BOLIVIA

I'm in Brazil! In Bonito, which has not been so bonito because it has been raining through out our whole stay here but finally, I have gotten the chance to upload some photos that I took during my trip in Bolivia!

After four days in Bolivia, we embarked on this four day 4x4 adventure through the south of Bolivia (the first day of it was through the Salt flats pictured below) and it was the most WILD car ride of my life. As I mentioned in an earlier post- Bolivia does not have paved roads, all in all, I traveled on a paved road for a total of about twenty minutes through out my whole trip in Bolivia. Instead, dirt roads covered in crevaces and unimaginably deep holes weave through Bolivia. I just realized its seven and not six and I have to be on a night bus to Iguassu in ten minutes! I hope everyone is doing well and miss you all terribly! This is sunrise at 4am through Bolivia on one of the 4x4 road trip days!

The most beautiful place I have ever been to in South America (other than parts of the Inca Trail, I just can't decide) is a place in Bolivia that to me, reminds me of what heaven must look like. This place is the Salt flat region of Bolivia, which is made up of sprawling miles of pure white salt as far as the eye can see. January, when I was in Bolivia, is one of the months during Bolivia's rainy season which is a MAGICAL time in the salt flats because two or three inches of rain lie on the perfectly white surface so that an illusion of perfectly reflected sky is created (see picture below). I couldn't attempt to do justice to the experience of seeing this heaven on earth through words or photos but I can say that nothing I have ever seen compared..

This is a photo I took as we were driving for three hours (a car ride that not once anyone asked 'when are we going to get there?'), you can see the salt floor through the shawdow of the cloud and in the distance the perfect reflection of the sky.

This is our 4x4 driving through the flats, it seemed as if we were floating.

In a section of the salt flats that was not flooded with rain, we were playing around with illusion photos for about an hour. This is Alex in front from England and Adel on the other side from Sydney, Australia (she's back in Buenos Aires now and I miss her!).

That night we stayed at a hostel made entirely of salt.. the beds, the tables, the chairs, the walls, it was insane. (And we had a surprise birthday party for James' who's 24th birthday it was!!)

After a ten hour (ROUGH AND RUGGED- I had to run out of the car at one point because I was in the front seat when the engine started smoking. The driver had stuffed grass around the engine to keep the salt out it as we drove through the salt flats and a flame caught, I didn't know the word chance or explosion in Spanish but I understood the sign language well enough to get the hell out) car ride through dirt ditches and roads of sand we made a detour to see the Red Lake which is a much deeper color than this photo resolution shows- the water was a Coca-Cola-can red and the lake was absolutely enormous. I'm smiling in this photo but I was actually completely out of breath after having run/rolled down this STEEP hill with John and then having had to run back up it to get to the car before we left this lake.

Although mostly covered by ice, this is the Green Lake that we saw the next day, at the tip of the most southern part of Bolivia (and my friends and I trying to do something else other than stand and smile).

The word 'diverse' describes Bolivia perfectly. I found diversity in their language, which was perfectly clear to understand in La Paz, the unofficial capital, but hardly decipherable outside the major cities where primarily Spanish serves as a second language and is spoken with a scratchy and thick accent. Another diverse aspect is the landscape. By driving through what seemed like the entire country but was only half of it, I saw landscapes that looked like the moon, the desert, a snowcovered valley, a never ending abyss of salt, fields of flowers and crops, high mountains, rivers, the different landscapes never seemed to end.. the cities themselves were quite diverse, Sucre was a beautiful white city with cleanliness and plazas while every other city (this picture I took in Potosi) had streets lined with garbage and homeless people..

While walking through Potosi, I passed this and took a picture to show how people are living in the very center of the city. I was surprised to find that in one of the main cities of Bolivia, there was this much undevelopment two blocks from the main square, I was expecting to find it ten blocks away but I imagine it is even worse there.

There are some things I have yet to figure out in Bolivia- scratch that- many things. For one, on my morning walk exploring Potosi, I passed these four women sitting in the middle of the street knitting. Another is the valor purple track suit our tour guide wore every day. More importantly though, I found Bolivia to be very, very unorganized, and for the most part, rather filthy.

Bolivia is a great place to travel if you are on a budget because the exchange rate (currently) is one dollar to seven bolivianos, so divide every price by seven. Furthermore, everything can be negotiated down in terms of prices.. everything, anywhere. For lunch in Potosi, I wandered off by myself and went to one of the nicest french/bolivian cuisine restaurants in the city that was recommended in the Lonely Planet Bolivia and this plate was.. $4.75, with my tomato soup to start with, two waters and the tip, the meal was less than $10. Unbelievable, right?? Now I'm in Brazil where you can barely find a soup for less than ten dollars!

Feb 4, 2011
I have never been on a quad before but in all honesty, I don´t really have any fears of anything that I have not tried before. Fear of quading hadn´t even crossed my mind when I heard that it was an option for the next day because all I had heard before was that it is loads of fun. In fact, when a tour guide came to our hotel and was telling us different things we could do; rock climbing, visit dinosaur footprints, go mountain biking, etc. I coughed and yelled quading to try to sway some of my friends to go with me. I would like to think that I had no way of knowing what was coming but I guess I should have thought back to the four day 4x4 Uyuni Salt Flats crossing we had just done and the conditions of the roads.. roads? No, I´ve been on one paved road in Bolivia and it was for twenty minutes. Roads here are dirt paths that are filled with massive bumps and holes as if every meter you had to slow down for a speedbump, but since there are so many, there is no slowing down (people have jumped so high from their bus seats while the driver hit one of these ¨speedbumps¨ at such a high speed that they hit their head on the ceiling, that was two feet higher, so suddenly that tears started coming).

Have to run to a night train to brazil now, (goodbye BOLIVIA!) but will continue what happened once I have internet again in a few days.. includes flipping, tears and a little blood, not on my end but my friend´s.. miss you all! Xo alexa


Feb 2, 2011
I am running as fast as I can towards a moving bus. The problem is, I should be on that bus instead of running after it. The thought of being left in Potosi, Bolivia, instead of sitting comfortably on that three hour bus to Sucre, is probably the cause for my terror that I can see reflected on the faces of the local women around me. Moments before, they idled in traditional skirts by their doorways but suddenly they are breaking into a sprint only meters ahead, flailing their arms in hopes of catching the attention of the bus driver as this vehicle rides on forward down the narrow street steeped on both sides with garbage and litter, something I´ve found to expect of every Bolivian city. Running with the weight of a four year old child on my back (the backpack that I have been traveling with for the past four weeks) through a Bolivian city alongside women selling homebaked cakes and electric converters on the street, I am wondering what the hell I am going to do if I get left. I am traveling with 16 people.. on a three week trip through Bolivia to Brazil. I´ve been with them since the 27th of January where I met up with them in La Paz, the unofficial capital of Bolivia. For the most part, they are a year older or younger than twenty-two and from Australia or England, with the exception of a couple from Canada. Whats complicated is that each of them are on that bus.

After exploring the city of Potosi on my own all morning, I met up with the group at 2pm back at the hotel to catch our two thirty bus. When our not-so-fearless-but-attempts-to-look-it-everyday-in-his-purple-valore-track-suit-and-Brooklyn-hat leader said the bus was pulling up soon, a line quickly formed for the bathroom. On the first bus from La Paz to Uyuni days before, I learned my lesson about Bolivian buses the hard way.. after downing two liters of wáter due to the altitude that we were climbing, I desperately needed to pee. I waited but finally tried to nudge my neighbor John awake, who I had just met that morning and who was sitting in the aisle seat. No success, so I tried to go over him, a bit worried he would wake up at the moment it would seem I was straddling him to get to the aisle, I risked it and was lucky, but completely unprepared for what I was about to walk into. The bathroom, although I would prefer not use that word to describe what this unfathamble place was, was a hole clogged with a sweater and diarreah, toilet seat glued to the wall. A watergun sat in the ¨sink¨ under a dirty backpack and socks. I had to grasp both sides of the wall to make sure I didnt fall in, what I can only imagine would be one of the worst moments of anyone´s life. Which brings me back to today and why I waited, last on line, to use the bathroom at the hotel before getting on the bus. Sadly, once out, I picked up my bag from the luggage storage and walked out to find the bus sitting a block away. I was walking towards it when its doors locked and black smoke erupted from its pipes as it drove away. Running as fast as I could, I tried to wave it down but there were no windows in the back to see any of my desperate attempts. Luckily, one of the local women who had recognized my distress caught the attention of the bus driver who slammed to a halt and opened the doors. When our tour leader saw it was me running up and we had not stopped because of local women trying to sell juices and sweets to us on the bus, his mouth dropped in horror and embarressment. I got on and stretched out for the ride but my heart was still beating so fast for at least ten minutes afterwards at how close I had been to being stuck in Potosi.