As we had buckets of time left in Argentina we decided against bombing it to the border and then on to Tupiza in one go, instead we opted to stay one night in La Quiaca, the Argentian border town. This proved to be good foresight since our bus broke down half way! Nevertheless we arrived at our hostel by 7pm and got settled IN A PRIVATE ROOM!!!! Yay!!! After 8 weeks in dorms it was amazing (apart from Ahmad farting in the bed).
Early the next day we walked to the border, got stamped out, got our pesos changed and entered Bolivia. All was going very smoothly and I had expected to see loads of dodgy folk on the Bolivian side but not a crook in sight. Kind of disappointed we weren’t mobbed like in Africa, oh well.
After uber European Argentina, Bolivia was a completely different set up. Women wearing traditional dress, a large proportion of individuals from aborigine descent, markets, street food and of course, the typical run down bus station. Bolivia is a poor country and therefore, we could forget all the comforts of Brazil, Arg and Chile – travel there is easy.
We eventually found a counter selling tickets to Tupiza and were told the bus was leaving in 5 minutes (this wasn’t as easy as it sounds given that we speak holiday Spanish and nobody seems to speak English in Villazon!) We were directed to the bus and then it all got a bit confusing. We were told the ticket was 15 bolivianos (£1.50 – a steal!) but were given no ticket and then told we had to pay somebody else another 4 bolivianos although we couldn’t understand why. We boarded the bus with great difficulty since we had to take our backpacks on as well only to discover that there were no seats. They didn’t give us tickets because there were none! More and more people were coming on even though there was no room and we had to push and shove our way off, basically they were going to pocket our money. We went back to another counter and purchased legitimate tickets for 4 hours time and then grabbed some empanadas in a restaurant (these are pasties by the way). I was feeling quite dizzy from the change in altitude (nearly 3500m above sea level) and so we made a decision to sack the bus and get a minivan to Tupiza. It was £2.50 each and we got there in just over an hour. I was shocked at the state of the roads and was glad we weren’t on the double decker bus!
Tupiza is just a jumping off point for horse back and salt flat tours so there is nothing to do apart from look at the red mountains and cactus which is what we did for two days until our salt flats tour.
The tour was 4 days and 3 nights. We travelled by 4×4 through landscape resembling the wild wild west, a national park with about 10 beautiful lagoons (with flamingos), desert with volcanos and strange rock formations (llamas everywhere) and finally the Salar de Uyuni which is the largest salt flat in the world. At night we stayed in small villages and it was pretty basic, only 3 hours of electricity per day. Needless to say, it was an amazing experience! The only negative was that we were with 6 other people who were all french and spoke french most of the time so we felt a bit left out. We had some fun with the photos though as you can see above.
After the tour we got dropped off in Uyuni and randomly bumped into a girl we met in China! That afternoon we did some errands, hung around with two couples who were doing the Salar tour at the same time as us and went on the internet (after four days without it we were dying!). That night we went out for dinner with Antoinette which was really nice and then headed to Sucre the following morning.