Polly and Toby's Travels

Must write blog… Jeez Sarah stop distracting me :p Been on the internet for 45mins and am only just starting.. Still when internet is 25p an hour its ok to fb for a while. You´ll get what the title means later in the post… We are in La Paz atm having got straight on an overnight bus after our salt flats trip, so we were feeling lovely and clean as despite the tour guides promise that there were hot showers there obviously weren´t any!

The salt flat tour was good fun and had some comedy moments. The guy who sold everyone the tour wasn´t the most honest person we´ve met and booked one too many people on the trip. Watching everyone slowly work out there were 13 people rather than 12 was entertaining and when the guy returned (he went out to help get people as apparently a bus had broken down, this meant we set off an hour late) he had quite a few questions to answer!! We ended up getting 4 bottles of wine free as an apology. Tbf we didn´t mind the extra person as it didn´t affect the squisshynesh and was an extra person to talk to! The trip started off slow with the train graveyard (whoop whoop) but picked up as we went to the cactus island with 9metre high cacti and then obviously the salt flat where we took a few comedy photos! We went into this cave that you had to pay a pound to get into and you saw it all as soon as you entered. Wasn´t exactly big but some coolish formations. The first hostel that we stayed in was made of salt and cactus so was quite cool. Got extremly cold later in the evening though and the power cut around 10 so early beds. The sky outside was extremly cool and one of the highlights, as it was super dark and you could see thousands of stars and the band of the milky way! Tried to photo it but ended up with a black photo! Oh well you´ll have to believe me that it was awesome

The next, once they had defrosted our jeep, we set off to visit 5 different lakes in craters. Some were a bit dull but the red one was very cool and reflected the mountains around it! There was also this huge red empty crater at about 5000m metres that after about 30 seconds of running across it you were completly out of breath. When my uncle when travelling round SA 10 years ago he had photos of him doing headstands at various places. I took it a step further and got an awesome photo of me doing a handstand (woah) in the crater! Expertly taken by Polly of course You will see the photos one day, but Bolivia isn´t renowned for quick internet. We paid today to get all our photos since New Zealand put onto a DVD as we had another memory card scare and lost some photos so we wanted to make sure that they are safe!

Anyways, I digress. The third day didn´t start brilliantly as I was sick due to the undercooked chicken the night before. I noticed and stopped eating it, but obviously not soon enough. I did improve quickly though which was a relief as we were in the jeep a lot the third day to get back. The highlight of the third day was the hot springs in the moring, which really warmed and woke you up! Was lovely and hot (in the water, outside was around 5 degrees!) We then drove around an hour to see this supposedly amazing lake that was the worst we have seen all trip, just brown and half empty! We then had to turn around drive the hour back as we had made the detoir specially!

We then had a long drive back with a few little stops mainly for the break. On the leaving the national park the guards wanted to see our passes that we had paid 15 pounds (!) for on entry. We had left ours at the hostel as we didn´t see any need for them! The gurds demanded we paid again, but we stood our ground and said no (to guys stood there with pistols :s) and eventually they gave in and let us pass when we pointed out (well the girl who spoke english and spanish pointed it out for us!) that they could ring the other office who would know we bought them (you had to write down your passport and name etc when you bought the pass) so we got through! Yaaay! Was quite a long drive back, but along fun 4 x 4 tracks and when we got back we had a couple of hours for some super good pizza and chocolate cake (treat day?)before the long bus that got us here at 6am! Got to our hostel eventually and the guy was a bit confused with our booking. Check in was at 2pm so we had booked the previous night so we could check straight in. This had confused him so I think we aren´t paying for the extra night! Yaay Spent today trying to plan what we want to do here. Going to mountain bike down death road on friday we think and doing the witches market tomorrow but haven´t really got much set in stone atm! Trying to organise our 5 day trek that we want to do in Peru around the England games atm!! Anyway getting a bit peckish now so going to go eat!

Tags: Bolivia, Bus, Food, La Paz, Salt Flats, South America

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.