Salar de Uyuni - Salt Desert (Bolivia)

This is, quite literally, another world.. The ground is made of SALT. I arrived by train..

Just kidding! This train is sitting there maybe before I was born eh eh. As usual, I got there on a bus, to the edge of the desert. You can then take a jeep tour with some locals, a very decent bargain for 3 days of surreal landscape. So what is this? As in other salt flats, there was once a lake here. I don't know the geological details, but the lake evaporated leaving the salt behind. It does rain here - and so every year this becomes a very salty, shallow lake for a short season. Interesting enough, they do have some houses made of salt. I passed in the dry period, when is possible to drive around. The salt area is some 12,000km2, the largest in the World.

First we came to the "island" above: inhabited by these intrepid cactuses, alone in the middle of the salt..

The scenery is certainly impressive. This time I wished my modest camera was better, so I could do justice what I saw. This is volcano land here. To give you some context, we are above 4000m already! Thus the snow on that hill top. And yes it gets very cold in the night!

The flamingos make a good living here, too. No predators, stable weather. An interesting animal, they feed by filtering the water in these smaller lakes, which contains small organisms, apparently enough for the flamingo. Some other living things, I could not yet quite figure out if those "balls" were a cactus or a lichen or..

Also very alive, the "boiling" mud holes, I guess the waiting lobby for Hell could look like that :-) It smelled really foul, there's some gas released from the entrails of Earth (thus the bubbles)

And that's me holding on to the Dali rock! Yes, he apparently was here and these kind of rocks inspired him to some of his famous paintings.

Altiplano 2: Sucre, Potosi (The Andes, Bolivia)

Sucre is a city with a very evident colonial heritage.. In many ways like Arequipa, the "white city" of Peru.. One thing that really caught my attention were those things on the electrical wires, which I assume are round nests of some crazy bird :-)

Still, the contrasts between the Ancient and the "New" are evident in many ways... as for example this countryside woman (I think she would be Andean native, but could be of Amerindian ancestry) sitting by an old skool ice cream cart, and in the colonial esplanade overlooking the city.

Speaking of natives, in Potosi I visited a colonial processing plant, in the early days they 'used' natives but eventually changed to horses as the natives got tired too quickly, that's all I learned from the tour.. What humanity

On a lighter note, the view from a central square in Potosi, one of the highest cities in the world..

Reaching for the Sky, no less...

Altiplano 1 (The Andes, Bolivia)

Quite literally breathtaking, it is a bit of a world of its own up here, close to 4000m altitude. Entering from Peru near Titicaca, this is what you see, the frontier town at Desaguadero...



It is better than it looks: I was feeling very sick, and these people were very kind to me. They gave me tea from coca leaves, actually I felt better and made it to La Paz. From there I went to Oruro, mining town:



That first image of the concrete slider always stays with me, don't know why. I never saw something like that. Down at the mine, I met "El Tio". He's the patron of the miners, so to speak, the Daemon of that mine. Drop some candies or any goodies to earn some favour and protection.

Moving on, here is the Altiplano in all its might and beauty



(Sorry its a bit tilted, I was on the bus...)

On a totally different angle, politics and (the misery of) the people are always close to each other.. The mural on the left says: "With Plan Condor they call us Communists; with Plan Dignity they call us Narcotraffiquers; and after 9/11 we are called Terrorists". This presidential candidate accuses the US of meddling too much in Bolivian affairs, and indeed he would be right..



Arriving in Cochabamba, more typical scenes such as those people sleeping on the street or the very colourful market - in another market (in Potosi) you can see the coca leaves sold like grain or tea... So did the bombings of coca plantations change anything in the traditions of these people? I guess not.

And a question for thinking: If people from a country want to use cocaine made from coca leaves, even if their country has outlawed it, and that creates a social problem, isn't that a problem of that particular state and people? Certainly Bolivians could do more to avoid selling coca to abroad, or to crack down on cocaine production inland, but to pay with the sovereignty of their state, have their coca peasants bombed by foreign order, isn't that too much? Sadly, this is a recurrent story between Latin America countries and the United States.

Staying at Tutusima (Boca Manu, Peru)

This is the modest house of my friend Tutusima - only the left half. He is a "colono", coloniser of mixed ethnicity (indian and something else - quechua, european, etc.), which seem to be the majority in the jungle. There are also indians, we passed by a village just next to Boca, they live in much more basic conditions - and perhaps closer to true nature..

The small photo on the left is a spider eating a big fat cockroach, frequent "guests" at his place. On the right, a friend of him had found/captured two little monkeys, he was going to raise and sell them. I held one of them, so cute and warm, but he pissed on my hand - and I got a rash!

Mother Tree (close to Boca Manu, Peru)

This tree is seen in great regard by the locals... Yeah, it's only ONE tree! According to my books, something of a fig tree, it started by growing around a large trunk tree, competed for space and nutrients, the other eventually withered and died, and now this one stands, in great presence.