Nyall hits the slopes... literally.

Last week we joined forces (and expenses) with a few friends from our hostel in Santiago for a skiing expedition in the mountains behind the city. Of our group of 8, 5 had never skiied before, so the remainder of us spent the day trying to get the newbies down the slope (almost all in spanish I should add - my biggest challenge in Spanish yet!).

Nyall had a few big stacks at first, but his determination pushed him to ski the steepest slopes by the end of the day. I can't believe how quickly he picked it up! I hadn't skied in 8 years, but since I have been skiing since I was 2 it came back pretty easily.

A day of heaps of fun!

Northern Chile, and heading back to Civilization

We ended our tour of the Bolivian salt flats on the border of Chile, where we had to take a shuttle bus down 2000m to the town of San Pedro de Atacama. The moment we crossed the border from Bolivia to Chile we could sense a difference... for a start, it was the first paved road we'd driven on in weeks!

San Pedro is a little town located in an oasis on the Atacama desert. For some reason, I was expecting it to be a city, so when we arrived and found a dusty little country town, I was a bit disappointed. But things quickly started looking up, especially when we managed to get through Chilean customs without having to pay the $60 entrance fee that Australians are supposed to pay.

At the bus terminal, we chose a decent looking hostel from the hawkers who came to meet us, bargained a little, then took a roundabout ute ride through town to find that our hostel was actually a fair distance from the centre. But, it was homely and comfortable, and most importantly, had a scalding hot shower. We also got a connection to the net for the first time in weeks, only to find worried emails from both of our parents...

On first look, we weren't too impressed by San Pedro. The streets are full of tourists - it's difficult to find someone there who isn't carrying a backpack! By the time we left, though, I'd really started to like the place. It's got a unique, funky, style of it's own, and even though we struggled a lot with the Chilean spanish, everyone was really friendly and warm towards us. We spent a few days there, relaxing and touring around the Atacama desert, before boarding a bus south.

Next stop for us was La Serena. For the first time in months we were back on the coast, and back at sea-level altitudes. And to top it off, our first sight on arrival was a giant shopping centre and a McDonalds. Needless to say that was our first destination after checking into a hostel! The mall became a regular destination for us during our stay there, as Maryanne slowly ate into her tax return and started replacing tired old clothes...

From La Serena we also took two guided tours. The first was to a nature reserve an hour north, called the Humboldt Penguin Reserve. With our tour guide, an Italian primary school teacher, we took a little boat out on rough seas to check out an island full of penguins, sea lions, comorants and other animals. He also took us to a second island, with a beach for swimming, but given that it's the middle of winter here no-one really felt like bathing there.

The second tour was to the Mamaluca observatory, where we were given a basic tour of the visible constellations and various other things that we could see through their telescope. This was a bit disappointing - we expected to be taken to a real observatory, but Mamaluca is solely aimed at tourists. It was all fairly lightweight and unfortunately nothing really new for me! :P

Right now, we're in the capital, Santiago. We've got supermarkets, fast food, and flushable toilet paper. It feels great to be back in familiar surroundings. In fact, Santiago reminds us a lot of Melbourne. It's got the same weather, and the streets, shops, and buildings all look like what you'd see back home. We're really loving it here.

The Silver Mines of Potosí

While we were heading South in Bolivia, we took the chance to take a quick stopover in the mining town of Potosí. Depending on who you ask, Potosí is the highest city in the world, at just over 4000m altitude. The city exists because it's the site of a massive hill full of silver and other minerals, which has been mined for hundreds of years. We went there solely to go on a tour of these mines.

When we arrived at Potosí we were welcomed by a large demonstration which had closed off most of the streets in the city centre, so we had to walk to our hostel. Apparently there's quite a bit of tension there at the moment between the local workers and an international Canadian mining company. We booked in a tour with our hostel, opting to pay a little more for an English guide (sometimes it's just too difficult to handle Spanish!).

In total we had about 14 people on the tour group, which was way too much for the little bus we had to cram into, but at least we split up into two groups at the mine, so it was manageable there. To start with, we all jammed into the van to get driven off to the miner's market. They took us first to a random house to get us all kitted up in mining gear - with boots, jacket, pants, helmet, and lamp. They also made us leave everything behind and just carry our cameras along in sacks.

From there we went to a small store, which was full of mining equipment, dynamite and other stuff like that. Our guide, Isaac, explained a bit about different types of dynamite and gear before getting us all stocked up with gifts (soft drink and dynamite sticks) for the mining groups we'd meet along the way. Thankfully he handled all this as we would've had no idea about it!

After our shopping, we took a really uncomfortable trip through the Potosí streets and started heading up the silver hill. Our tour was of one of the community run mines, where a bunch of mining teams all work the same mine, but independently. The whole way into the mine shaft we had to avoid the workers who were continually pushing out mine carts full of rocks and minerals, then running back into the mine with the empty carts. The tracks were pretty rough and the carts kept falling off the rails and into the mud, and each time that happened the workers would have to lift the cart (complete with a few tonnes of rock) back onto the track - it looked like really hard work.

Heading deeper into the mine, we descended a bunch of rickety ladders and across slippery beams to the bottom of the shaft. There, the workers were all busy repairing a rope ladder and some machinery. We hung around for a little while until they started everything up again - then they rode a bucket-on-a-winch down another shaft to start drilling and laying dynamite. About this time our guide took us back up through all the ladders to the main level. It was a lot more difficult to climb back up then to get down!

Next stop was a team of workers doing things more manually - raising buckets of minerals on a hand-driven pulley winch. They were really glad to take a break when we arrived. After chatting with them a bit we headed off, to see a few more little sites and a shrine to El Tio on the way.

I was so glad to get out of the mine in the end. While it wasn't as difficult or claustrophobic as I'd been expecting, it was getting really tiring to walk without continually bashing my head. Without my borrowed helmet I'd have cracked open my skull so many times...

Outside, the last thing we did on the tour was to light and explode our one remaining stick of dynamite. Isaac lit up the fuse and we all joked around, passing it amongst ourselves before Isaac finally took it to throw into a hole in the side of the mountain. It made a huge bang, but not much visible except a lot of smoke.

From there, it was back in the crowded bus to the house where we'd started, to get changed and return all the gear. Then, finally, back to our hostel for a much-needed hot shower.

I hope this doesn't sound insensitive, but the mines weren't at all what I'd been expecting. I had in mind that I'd be shocked and scared by the conditions, but after visiting it, I didn't feel like this at all. I actually got the impression that it was more of a boy's club - a place to drink, chew coca, and work with friends without women around. In fact, our guide (who used to be a miner before his father made him stop), kept telling us how much he missed working there. That said, there's obviously no health-and-safety rules or anything in the mines, and we were told the life expectancy for a miner is about 10 years after they start to work down there...

Conquering the Death Road

Our first impressions of Bolivia weren't great. We came in via a bus from Puno to Copacabana, which turned out to be a total gringo town, full of crappy market stalls and extremely overpriced, average food. (It seems to me that in Latin America the more expensive a restaurant is, the more it's solely catered to tourists, and the more bad imitations of 'traditional' western food they serve). We nearly got stuck in Copacabana - even though it's a tourist town, it turns out there's no atm's anywhere in town. So we only had a bit of cash left we'd got at the border, which was just enough to cover our night's accomodation. We had to sell our Peru guide book for cash to get a bus ticket out of town.

Half way through the trip from Copacabana to La Paz, we all had to disembark the bus so they could put it on a rickety old wooden platform, to ferry across a part of Lake Titicaca. We were worried the ferry fare would exhaust our little supply of loose change we had left, but even though the ticket salesman ripped me off 1 boliviano (about 20 cents!), we had just enough to scrape by. The ferry ride gave us a good chance to meet the other travellers on the bus - all us tourists grouped up because none of us had a clue what was happening.

From one of these other tourists I learnt about the "Death Road" in La Paz. Apparently the main highway north from the city used to be a narrow dirt road which wound around the mountains and was notorious for how many people died on it each year (some estimates say about 300 people each year!). A few years back the Bolivian government built a new highway, which meant the old road is only used for local traffic, and for extreme-thrill-seeking-mountain-bikers who can ride the whole way downhill without having to peddle at all. There's a bunch of companies in La Paz which take you up to the top of the road, rent you a bike and gear, and then let you race from the mountains (at 4700m altitude) down to the forest (1000m altitude). I decided to sign up with one that claimed to have a perfect safety record and give it a shot!

Our tour had a great group of about 14 people, of which over half were Australian! After about an hour drive out of La Paz and up through the surrounding mountains, we reached the top, where we had a quick training session to familiarise ourselves with the bikes (and the brakes!). The first downhill section was paved, but was scary because it was still part of the main highway and was full of traffic... including lots of oversized trucks, which we had to grit our teeth and overtake.

After about an hours ride (about 20km, all downhill), we started on the "death road" part of the ride. This bit was really scary, with a slippery gravel surface and sheer drops on the side. The worst part was that we had to ride on the outside of the road - the side closest to the edge. All up-hill traffic has the right to the other side of the road.

We all survived this hard bit, but honestly I'm really surprised that more riders don't fall off the road. We'd had a few close calls on our trip, and there was another four groups doing the same ride at the same time - so it's a lot of people to potentially make mistakes. One of the other groups was full of idiots who were treating the whole thing like a competition too - they kept overtaking dangerously with no warning at all. (When I got back to our hotel later that day, I did a bit of googling and found that just last year a rider fell off the road to his death).

At the bottom of the ride, we'd left behind all the mountainous altitudes and were right back in the tropics. You could really feel the difference in temperature and mugginess in the air. Maryanne and I were really glad that we've passed that part of our travels - and that we were heading back to La Paz, high altitudes, and cool temperatures.

All in all, it was a fun day, and I'm really happy because I've achieved one of my goals for this trip - overcoming my fear of heights. I'm not sure when it happened, but now they just don't bother me - I can climb anything and look down massive cliffs without problem, when before I'd be freaking out at the slightest drop. Oh, and if anyone's looking for a good company to do the death ride with, I'd recommend B-Side adventures.

Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, and high altitudes in Bolivia.

After an extremely bumpy bus ride in a little pink bus on the dirt road from Potosí to Uyuni we booked into a quality hotel for $5 a night. (The hotel owner wouldn't give us a discount on that rate!). We'd headed into Uyuni for the sole purpose of signing up to a tour of the salt flats - and when we arrived we were swamped with agencies trying to get us to sign up. In the end, after checking out a whole bunch of competitors, we came to the conclusion that the only real difference was accomodation choices, so we settled with the company that sat best in our gut (literally... they were also offering pancakes for breakfast), and settled in for a cold, early night.

DAY 1

Breakfast took forever to be served (typical Bolivian service -- we were a few seconds away from just walking away when our food finally arrived), and at 10am we went to the Andes Salt Expeditions office to meet our fellow travelers. Dan & Alex (Brits), Joe & Ben (also Brits), Rod & Michelle (Irish), and Hyunmi (Korean) made up the English speaking contingent of our adventurers, and we were also joined by Alexis & Valerie (French) and our guide and driver - the Juans (Bolivian).

The tour didn't get off to the best start as we waited around for over an hour for the company to resolve petrol problems in the 4wds, and then on the way out of town Juan suddenly remembered that after all these delays he had forgotten to fill up the tank. We returned back to town, even further behind in the schedule.

First stop on the tour brought us too the train graveyard just outside of Uyuni. Nyall had fun jumping on the huge old rusted bodies - surely there would be some safety regulations, but hey, remember we are in Bolivia!

From there we were finally on our way onto the famed salt flats. After driving about 20 minutes out of Uyuni we were hit by a blinding whiteness of a never-ending salt desert. There was a little town just on the border of the flats, which seemed to be just an excuse for a market directed to us tourists. It was cool seeing local kids playing in the salt like other kids would play in snow, though.

From there we drove out over the salt to the famous Salt Hotel... which I think is a museum and not actually a hotel at all, but I don't know for sure because it was closed by the time we arrived. The Juans set up our barbecue llama lunch while the rest of us played around on the salt flats. It felt like we were in the snow, so consequently I tried to make salt-angels... and failed. The salt is hard, and wrecked my clothes a little!

Nearly everyone goes to the salt flats to take some trick photos. So here are our happy-snaps from the flats:

After way too much time setting up silly photos we bustled back into the 4wds and visited Fish Island - a cactus ridden island in the middle of endless salt flats. Más fotografías:

The boys managed to convince the Juans to let us ride on the roof of the 4wds across the flats until our fingers began to ache from the cold.

And we arrived in another Salt Hotel (this time on the very edge of the salt flats) for our first night's accommodation. It was a surprisingly comfortable hotel, and I slept great!

DAY 2

Our wake up call was at 6am, and once again the troupe piled into the 4wds. We visited this cool looking volcano on the border with Chile, which had awesome clouds and a rock that "supposedly" looks like a crocodile. Anyway, we all climbed on the crocodile for a group photo to keep our guide happy.

We entered the Colored Lakes National Park where we became mesmerised by flamingos, Vicuñas, Llamas and all things typically South American - and a little field mouse that wanted our lunch.

We made our way across the Atacama Desert - the highest and coldest desert in the world. Nyall and the boys climbed every rock they could see, while the girls wrapped ourselves up in jackets and beanies to protect us from the extreme wind and cold.

Tonight's accommodation was in a dormitory-type room, not nearly as impressive as last night's salt hotel. It was extremely cold, and we all went to sleep reluctantly knowing that we would be leaving before sunrise the next morning.

DAY 3

As mentioned, we woke ridiculously early and huddled together in the 4wd for warmth, while the Juans loaded our bags and gear onto the roofs of the vehicles. First stop was at the geysers at an altitude of 5000m and temperatures of -15°.

As the sun rose we approached the hot springs for breakfast. The boys and Alex gamely stripped down to their swimmers to have some hotsprings goodness, but the rest of us chickened out.

The green lake was mildly disappointing because it wasn't green, and from there we made the last stretch to the Chilean border crossing where we bid farewell to our friends returning to Uyuni, checked our luggage to ensure we weren't smuggling coca leaves into Chile, and boarded a bus for the tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile (the officials somehow overlooked our Australian passports and forgot to charge us a $60 tourist visa, yipeeee!).

We had such an amazing time on our Salt Flats with tour operator Andes Salt Expeditions. In Uyuni we were quite overwhelmed with the choice of operators, and although Andes Salt were a tad more expensive (we are talking $10 more over 3 days, but that is a lot in Bolivia) we really felt that we had exceptional service. Our guides and drivers really took an interest in us, and we had a lot of fun with them. But what really counts, more so than the tour company, is the group. On a 3 day tour in 4wds you don't want to get stuck with someone you can't stand, but we really enjoyed hanging out with our group! The salt flats tour is probably one of the best things you can do in Latin America. So do it :)