So for anyone else out there who´s keeping a blog, you know that sense of security you feel every time blogspot so nicely autosaves your post for you? Well when the computer I was working on crashed a few hours ago I learned that here it doesn´t do that. Which is a bummer since I´d almost caught up on everything from the past 2 weeks. Now I´m going to do this in stages and I´ll try to muster the enthusiasm to make it as good as it was before...
I think I left off on my way to Cochabamba. Cochabamba is Bolivia´s 3rd largest city and as a center of "agriculture" both legal and illegal its citizens enjoy a little higher standard of living than most Bolivians. I had a meeting with my Bolivian contact (which involved much less espionage than the word "contact" would imply, unfortunately) who was very helpful if a little rushed and impatient. I also checked out the Christ statue which stands over the city. It´s actually taller than the Christ in Rio (sorry Leah) which at 33 meters tall has a meter for every year of Jesus´ life. Cochabambans say theirs is taller because Christ lived "33 years and a little." Cochabamba is also home to the largest open-air market in the Americas which after having experienced dozens of South American markets amazed even me. Standing at the entrance (the decorated cakes section) I couldn´t even begin to see the end of the stalls in the distance. Cochabamba also reinforced one of the greatest personal mysteries for me here. Last fall I commented on how Quito and other Ecuadorian cities seem to be commercially organized by the services or products for sale. While this is true in most cities in the region Cochabamba took it to a new level when I stayed on the funeral home/custom hat shop street. Curiouser and curiouser...
After Cochabamba I made a quick, spontaneous stop in Sucre, the official capitol of the country. Although it was a beautiful city with all of its white-washed colonial buildings I was there on a Sunday when almost everything in the city was closed. I did manage to check out a really famous and scientifically important site of fossiziled dinosaur footprints. Techtonic action since the footprints were laid has today left them on an almost perfectly vertical cliff at the local cement factory. They were neat.
From Sucre I took a quick busride to Potosí, the highest city in the world of its size, whatever that means. Due to the once silver-rich mountain which looms over the city, Potosí was in the 16th and 17th centuries the largest city in the Americas and one of the richest in the world. For 2 centuries millions of dollars of silver were carried out on the backs of indigenous slaves and when the silver veins more or less dried up the city went with them. Now silver mining is still the most important economic activity in the region but affords the miners paltry earnings. Also, due to the toxic chemicals used for centuries in the mine and the obvious dangers of mining in general a miner has approximately 20 years to live from the day they first enter the mine. Obviously with such a rich history and interesting I decided to take a tour. It was pretty much as I´d expected: enclosed, dark, hot, and difficult seeing the 15-year-old kids toiling in such awful conditions. We bought alcohol, coca leaves, and dynamite (all the necessary things to work in the mine for more than 12 hours a day, and yes, I was carrying dynamite in my backpack for about 3 hours) as gifts for the miners before we left. I also ran into my Irish friend Emma for about the 4th time and it was really great being able to catch up on our past few days. I´ve definitely missed traveling with her and our "boys" these past couple weeks.
After Potosí I took a bus to Uyuni, probably the most remarkable/haunting/beautiful/ridiculous place I´ve seen on this trip. The town is absolutely post-apocalyptic (more Cormac McCarthy than Mad Max) with its wide, dusty streets, low and functional buildings, and people rushing around bundled against the cold. I´d been warned about this cold at several points in my journey but by now I´m a hardened Minnesotan and just couldn´t be convinced that South America could produce a cold that could phase me. I was wrong. It routinely gets down to -5 or -10 at night in Uyuni and the wind blows about 30 or 40 mph constantly. Luckily I´d purchased a coat in the massive Cochabamba market. In the 19th and early 20th century Uyuni was actually a pretty important city for Bolivia as a stopping point for trains from Argentina and Chile. When the railway gave way to the highway Uyuni more or less dried up. As a testament to this past a huge train cementery lies about a kilometer from the town where trains in various stages of corrosion are just falling apart in the desert. I think walking around the trains at 7 in the morning (before tourist groups got there) with stray dogs and old men walking around and plastic bags floating in the breeze was the most powerful part of the trip. Absolutely, hauntingly beautiful.
Most people only stop in Uyuni on their way to a tour of the Salar de Uyuni and southern Bolivia. That next morning I joined mine with 3 middle-aged Belgian women and a Dutch couple. The Salar de Uyuni is the highest (like everything here) and largest salt lake in the world. During the wet season a little water covers the surface but for most of the year it´s just an enormous expanse of blindling white salt plain. We made a stop at the salt hotel (really just a hotel made entirely of blocks of salt) and then stopped at Isla de los Pescadores, a cactus-covered island in the middle of the salt wasteland. The island was beautiful with many cactuses standing over 9 meters tall and thousands of years old and the geography made for some good rock-climbing and hiking (Katie not that I have you pigeon-holed as "the geologist" but I´ll have to describe this trip in geological detail to you, it was amazing). From there we spent the night in a simple but comfortable hotel on the edge of the Salar and settled in for the plunging nighttime temperatures. The next day was full of high-altitude lakes with various species of flamingo (yes, flamingo) and the most bizarre rock formations I´ve ever seen. I have pictures of all these things but don´t have the cable for Lauren´s camera (mine was stolen back in Ecuador), so those will be up in a week or so. The second day ended at Laguna Colorada, a lake turned entirely red by the reaction of light with the algae living in the lake. This in itself is pretty amazing but the red of the lake was contrasted by the complete whiteness of the borax shores. I climbed around the borax (which I just wikipedia-ed and found to be only mildly toxic) cliffs and it really felt like I was on another planet altogether. The next morning we had to get up at 5 to see some really disappointing geysers, especially considering the temperature that greeted us at that hour. On a positive note though I did see a shooting star that night in the fantastically clear sky with a really wide, long tail; sort of like the shooting stars in kids´ drawings. After the geysers we stopped at a hot spring and I decided stripping in the still far below freezing weather was worth the experience of a thermally heated bath. After all, if you refer to one of the first posts from this trip a physically shocking early morning bath was nothing new. Afterward we saw a white lake and a green lake (which at this point I´m too tired to explain but they also were weirdly beautiful) and I hopped in a van for Chile.
Although I originally wasn´t planning on staying in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama was a really nice town albeit expensive (I spent more money just surviving for 3 days in Chile than I spent living the high life in Bolivia for a week!). I tried sandboarding a bit (basically snowboarding down massive sand dunes) and watched the sunset over the beautiful and aptly named Valley of the Moon. I caught a bus to Arica, taxied across the border to Tacna, Peru, and was on a bus to Nasca within the hour. In Nasca I looked at the famous Nasca Lines from a lookout (majorly disappointing, they would have been better had I splurged for a plane ride) and saw some really interesting pre-Incan cementeries with the mummies still intact. The graves had actually been plundered by grave-robbers for years before archaeologists discovered them so the desert was just littered with bone fragments. A very creepy experience. Finally I visited a little desert oasis called Huacachina where I sandboarded for an hour or so before leaving for my present location. Huacachina is near the top of the list of places I plan on spending more time soon.
After a quick stop-over in Lima I´m now in Chiclayo, Peru. Today I visited a really big witch´s market and got great explanations from a local healer on the uses of monkey claws, various types of amulets, and dragon blood. This afternoon I checked out more ruins and decided a little late that I´m pretty ruined-out.
Now I basically just have a straight shot back to Ecuador and my flight on Monday. Blogspot and my brain are probably going to crash after this most epic of epic posts but I guess it´s been a good and story-worthy couple weeks. I hope this finds everyone extremely well and that I find you as such when I return in a few days. Love to all.
Coming soon: A return to Ecuadorian friends and maybe some closing thoughts
1 comment:
yours might be bigger, but mine is more famous. and less full of holes.
Post a Comment