Bolivian tales

DAYS 63-66

It’s 8.10am when we get picked up by the shuttle bus from Mistica, taking us through two borders and to our 4×4 jeep, which will be our vehicle for the next four days… I’m slightly concerned about this trip and getting to the Bolivian border does look like reaching the base camp of some adventurous expedition: several jeeps are being loaded with supplies and luggage, while anxious backpackers try to help the young Bolivian drivers who will serve as their link to the world on this excursion… There is great anticipation in the air, while we embark on a trip with more question marks than any else so far….

But off we go and Bolivia shows its most beautiful sides without delay… getting to bath in the Altiplano hot pools is also a real plus! 🙂

The first day is however the toughest one of the tour: we reach an altitude of 5000ms and each of us (we are a group of three jeeps, each with six passengers) are suffering from some form of altitude sickness: despite doing more or less ok for most of the day, eventually my head just wants to explode and I feel breathless after taking two steps! It’s a very weird feeling and sipping mate with coca leaves, as well as drinking lots of water, does not seem to help very much… The Bolivian guides, able to run around and play football with the local kids at this inhuman altitude, keep on telling us that we will get used, but this is now requiring quite some act of faith…

The day ends us really early, though, as we are all exhausted by dinner time. Besides, the place where we are staying only has three hours of light available each night… This is such an incredible place!!

The highlight of our second tour day is definitely Laguna Colorada, an Altiplano lake changing colours depending on the weather and home to a lot of flamingos! Other incredible views are the Albor de piedra (=stone tree) and several sides of the desert.. as well as llamas, of course, lots of them! 🙂

The following morning, we get up at dawn and have a lot of road in front of us. We have by now got more or less used to altitude and are looking forward to reaching the place that should make it all worth while: Salar de Uyuni. Before reaching it, we stop just outside of Uyuni to visit the Train Cemetery, a sort of park where trains from the 1900 century, once used to transport metals out of Bolivia, are kept to rust… It’s all very surreal and we enjoy this crazy kind of adult fun park!

After playing on trains for a while, we finally reach Uyuni and the culture shock starts getting in: this is my first poor country and despite being only one day of drive from the almost-European Chile, it immediately appears as another world. Women dress with tradition clothes, locals have a sort of suspicious look towards us, the strange gringos, and I do also spot a pig (!) strolling on the street..

Half an hour later we enter the most surreal place: Uyuni Salt Plains! No picture could prepare us for what we would see… The salt plains are currently flooded and therefore, rather than looking like snow-covered fields like the one we saw close to San Pedro, are a blank mirror of salty water.

We spend over one hour walking around there, taking photos and being goofy, and it’s all just so weird!

Back in Uyuni it’s time for us to say goodbye to Jannecke, who is continuing her trip through Bolivia, while we will be heading back to Chile. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep in touch and maybe even meet again somewhere around the world one day! 🙂

 

The trip back is delayed first by some disappeared passengers (….’son Cinos!’) and then by the road being closed due to a car accident… While sitting on the jeep, I try to sleep just not to think that we are driving on a secondary road in the middle of the Bolivian nowhere at night…And it’s not a very successful try! We do survive, though, and by the time we finally make it to our accommodation, it’s well after dark and none of us is happy to hear the news that departure time is scheduled by 5am the following day…

Still, after some hours of sleep, we manage to get up and endure what seems to be a never-ending morning of driving with no breakfast… We have been promised the Chilean breakfast at the border, but that seems to be such a distant concept! Still, eventually, we make it there: to the breakfast table, through the long Chilean immigration line and finally to our hostel in San Pedro. After three nights in very (VERY!) basic accommodations, even a dorm bed feels quite comfortable! 😉

Mistica has proved a pretty good agency: we had no troubles with the drivers at all and the food, despite not being excellent quality or very abundant, was ok, including my veggie options. Perhaps the itinerary was a little too pretentious and the first day a bit too intense, but all in all I do believe our choice was right! 🙂

 

A band aid’s day trip: Vina del Mar

DAYS 56 & 57

During our stay in the area, we also take the chance to go to Vina del Mar for a day trip. This is where rich Santiago people come to spend their beach time and as such it’s a touristic place with skyscrapers as well as a nice coast line. It’d be a fun place to spend a typical seaside day, but we are not too lucky with weather when we get there so our beach time is mostly spent with all our clothes on!

For my, though, the visit to Vina del Mar also had other reasons: back on February 5, 1990, my all-time favourite band EUROPE played one legendary concert here, during the annual International Song Festival hosted by the city each February. Maybe it was because the location felt so exotic, maybe ’cause the South American crowd was totally wild and maybe ’cause the band was at its most successful period before descending to some years’ absence from stage, but the Vina concert was any fan’s ‘must have’ in their video collection! I was 14 then, had only a very vague idea of where Vina del Mar was located but remember spending several hours together with my other EUROPE fan buddies glued to the tv screen looking at the recording of that gig!

Today, I can stand by the arena where they played and look at the stage from which other bands will play in a couple of weeks, for that same Festival…. It’s surreal as only teenage myths getting real can be! 😉

But after one more exploration day in Valpa, it’s time to move again and go further North.

The bus trip to La Serena, our next destination, shows us a totally different side of Chile: nature has changed completely and pine and eucalyptus trees have been replaced by sand ground and cactus bushes. The desert towards which we are slowly moving does not seem too far away now… too bad that in reality I do know it’s still many, many bus hours away!

If 6 is not enough, what about 13?!

DAY 35

All in all I have found Argentina to be a more complicated country to travel in than I had thought.. So after about a month spent here, I was quite ready to leave and seeing more of Chile, which had made a better impression on me!Argentina was however apparently not quite as ready to let me go…

So our 6-hour-long bus trip from Bariloche to Puerto Montt (our Chilean destination) turns into a 13 hour-long adventure by bus! 😛 The reason behind this nightmare was the total destruction of the nearby border between Argentina and Chile, which ‘happened’ to burn down on New Year’s Eve for ‘unknown reasons’…Ehm, ehm, let’s not go into further speculations here, shall we?!

Whatever the reasons and the details, we have to drive a much longer way to reach another border, which of course is dealing with too much work and is a total mess!

What do you do when the border building is overcrowded? You move your ‘office’ outside, of course! 😛

To make a long ride shorter, we finally made it to Puerto Montt at 3.15AM, found the bus station closed down and a totally dead town. With some efforts, though, we finally get  to reach our guesthouse a short time later and finally collapsed into our beds by 4am! Ironically, this B&B is probably one of the nicest we have stayed at so far! 😛

By bus on the Ruta 40

DAYS 29-30

‘It’s an interior journey’ – that’s what they said…

 …When talking about the trip between El Chalten and Bariloche with the rental guys who tried to make our flight cancellation nightmare a little more bearable back in Buenos Aires. Their explanation was that driving for two full days on a nearly completely straight and gravel road with absolutely nothing around you was not a spectacular kind of trip, but still an incredible one on a deeper level…. I can’t exactly remember how much wine had been already drunk by the time this conversation took place, but profound experience or not the trip has to happen!

And so at 9am on December 27^th we start our bus journey along the legendary Ruta 40, the road connecting Patagonia to …Alaska! The bus picking us up is definitely the least comfortable one of those we have caught so far, but surely it must be legendary, too! Or at least very, very old…

The first leg of the journey is taking us to the little town of Perito Moreno, ‘only’ ten hours north of El Chalten. We get to sleep at a ‘hotel’ that night, before continuing for 12 more hours the following day… Everything in Perito Moreno looks like a step back into time, 30 or something years ago… The ‘hotel’ atmosphere and forniture/decorations, the restaurants and the supermarket… There’s something very retro about it all, and it vaguely reminds me of my early childhood and the places where I would hang out with my grandfather. Perhaps that’s the reason why I can endure the world’s possible worst pizza for dinner and sleeping in a room that despite looking clean smelled of sewage! 😛

The morning after a new, much nicer bus is picking us up and with it we even get a kind of guide telling us a bit about Bariloche, ready to answer any questions we might have and even willing to stop to let us take the photo we all wanna have!

Definitely a step up from day 1! The road is mostly paved today, too, so that’s a great improvement. Still, 12 hours on a bus are not passing by with the blink of an eye!

I don’t think I ‘found’ myself while travelling on Ruta 40, but it’s definitely an experience, I must agree on that. The landscape is amazing because there is… nothing …and this nothing changes and turns into several different versions of emptiness but still impresses anyone with the beauty of the pampa, the snowtopped mountains on the skyline, the red hills, the wildlife… This is also the first time I travel by land for so long encountering so little on the way (as a proof of this, on day 1 our bathroom were the bushes by the road, as there was absolutely nothing for several hours of driving!).

32 hours of travelling by bus… who would have believed they could be interesting rather than boring? At least for most of the trip…

Because by the end of it, I am really and utterly exhausted and feel like I never want to see a bus again…EVER! (which is of course highly unlikely!).

Finally we made it to Bariloche by 8pm of the second day, catch a taxi to our hostel and spend the rest of the night in a blur of exhaustion…