the most impressing part of our trip was the 'Salar de Uyuni', a salt lake of 12000 square km with at some point a dept of 40m! Maybe for the guys the highlight of the trip was bathing in the aguas calientes 4500 m above sea level ;-) Surprisingly enough there were a lot of islands on the salt lake and the one we visited was full of giant cactus's! For four days we were on a height of more than 3500 m above sea level! There was a lot of wind and sleeping at a height of 4300m above sea level was really cold! Accommodation was very basic but luckily we had our sleeping bags with us! From Uyuni we moved on to Potosi. It wasn't that simple to catch a bus. Politically there are still a lot of problems in Bolivia and frequently there are road blocks. Sometimes it means that there is no way to get in or out of the city for days but we were lucky. The next day the roads were open again. Potosi was once (in the 19th century) a very rich city because of the mining industry but nowadays not much is left of that wealth! More than 10000 miners work in the 'Cerro Rico', the mountain from which silver, zinc and lead is "gained" from. We visited the mines and it was very impressive to see how those men work. At a very young age they start to work in those mines because there is no alternative. The working circumstances are bad (lots and lots of dust and hard labor for only a few dollars a day) but they have no choice. The work opportunities aren't good in Bolivia and in order to find another job the young people have to go to Argentina or Chili and leave their families behind. During the guided tour we visited different levels and galleries within the mine. I will never forget the sound of the hammer from the miner making a hole in the mountain by hand in order to be able to put some dynamite in the rock.(see picture) They could not afford machines to do that kind of work because they are too expensive. Between 3 and 4 hours of hard labor to dig a hole from 15 inches deep. Just enough to blow up one cubic meter of rock! The miner had a kind of lamp with him that would burn for about twelve hours but as he was going to work for twenty hours that day, he would continue his work in the dark and find his way out without light! It's hard to imagine that people still live that way! We were very impressed to see this! Before visiting the mines we bought some presents for the miners; dynamite, coca-leaves and soft drinks. Everybody can just buy dynamite on the miners market! Chewing coca-leaves allows the miners to stay in the mines without eating and they get less quickly exhausted. The coca-leaves also function as a filter, it prevents your mouth drying out from the dust (we could experience that for ourselves and it is true!) and a part of the dust gets absorbed by the leaves. The alcohol they consume is not just beer or wine but they have bottles of 'alcohol potable' which contains 96 degrees of pure alcohol! Awful! In the meantime we are in Sucre what used to be the capital of Bolivia. Today and tomorrow a lot of festivities are going on. They celebrate the fact that Sucre was the first city in South America that won his independence! Today we visited a very interesting museum about indigenous art. They had beautiful textiles and tapestries, all hand made and you could also listen to different kinds of indigenous music. The two day-trekking we wanted to do around Sucre had to be postponed because of my bad stomach and annoying intestines! The last two days I visited the toilet as if it was a very good friend of mine but no worries we have all the necessary medication with us so in a couple of days I will be fit again! In order to avoid another uncomfortable bus trip from about 20 hours we booked a flight to the next village, Santa Cruz, and from there we are probably going to take the 'death train' to the Brazilian border! The train was named like that because the journey used to take about 30 hours on a horrible train. Luckily nowadays things have improved. The trip 'only' takes 21 hours and there is a possibility to travel in an air conditioned first class carriage. We will let you know how deathly the trip was!! Domi and Joris |