Sorata

Women preparing a field for planting

Sorata is situated in the Cordillera Real about four hours north east of  La Paz. Its like Scotland in many respects, steep hills and  lots of rain. 

It started off badly as I asked a police man for directions to a campsite but the bastard sent me the wrong way, thankfully some kids on their way home from school were going in the same direction, these children have some walk to school as it was like climbing a Munroe as we left the town and took fairly brutal 20 minutes .

I was beginning to think I was crazy camping here as the weather was like midsummer Argyll on the first day, sporadic driving rain followed by a short dry spell then more rain. The surrounding hills shrouded in mist, I did wonder why I had come here. The next day however I awoke, with the sun beating down on my tent and it was such a beautiful place, towering over the town was the mountain of Illampu, glistening in the sun.

I walked down a dirt road for several miles through several small hamlets, until in the midst of all this spectacular scenery I came upon the local binmen "unloading" the towns rubbish over a cliff face which was directly above the river! I was quite disgusted, but given their circumstances and that it is the poorest country in South America I think that they have few other options. 

Coca and houses.

Sorata with the Cordillera Real as an impressive backdrop!

View from the road across the valley, there are little hamlets scattered throughout the area, which would make for some interesting visits.

Taliban style taxi on a road with crazily steep drops from the side, and innumerable bits where landslides had taken the road down the hill

The local bin men emptying the rubbish at the local landfill

Illampu towering over the town

Chickens getting out of the torrential down pour

Typical Sorata street, steep, unpaved with a stream running down the middle.

La Paz

Wifeys

La Paz is a breath taking city but not just because of its 4000 metre altitude, the sights, sounds and smells of this crazy city really are something too savour. It is now my favourite city having ousted both Vancouver and Santiago from the number one position. 

The first thing that you notice in La Paz are the women in their traditional attire, usually manning a stall of some kind in one of the city's crazy markets. The second thing you notice is the shoe shine boys, Lambustres, they are all masked and there are hundreds of them. 

The streets are all very steep, and the altitude means that you get out of breath walking up and down them, and on every street there are people selling everything from battery's and copied music (piracy is rife) to llama fetus's and more!

There are hardly any private cars, all the traffic being made up of taxis and micros (small buses and minivans) all of which have a barker who is usually hanging from the sliding door on the side shouting the route the bus is taking. They are a brilliant way of getting around the city and only cost a few pence to go a mile or so.

Florian my shoe shining mate

City with cliffs in background

Selling tomatoes

Lambustres

Market from above

Sitting on the step

El Alto

Llama fetus's

Sagernaga

Hanging in the street

Salar de Uyuni

Salt mountain in a small village called Colchani on the edge of the salar.

After attempting to get to the Salar de Uyuni on foot and failing I went on a jeep excursion to the salt flat. The Salar They build with it as well as harvesting the salt. The salt is also far saltier than the stuff you get off the supermarket shelves, so like drug dealers they must be cutting the salt that we get in Scotland.

The Salar is the largest salt flat in the world and is in places over 130 metres deep and was formed by the drying out of a huge prehistoric lake. It is also the main breeding ground for 3 species of Flamingo.

It really is a spectacular and surreal place to visit, as it is perfectly level with a thin covering of water, making it very reflective making the sky look like it was in the ground as well as above. The salt forms into large heptagonal shapes as far as the eye can see, and it is astronomically huge!

Harvested salt in a drying heap

The people of Colchani harvest the top 5 inches of salt from the Salar and harvest in the region of 20,000 tons per year, there are also large deposits of Lithium within the area which I was told the Bolivian government is looking into exploiting.

The Salar is used as a transit route due to its flatness

There are several islands within the Salar which protrude above the salty surface and are the fossilised remnants of coral reefs, this one is called originally Isla de Cactus and has innumerable cacti growing on it.

Uyuni

Curing a llama fetus in the local market


Coca leaves are available everywhere in Bolivia, and almost all the locals "chew" on a regular basis, in traditional Andean culture it is used as a stimulant to overcome hunger, thirst and fatigue as well as being good for the symptoms of altitude sickness. Chewing the leaves is called picchar, you first have to get a good wad of leaves going in your mouth for half an hour or so before adding a pinch of alkaloid, traditionally ash from a plant, but I think the pink balls are some man-made alternative. They say that taking the coca leaves has no effect but I found my pen continually drifting off the edge of the page when writing my journal in the evenings.

Typical street in Uyuni, no tarmac and huge holes full of water, Argyll and Bute council must have the road maintenance contract!

The town of Uyuni itself is a bit of a shithole, but then it is in one of the most impoverished places in one of the most impoverished country's in the world, litter is everywhere as you can see in most of the photos particularly just outside the town, and as running water is a major luxury most people go for a wander to the train track for the toilet, and I was initially shocked when I walked past several woman crouching with their skirts hitched up having a dump, they didn't bat an eyelid as I walked past!

One of the few wee bushes that wasn't wearing poly bags!

The local latrine and dumping ground



Vicuna grazing a few miles out of town

I tried walking to the huge salt flat outside of the town one day to avoid paying to go on a tour, but after several hours walking across a starkly barren landscape which is very occasionally peppered with tussocks of grass and a storm coming from where I had walked from, I decided that the £15 for a tour wasn't that expensive and that being lost out here would not be a good way to end my holiday.


You walk for miles and it just doesn't seem to get any closer, only more barren

Off the rails in Bolivia!

The cemetario de tren outside the town of Uyuni

Going for the Johnny Cash look

Bolivian border

I entered Bolivia Through the town of Avaroa which is at an altitude of 3,700 metres, though during the bus journey we went over a pass that was over 4,500 m. It was very cold during this journey the air is very thin making breathing more difficult than normal, and the bus was full of dust. To make matters worse the woman sitting next to me was not keen on sharing here blankets with a poor freezing gringo who had stupidly turned up for a 6am bus in shorts.

Altiplano

I experienced proper culture shock the moment I crossed the border into Bolivia, and realised that my travels up to this point had been in the more westernised countrys and that this journey would be very exciting. You can see the moment you go over the border that it is a very poor country and that there is little road infrastructure, and the packs of maurading perro's found in Argentina and Chile were replaced by pigs!

Train going across the Altiplano

Volcan Ollague

San Pedro de Atacama

The Atacama desert

I arrived in the town of San Pedro de Atacama at the height of their summer, and god was it oppressively hot, 35 Celsius during the day then getting close to 0 degrees during the night! The town itself is a total tourist trap (literally) as its a 2 hour bus ride to the nearest point of escape, the mining town of Calama. The hostels don't have kitchens, forcing people to eat at the massively over priced eateries, and I was told by the hostel staff not to think about using my camping stove within the town boundaries as I could be lynched!

The town itself is of no interest and has nothing other than restaurants and tour companies lining its streets. I hired a bike and explored the surroundings which are pretty impressive, though with the sweltering heat and beating sun is hard work and I drank nearly 5 litres of water.

I cycled up the aptly named Valle de la Muerta, which I think came close to claiming another victim. It may only be 4 or 5 km's long but trying to cycle up a slight incline in loose sand with the sun beating down on you is not easy, there is very little shelter and on a few occasions I was questioning my sanity. Though when you get to the top and get spectacular views over the barren wasteland that is the Atacama you are chuffed that you didn't just pack it in further back and freewheel back down to the pub.

Near the top of the aptly named Valley of the dead

Nothing for 100's of miles in every direction

These cliffs were creaking and moaning as the morning sun heated them up

Some caves I found on my bike ride

It sounds corny to say but the silence out here really is deafening

Dust storm rising as the sun goes down