unBOLIVIAble

Bolivia, what I now lovingly refer to as the hidden gem of South America. I say this because I mean really, who do you know that goes to Bolivia? Am I right or am I right? But then you go there and it will literally take your breath away (pun intended). It’s this gorgeous city tucked away in a valley surrounded by immense mountains that is at 11,000 feet at its lowest point. So sure breathing was difficult for a few days, but we quickly recovered with no altitude sickness besides exhaustion, nailed it.

Bolivia, let’s talk about it. Man oh man. So you fly there, first going through 4 immigrations, I mean that’s if your us and booked the cheapest flights possible so from Buenos Aires to Santiago, Chile to Iqique, Chile, to La Paz. It was really quite the treat because we indulged in some Cinnabon and Starbucks at the Santiago airport, well deserved since we woke up at 3:00am okay? So cool your judgments, punk. So anyway, you fly over it and there are just insane mountains covered in snow, like Mount Rainier times a thousand because there are so many Mount Rainiers and their way taller and also they’re not Mount Rainier…anyway I don’t know where I was going with that. And then you see tons of these rivers and valleys and sand dunes and you’re just like, what, where am I!? And then you land and drive from the airport to La Paz with the nicest taxi driver you’ve ever met who stops to let you take a photo of your first glimpse of La Paz, truly incredible. Miles and miles and thousands and thousands of brick houses that dot the mountains all surrounding La Paz. La Paz is interesting because the wealthier live lower and closer to downtown and the higher you ascend in the city, the poorer it gets. This is interesting because in the United States the wealthy typically live high up where all the good views are, but this is not the case in La Paz. It's really because the higher the altitude, the younger people tend to pass away due to the strain on one's body from not having enough oxygen. This is why the rich build their homes in the valley where the altitude is lower. Just a fascinating side note for you.

La Paz reminded me a ton of Ecuador so naturally I was insta-in love. There are the most beautiful indigenous people dressed in intricate outfits with full skirts, top hats, alpaca leg warmers, etc. They carry these insanely heavy loads just on their backs like complete bad asses. I love when women are just nailing it all over the world. So our first couple of days we got our feet wet in La Paz and discovered all of the architecture, the cathedrals, and the vegetarian restaurants that the city had to offer us (seriously so many vegetarian restaurants, but more on that later). We also planned our trip to the Salt Flats or the Salar de Uyuni.

First, the vegetarian restaurants were great! We went to this one with the most incredible fresh squeezed juice ever and I got a quesa-freaking-dilla! WHAT. I was obviously happy as a clam. Eric even got Pad Thai! We both unfortunately had lost our appetites at this point because of the high altitude, but we made our best efforts to eat a decent amount of foods we have been missing. The other one we found was a vegetarian lunch buffet. Okay so basically Eric and I are a huge mess whenever we walk into a restaurant in South America. So you seat yourself, which is confusing enough because it just feels so wrong to do that. I used to work as a hostess and I would be livid whenever a family sat themselves because it’s all an art to seating people while not upsetting servers, but maybe they had just been traveling in South America, who knew? So we get in and we circle the restaurant looking for a place to sit and finally find a place and sit only to realize everyone had trays and it was a buffet so we needed to get the food first, and then sit. Fail. We go up and get all of this food that we literally had no idea what any of it was, thankfully not having to worry if we were accidently eating meat, but to this day we have no idea what we ate. Oh except the broccoli soup, which I hate broccoli more than anything, but was surprisingly delicious! We also had this corn that was probably the grossest corn I have ever eaten, and I love corn so it was extremely upsetting, plus I don’t want to offend anyone by not finishing my meal, but I really had to put my foot down on this one. Anyway, besides that we had a blast being a mess and eating as the locals do! Rather, the local vegetarians? Hm.

Okay so to the salt flats, because who really cares what vegetarian restaurants we ate at? SALT FLATS OMGOSH. Quick, book your flights to Bolivia to see these suckers because they are just absolutely breathtaking (once again pun intended because they’re even higher altitude than La Paz! Tired of that pun? Sorry I’m not sorry). Just imagine miles upon miles (or kilometers rather…) upon miles upon kilometers of the whitest salt ever in these hexagon patterns just absolutely beautiful and huge and I just have no words to tell you how incredible it was. Not only were the salt flats incredible, but we got to drive around in a jeep checking out all of these amazing sights. We got to see the salt flats and the process of the whole salt business. We got to see incredible lagoons that sit at the base of volcanos that are insanely gorgeous and BONUS there are flamingos in the lagoons! FLAMINGOS!? Pink ones! In Bolivia? Where it’s freezing? Who knew!? Literally, who did? Because I didn’t. I thought flamingos were more hot weather kinda guys and gals, but apparently they don’t mind the freezing, hurricane winds in Southern Bolivia. I’m talking freezing people, I could barely feel my face after our 2 day excursion, but it’s alright because I stole Eric’s jacket, naturally I was freezing and he was 100% fine. What’s with that? Anyway, we had this great guide Gonzalez who told us all about the salar and oh we went to this place called fish island, which just had hundreds of Cactu (called Cactu not Cactus in Bolivia) that were 9 meters tall (quick convert meters to feet! It’s a challenge right? Now you see what we’re working with here, you know metric system, the better of the systems). So the salar is neat because it formed "as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes" (thanks Wikipedia) so there’s all of this fossilized coral and these random islands in the middle with cactus and it’s all because it's dried up lakes! Neat huh? We also visited this salt hotel, which had a ton of flags all over one area and guess what flag was missing? That’s right, for once some redneck didn’t bring an American flag to South America! What!? So neither of us are patriotic at all, but what?! Even Canada had a damn flag up, although it was tiny, which I thought was hilarious and representative of cute little Canada…just kidding enough Canada jokes…for now. Okay but seriously. Eric and I decided we have to go back just to bring the American flag, I mean come on, we need to represent! Brazil had like 3 flags up! They’re putting us to shame here people!

Okay so salt flats were incredible, but cold. We also got to spend the night in a salt hotel! Which is neat because our beds were just made out of salt! Oh also we had to take an 11 hour overnight bus to get there, which of all of the insanely long, developing country busses I’ve taken, this was by far the nicest! They served dinner AND breakfast, hot damn! Plus my seat reclined sort of and oh yeah! We even got to change busses somewhere in the middle of Bolivia at 2:00am. Boy was that a fun one! But seriously, besides that little hiccup, super nice bus! And then we got in to Uyuni (where the salt flats are) at like 8:30am and just plowed on through to start our tour at 10:30am. Needless to say, after our 3 day trip from La Paz, we took a day off to sleep.

But after our day of rest, what did we do? Well, I’m sorry to say this to the Thomas, Conant, and Spishak families as I know all of you would have freaked out had we told you that we were doing this, but we took a little mountain bike trip down what is called “Death Road”. Hmm, don’t like the sound of that mom? You always told me to tell you after I do scary things, this is after! We survived! So what this is, is basically a 36 mile mountain bike ride down a really scary, but gorgeous mountain. You start out at La Cumbre, which is like 14,000-15,000 feet (breathtaking…hahaha just kidding this time, unless you laughed, in which case I wasn’t kidding) and then you bike down a road until you get to the actual dirt road. There are just huge rocks and dirt and loose gravel and you just sign up to ride down this crazy road with a huge cliff on the side that you can probably easily fall off, but like I said, we didn’t so no worries! Let me tell you though, I was about to pee my pants a couple times and on the whole bus ride there. I am a terrible, TERRIBLE, bike rider. Seriously, who signs up for this when they’re as bad as me at bike riding? The trick is, is that it was my idea in the first place. Everyone had raved about this trip and so we just had to do it. We are so glad we did because we just had a blast! I was the slowest person in the group, but you know you win some you lose some. I figured it would be safer for me to go at my own pace, so whatever sure my butt is in serious pain today and my hands are like claws from squeezing the brakes and I somehow got a huge bruise on my upper right bicep, my forearms are in a lot of discomfort, and whatever I’ll never mountain bike again, it was worth every second! The views were…wait for it…breathtaking! I couldn’t help myself on that one, but for reals, we descended into the most beautiful jungle ever where you could swear George was living with gorillas and orangutans because it was that kind of jungle. Just beautiful and thank god we didn’t fall off the cliff because I loved the jungle, but I didn’t want to die there you know what I’m saying? I basically alternated between thinking “omgosh, I’m going to fall of this cliff and my mom’s going to kill me” and “I really have to pee” and “ow ow ow, this is killing my hands”. At the end I was so proud of myself though for really conquering a huge fear of mine and had an absolute blast.

Another weird thing that happened was this market called the Witch's Market. Now, I want to note that I did not see a single witch (hhwhhitch) during this walk, but we saw lots of shrunken dead llamas. For reals, it was disgusting, but don't you worry because I took a picture for your viewing pleasure! We also went to this museum that was one of the best I've been to, called the Coca museum. What's coca you ask? Coca is basically cocaine! Well I mean not at its simplest form, but once you do a whole bunch of chemically things to it, it can become cocaine. Anyway, people in Bolivia chew it (think chewing tobacco, but leaves, are tobacco leaves? Hm, I don't do drugs clearly) and even though the US was like we're making coca illegal blah blah blah typical US fashion, Bolivia's like whatever we're doing it and so there's a museum and they chew it on the daily. Also fun fact: coca is still put into Coca-Cola (see the name there? that's a good trick!) and there are several coca processing plants in the US. The last thing, I swear this is so damn long, but there's this prison in La Paz called San Pedro Prison. This is by far the weirdest part about La Paz. It's a prison that is basically a neighborhood in La Paz. Prisoners can buy larger spaces to live in and their wives and children can live there as well, coming and going as they please. The trick is, is that most of the prisoners are locked up due to drug related crimes, but inside the prison many of the prisoners still make cocaine right out of their cells and sell it to tourists and people on the outside. Tourists can pay money (60 USD!! OUTRAGEOUS) to go into the prison and see all of this, but we felt a little uncomfortable going in to look at people living their lives, this is similar to the reason why we didn't go into the favelas in Brazil. These weird tourist activities seem a bit voyeuristic to me. In other news, there's supposedly a great book out about San Pedro Prison, so I might just read that to fulfill my interest.

We truly had an unBOLIVIAble (seriously the puns are killing you right?!) time in Bolivia. Book your flights ASAP, omgosh but don’t go without me, how rude. But on to the next and keeping with the high altitudes from here on out, we’re on to Quito and Cotacachi! I am THRILLED to be returning to this wonderful place. On our way though we got to have a little adventure in Lima, Peru! We had an 11 hour layover in Peru and so what the heck, we left the airport and ventured around the capital city of Lima. Not to mention we got the best Ceviche I’ve ever had, albeit I didn’t touch the octopus or squid that were raw in there (Eric ate it like a champ) and we also got this Peruvian dish called Causa, which was a mashed yellow potato dumpling with various ceviche toppings, one had a super familiar taste and turned out to have an olive sauce on it, but not olive oil, like legit kalamata olives mashed into a sauce! Nom nom nom. We started our day at the historical center of Lima and wandered around and took pictures of old buildings and cathedrals, let’s be real we do this at least once in every city. And then we randomly came upon a parade of sorts in front of the government building. I think the president was standing outside watching. There were military sorts on horses with swords, it sounds bizarre, but seriously was awesome! Like what the heck? I don’t even know how we got so lucky! We then ended our day at the beach watching surfers and marveling in how lucky we are to be having the best six week adventure ever. The end of our day was kind of silly because we flagged down a taxi who decided he didn't want to pay the airport fee and instead dropped us off in some sketchy ally near the airport and pointed towards the airport, and so we went.

Anyway, this has been long as per usual, but I just have so much to say okay!? Also, we finally figured out the hot showers. I told a few of you about my issue with cold showers because our hostel was about 10 degrees below 0 and I refused to take a cold shower because I was already so cold. Seriously, Bolivia you are cold. On our last night I finally turned on the shower and to my pleasant surprise, there was steaming water coming out. I leaped in and did a little victory dance. Now I’m clean as a whistle (what does that even mean?) and I got my dread locks all cleaned up. Not actual dread locks, but I swear if I kept not washing my hair that was where things were going.

And finally, a picture for your viewing pleasure! I was feeling pretty thirsty on the salt flats...

So on to Quito and to the next adventure! Week 5, come at us!

xoxo,

Mandi & Eric