After three intense weeks in Peru with my friend Pam, I headed straight to La Paz, where I spent a few days visiting the city and writing my previous article about Peru (Bolivian internet being really slow, it takes ages to upload any picture).
La Paz is a very depressing city. 3600m above sea-level makes it a difficult place to breathe, but add an extremely polluted and dry air, rain every afternoon (it's the beginning of the rainy season here) and you can get an idea why I really hate this place. It is surrounded by impressive mountains, as you can see on the following picture. But I said impressive, not beautiful.
La Paz - View from the top (1)
La Paz - Supposedly Bohemian area
On the contrary to places like Santiago or Hong Kong, where local topography also drives the social organisation of the city, here poorer people live in the highest areas (about 400 metres higher than the city centre) in the north of the city, for example on the way to the airport (highest of its size in the world for the anecdote), whereas wealthier areas are located in the south of the city, maybe 400 or 500 metres lower than the city historical centre.
Another great electric engineering work
La Paz - View from the top (2)
You may think that I insist a lot on altitudes in this article, but it is really important in Bolivia, both in terms of health (altitude sickness, lack of oxygen when you do some physical effort, etc.) and in terms of pride to always be the highest something in the world (I have seen villages indicating their altitude to the nearest centimetre, so yes, Bolivian do care about it).
I was also waiting for my Dutch friend Ruby to arrive in La Paz (she was visiting lake Titicaca at that time) so that we could get into the infamous San Pedro prison.
Let me tell you the whole story.
Mel, my friend Chor's cousin (to make it simpler) had told me about this book "Marching Powder" she read, which basically tells the story of a Brit who got arrested for some drug-related crime and was put into this jail. He seems to be the one who started offering illegal guided tours of the prison to tourists. I had heard about it long time ago, but now that I was in Bolivia, it had piqued my curiosity and I decided to get more info about this place.
The prison is divided in eight neighbourhoods, each with its elected mayor, treasurer, etc. You'll find no guards and no rules within these walls, guards only control the entrance of the jail. Prisoners have organised their lives themselves, and there are countless surreal anecdotes about how this tiny closed-economy actually works.
To put things in context, three quarters of the people there have been sent behind bars for drug-related crimes (Cocaine is a big deal in Bolivia, even taxi drivers ask you if you want some when you go out in La Paz). Apparently, everything is organised around money and prisoners have to buy their own cell, resulting in drug barons owning proper houses, sometimes living there with their family with all the comfort you could dream of (tv, rooftop bbq, sauna...).
Anyways, that sounded way too interesting to miss it, so we decided to take the risk and check it by ourselves.
Because, yes, since it is totally illegal, there are some risks involved.
A few years ago, after journalists filmed an American girl exiting the prison while proudly raising her middle finger (a video that went viral on the web), authorities decided to stop these illegal tours. But since this was really helping prisoners to make some extra money and live slightly more decently, a huge rebellion followed. Since then, there have been ups and downs, but the trend is pretty clear: authorities want to stop these guided tours and avoid more bad press about it. Recently, there's been a lot of buzz around a tourist being raped while she was visiting the prison, so now they seem to have seriously clamped down on visits.
Of course, there is a bit of voyeurisme involved in all this: if you manage to get in, you'll see where these guys live all year long, sometimes impinging on their privacy. But my personal opinion (and you may disagree with it) was that done with respect, without taking photos as if you were on a safari, this could really be a fascinating experience. What I really wanted to see was how the dynamics of power and money would structure one's life in such a closed world.
So we went on a sunny morning to the prison, and waited for at least ten minutes not too far from the entrance to see if anything would happen (usually people come to offer you the tour). Since no one came, we asked a Bolivian who came out of the prison for advice, and he told us to try discuss it directly with the officers guarding the entrance. The first guards we approached seemed cooperative at first, and our hope to nicely bribe them to let us in grew significantly. But after having waited for another fifteen minutes under the burning sun, another guard came and told us that prison tours were illegal, and had always been, so we shouldn't stay there. Seems like not all Bolivian guards are corrupt, good news for our dear friend Morales but that left us very disappointed... When we came back two hours later, he was still at the entrance of the prison, so our chances to get in felt sharply. And unfortunately, we didn't have another occasion to try it, so here is the story of how I missed the occasion to visit what probably was the only worthwile place to see in La Paz. The first big fail of my trip so far!
And yes, I know, I just spent half an hour writing about a place I haven't actually visited.
But let's not be that dramatic about La Paz. There are actually a few nice cafe, bars and restaurant, sometimes hidden in the middle of nowhere. We managed to discover an extremely cheap restaurant who had opened only a few days before and was run by a French guy (which means that unlike typical cheap Bolivian restaurants, you won't have only a soup, followed by chicken, rice and potato to eat), another restaurant where I had great quinoa raviolis, listening to a whole album of our (French) national pride Charles Aznavour, but surprisingly singing in Spanish, a cool bar we renamed the "recycling place", its entrance looking like your local recycling depot, the highest Swiss fondue in the world (we didn't try it though, it smelt more like a tourist trap than like Swiss cheese), and... well that's pretty much it, so La Paz clearly doesn't have much to offer.
Presidential office buidling
Coolest bar entrance ever (La Paz)
Probably the only nice street in La Paz
La Paz remains a favourite with many backpackers, at least for a few days: It is very cheap, can be a useful hub for your Bolivian travels and boasts some big backpackers party-hostel, like the famous Loki and Wild Rovers, conveniently located a couple hundred meters away from each other, which means that you'll find all you travel friends staying in La Paz in the same block. These are franchise hostels with multiple branch scattered across South America (mostly in Bolivia and Peru though), where the most strategically important area is definitely the bar and its overpriced food. To get a better picture of what kind of hostel it is, on a karaoke night there, we had the chance to watch a live performance from a drunk Aussie dude, who ended up dancing and stripping on the bar all night long. Usually, you don't stay in one these hostels if you really want to sleep. As the Lonely Planet travel guide says about Loki La Paz, "if you don't already know about it, you shouldn't probably stay here"
A Street next to Loki La Paz
We also made a few really good day excursions out of La Paz though, the first one to Chalcataya mountain. To get there, we (Ruby, Dutch, Solange, French, Daniel, German and myself) had to bus to the northern and higher part of the city (which is also the poorest one, if you remember what I wrote earlier), and then fought hard to find a cab to take us to the mountain, the route being extremely accidented and difficult to ride. Our expert driver dropped us at a refuge, from where we walked for maybe half an our to the top, 5300 m above sea-level. You really feel the altitude, but walking slowly it is easily doable. And the view was clearly worth it, as you can see from the following pictures.
View from the top of Chacaltaya mountain, La Paz in the background, top right corner
View from the top of Chacaltaya mountain, Lake Titicaca in the background, top right corner
On top of Chacaltaya mountain
We were surrounded by very bizarre rocks, as if thin layers of solid rock structures had been stuck together, then broken into pieces and finally carried all the way up. There are so thin you can actually break them by hand. I would have loved to have a geologist with me to understand how all this happened!
Crumbly layers of rocks, Chacaltaya mountain
On the way down
On the following day, Dan having already left for the jungle, Solange, Ruby and I went to the Moon Valley, south of La Paz (and thus went through the wealthiest and supposedly nicest parts of the city, which failed to make me change my very poor opinion of La Paz). Another set of very bizarre geolical formations, solid mud shapes similar to what your little cousin does when playing with sand on a beach. The all place makes you feel you just landed in the middle of a Star Wars filming, worth a visit if you're desperately stuck in La Paz like I was.
Moon Valley, South of La Paz (1)
Moon Valley, South of La Paz (2)
Finally, on Sunday, Ruby, Carl (a Swedish guy) and I took a place to Rurrenbaque (a small town in the Bolivian jungle, 30 minutes flight to the north of La Paz) and left La Paz (YES!!!).
Our plane was this small propeller-driven aircraft for 18 persons, good news being that the same model from a rival company had crashed on a similar route only a few weeks earlier. But the 18 hours bus (that's if you're lucky, usually it takes between 20 to 25 hours, possibly even days if you have bad weather) being even more dangerous, we didn't really have a choice.
Come on, no one in his right mind would expect that flying in Bolivia is safe, right?
Safest plane to the Amazon
We landed in Rurre and immediately felt the very humid, hot and heavy air characteritic of the Amazon.
The first thing you see at the airport (if we can call that shack dropped in the middle of a field an airport) is an advertisement in hebrew. It is one of the most surprising aspects of Rurre, you have so many Israelis tourists that locals have adapted their offers to specifically target them.
Apparently, after they have completed a couple of years in the army, most Israelis travel, and you won't find much 21 to 24 years old kids left in Israel. Peru and Bolivia are very popular destinations, but we reached a new level with the remote town of Rurrenbaque. One explanation could be that apparently a few years ago three Israelis went on traveling there, and two of them died in an accident in the middle of the jungle. The only survivor wrote a book about it and that was the beginning of the story, everyone suddenly wanting to adventure into the wild Bolivian jungle. Word of mouth quickly took over as a way to make Rurre the place to be for Israelis backpackers, to such an extent that you'll end up in surreal situations, for instance when your Bolivian guide start speaking perfect hebrew, even if he can barely say more than two words in English!
Looking for a hostel, we met a French baker, who brought us to a good place in his home-made car (a smart commercial move, his bakery became our headquarter!). He had decided to come to live here to escape civilisation (this includes French taxes, Francois Hollande, and much more...). He is actually building a boat to live on the river, so he's pretty serious about it.
French Baker and his home-made car, no surprise you have more Toyotas than Peugeot cars in the jungle
After half a day sunbathing by a huge swimming pool, we started our pampas tour (you have the choice between pampas and jungle tours, but you'll find more swamps in the pampas than in the proper jungle, therefore many more mosquitos but also more wild animals to be seen).
In addition to the three of us, our group included Americans, Dutchs and of course Israelis. A three-hour ride until the river, from where boats brought us to our lodge, but slowly enough so that we could start looking for animals. For two days, we basically went on small excursions to see pink dolphins, caymans and aligators, exotic birds and monkeys, ending each day at the "sunset bar", watching the sunset (as you probably guessed) while sharing a drink with tourists from other lodges and complaining about mosquito bites. Actually for me it wasn't that bad: I took antihisthamine tablets so that my skin wouldn't react from the bites and would not hitch at all, plus a lot of insect repellent and many layers of loose clothes (the most effective protection being to wear a carefully closed rain coat, so you end up sweating like a pig under your k-way but at least mosquitos can't reach your skin!). You should have seen me in my pijamas/k-way combo, definitely up and ready for Rurrenbaque fashion week 2014.
Getting intimate with a cayman
Beer-loving Italian dudes and their American friends
Sunset bar
On our way to watch pink dolphins
Anaconda hunting in the swamps
After our three-day excursion, we (Carl and myself, Ruby had left a day earlier) came back to Rurre, where we ended up staying an extra day, all flights back to La Paz having been cancelled due to bad weather (rainy season has started!).
Cows on Rurrenbaque very wet airstrip
From La Paz, we took a night bus to Sucre, constitutional capital of Bolivia (even if La Paz is the de facto one), also called "the white city", because, well as you can see on the pictures, there are a lot of nice white colonial buildings in the city centre.
Sucre - University
Sucre - some government building
Sucre
We spent the first day visiting the city, and went on Sunday to Tarabuco, a town located 2 hours away from Sucre and mostly (or should I say only?) known for its Sunday market, where prices even for gringos are so cheap that you don't even bother bargaining.
Next stop on our Bolivian route was Potosi, said to be the highest city in the world ("only" 4090m above sea-level, so you can challenge their title depending on your definition of a city) and home of the "mountain that eats men alive", el Cerro Rico. Potosi is mainly known for its silver mines, dating back to colonial times. It said that more than eight million people died there since its exploitation started 450 years ago, hence its nickname. During the sixteenth century, Spaniards had found so much pure silver in this mountain that Potosi had grown to being one of the biggest and richest cities in the Americas and in the world, on par with places like Sevilla, London or Paris. Now, most of the silver is gone and none of the wealth is left.
Mines are still in use though, extracting various minerals, mostly silver mixed with zinc, tin, etc. We had seen a German documentary about the mines the night before ("The Devil's Miner") and decided to go on a mine tour.
Potosi seen from the Cerro Rico
All ready for the mine
Miners at work
There used to be big foreign mining companies in Bolivia, but when President Morales started his resources nationalisation program, he nationalised many of them all and redistribute them to his people. Thus, mines are now organised in cooperatives, but in fact they do not work at all as such. Miners are totally independent, working on their own there and when one finds a good vein, he usually hires co-workers to help him extract minerals, resulting in groups from a couple miners to thirty or fourty miners maximum working together. In other words, you could consider that some miners run small mining businesses, simply paying to the government a tax for the right to work there and then managing their teams as they want.
Of course, miners never earn a lot: they sell minerals they extract to companies who then start the purification process, and then send their product to Chile, from where minerals are shipped to Europe, US or China to be refined. And purification/refinement is where you really start making money, not extraction of impure minerals.
But except the use of pneumatic hammers, the way miners actually work has barely changed in centuries, and the whole process remains very far from efficient. There are actually European charities helping miners by raising money and buying some of their heavy working equipment, like rails, trolleys, etc. To me, this seems like a total non-sense, and a sign that something is clearly going wrong. Of course, these guys have a terrible job, but charities would make a much better use of their endowments by for instance helping new generations access better education and thus avoid having to work in a mine. The fact that an NGO has to do the job of an entrepreneur or an investor kind of tells you something about Bolivia's economic woes.
Despite the fact that it is one of the poorest countries in the world, Bolivians seem to fully trust their populist and protectionnist president. There is still so much resentment against Spaniards (something you can also easily feel in Peru), dating back to the suffering endured in colonial times. For instance, in the sixteenth century Spaniards would force indigenous men to work for six months straight in the mines (and by straight, I mean these guys would barely see any sunlight in weeks or even months) because they could not import African slaves to work at such altitudes, only locals could do the job.
Bolivians nowadays take a lot of pride in their hard-fought freedom and consider most foreigners as greedy and heartless capitalists wanting to steal their plentiful natural resources. Wether they were Spanish colons centuries ago, or American firms in the last decades makes no difference, and a few nationalisations did not make business climate any better.
But enough with Bolivian economics, it was now time to head to Uyuni and desertic south west Bolivia.
Carl and myself had booked a three-day tour across Uyuni salt flats and the desertic landscapes further south, to end up at the Chilean border in San Pedro de Atacama.
We were six in our classic Toyota: our guide/chauffeur/cook Luiz, a quiet Equatorian girl, whose name I don't recall, two Spanish dudes called both Roberto and Duncan, coming from Canada. Plus Carl and me.
Dream team
The tour started with a quick stop at a train cemetery. The region around Uyuni is full of minerals, and since Bolivia has no sea access it has to send everything to Chile by train, passing through Uyuni, which thus became the centre for trains repairs in Bolivia.
Train cemetery
Carl re-living his childhood memories on a swing
The Dakar finishes in Uyuni next year!
The number of tourist cars with us was at first quite worrying, but fortunately enough Luiz managed to keep us away from them for most of the day.
In Uyuni, you hear a lot of stories about terrible guides, who won't tell you anything more than the time you have in one place to take pictures, or worse who would get drunk and then get lost in the middle of the desert (one tourist ended up spending a day driving instead of the guide, who was unable to stand behind the steering wheel). Luiz may not have been the funniest guide ever, but at least he was sober, and knew everything about local geology, plants and other singularities of the Salar.
We spent the first day in the Salar de Uyuni properly speaking, the biggest salt flats in the world. It is actually quite difficult to describe this salt-saturated experience, the emptiness and immensity of the site can hardly be captured in a picture. More than 10 000 km² of perfectly flat bright vacuum surrounding you. Looking in any direction, you'll see nothing but the top of mountains located dozens of kilometers away. Prick up your ears and you'll hear nothing but an overwhelming silence.
Some dust storms had given the salt flat a singular colour, a dazzling intensity varying from off-white and cream to beige. You'd better wear good sunglasses if you want to avoid suffering terrible headaches at the end of the day!
Luiz showed us holes in the salt crust from where we could see the amazing process creating perfectly squared salt cristals. It is difficult to believe that we were driving on such a small layer of rock-solid salt with our heavy car, but salt flats are full of such surprising natural phenomena, and that's what make them a truly unique place on earth.
Driving on such a thin layer of salt
Apparently, there is quite a lot of lithium a few thousands of meters underground in the southern part of the salar. Bolivia is probably seating on the world's biggest source of lithium (estimated at around half of the currently known lithium reserve worldwide), a key component of electric batteries you'll find for instance in your Nissan Leaf, or if you can afford it, in your brand new Tesla. But being Bolivia, both the government and local communities strongly oppose any foreign extraction, preferring to build their own lithium mining industry, even if that will take quite some time to materialise.
After our Geological Economics 101 lecture, we spent some time taking the traditional funny salar pictures, especially with our new friend Raúl, a plastic dinosaur we found at the back of the car.
Synthesising vitamin D
Raúl's in a bad mood today
David vs. Goliath
Then, the Inca Huasi island (sort of huge rocky hill popping up right in the middle of the salar for no obvious reason) and its countless cactuses was waiting for us, before heading south east to watch the sunset and then get to our salt hotel. If you're wondering, that's like a normal hotel, but with walls and furnitures made of salt blocks.
View from the Inca Huasi island
Cactus forest on the island
Inca Huasi island
Sunset in the salar
Salt hotel
On our second day started the proper desert part of the trip. While the salars are located about 3660m above sea-level, here we started to go a bit higher, reaching 5400m in the middle of the afternoon. What surprised us was the variety of landscapes offered to our eyes. Dry mountains, sand deserts, huge volcanos, lagunas of all colours full of flamingos, rocks of any size and shape, volcanic structures... As you may see from the following pictures, the whole tour was clearly one of the highlights of my trip so far, I'm actually wondering if I didn't enjoy more the last two days of the trip than our first day fully spent in the salar!
Uynui desert (1)
Lagoon in Uyuni desert (1)
Lagoon in Uyuni desert (2)
Uyuni desert (2)
Carl and Duncan doing some rock-climbing
Thousand-year-old plant in the desert
Uyuni's tree rock
Uyuni desert (3)
Uyuni desert (4)
Another lagoon in Uyuni desert (1)
Another lagoon in Uyuni desert (2)
On our last day, we woke up at 4 am to go to some geysers. The sun being still low enough, it created a very particular atmosphere in the geysers, that you can see in the following pictures.
Geysers in Uyuni desert
Carl and myself in the geysers
High altitude early hotsprings
Lamas family
Unfortunately, as Geoffrey Chauser once said, all good things must come to an end, and here ends the Bolivian part of this trip.
Dali's desert
Another lagoon in Uyuni desert (3)Like in Peru, I started with the worst part of the country (its capital), and finished with its main attraction (Machu Picchu and Salar de Uyuni), in both cases a very touristic spot, true, but world-class regardless. Another highlight for this whole South American experience!
We finally ended up at the Chilean border, leaving Duncan with Luiz and other tourists (they were going back to Uyuni), while we waited for our bus to San Pedro with the two Spanish Robertos... But I'll leave that for my next post!
Thanks for having read this far!
Much love from South America.
Un besito,
Votre loyal Riton.
