Salar Saga-Part 1

Ahoy folks,

Long time no blog! I just got back from another adventure, this time longer, colder, and incredibly more breathtaking. I'm going to put up the Salar trip saga in parts.

I found out last Sunday that one of my housemates and two other girls I'd gotten to know and like were planning to go to the salar that Wednesday. Since I've been in Bolivia I've learned that there are certain popular excursions that volunteers tend to visit while they are here. La Paz I've already done, Villa Tunari is supposed to be tropical and have lots of monkeys, Tarija is wine country, and the Salar I'd heard of as a far away excursion to salt flats and multi-colored lakes. I asked if I could join their group and off I went on Wednesday!

We had a 12:30pm bus to Oruro due in at 4:30pm and then a 7:00pm train to Tupiza due in at 8:30am. Tupiza is extremely close to the Argentinian border.

Packing:

So I bought a sleeping bag in La Paz to prepare for the cold at the Aymara New Year all night celebration. I was told it would be cold on this trip, and that I would want my sleeping bag with me. If you remember from the La Paz trip, the bag to my sleeping bag is very difficult to work with and ripped a bit as I tried to stuff the sleeping bag inside of it. (This was while the idiot was watching me try and fail). I had to get creative to figure out a way to make it transportable, and I came up with this:

This is everything I brought with me to the Salar. If you can see, my sleeping bag is secured in a roll with a green and yellow jump rope bought at La Cancha (the huge cheap market I'll write about at some point). I knew I'd need a way to carry it on my back, so I looped another jump rope through the rolled up bag and tied it. This way I could carry it over my shoulder onto my back easily. The backpack I'd brought with me to Bolivia was too small for this long of a trip, and too big for a carry on. I went with my duffel and my Bolivia purse from Uncle Winston.

The Bus: (cost 25 b's)

There was a man selling silver necklace chains who got on the bus a few minutes after we'd taken off. It was exactly like an infomercial. He started off saying that he'd charge 25 to 30 b's (b=bolivianos for future reference, that's how people say it here). He explained that he knew how we were probably thinking that the silver was fake, but he rubbed it against his hand to show that there was no residue or tarnish. After about 15 minutes of talking to the entire bus he'd lowered the deal to 10 b's and if you were one of the first 10 people to raise your hand, you got a baby chain and a silver charm of either a cross, a dolphin, or a frog or something. He got off after he'd sold several silver chains. Intermittently while on the bus several individuals came on and walked down the aisle to sell food. We bought from the ice cream guy. They all got off after about 15 minutes on the bus. We assume they got back to the place they started by hopping on a bus going the other direction. The movie was Transporter 3. Based on our first-hand accounts and those of several volunteers at Sustainable Bolivia, we have developed a theory about the movies on buses and trains in Bolivia.

The theory of Bolivian transportation movies: If one is on a train or bus in Bolivia, and that trip involves a movie, the movie will without a doubt include some sort of transportation catastrophe.

Of course in Transporter 3 a train blew up and a car was run over the edge of a cliff.

Oruro:

We had a couple hours to eat. We stopped at a restaurant that another volunteer had recommended; a Hare Krishna vegetarian restaurant. They had samosas!! It was alright. Oh I also got hit by a car kind of. I was getting our stuff out of the back of the cab and a van drove right past us so close that the sleeping bag I'd had over my shoulder was hit by the van and the force of it shoved me over.

The Train: (cost~160 b's)

If you recall, we had first class tickets. It turned out to be more than worth it. The seats on the train reclined almost all the way. We got super huge blankets that were as heavy as lead. This turned out to be our saving grace because the farther south we got, the closer the temperature got to frigid. The train was ice cold and we had on several layers, hats, the blankets, and were still struggling to stay warm. Here we are just after we got on the train (before the temperature drop).

This is Claire (my housemate) in the black, and Laura, another SB volunteer, in the white.

This is me and Nina, another SB volunteer.

We slept on and off once the lights went off around 11pm. The two movies they showed were Assassins (which included several transportation catastrophes), and Legion, which I slept through most of but I did catch an old lady named Gladys tell a woman all babies were going to burn in hell, then she ate a man's neck and crawled on the ceiling before being shot to death. Some French Canadian people got on the bus, along with an English bloke and an Israeli guy. Since we'd gotten on the train at the first stop, and were on the train for 13 hours, we were served breakfast in the dining car.

For breakfast we had crackers, butter, jam, scrambled eggs, one half of a piece of bread, and tea (which we clung to in order to regain feeling in our hands).

After we ate, Just for Laughs was put on the TV. It seemed like a stupid hidden camera show where they don't use audio and there isn't dialogue so there was no need for dubbing or subtitles. As it turned out it was hilarious after a night of interrupted sleep and extreme cold. I couldn't stop giggling at this silly show. The sun was up and we began to realize they hadn't been announcing the various stops on the route throughout the night. They'd been stopping, people would get on and off, and they'd take off again. We didn't know if we'd passed our stop, so we asked the lady behind us. She said we'd passed Tupiza and that the next stop was in 3 hours. The lady behind her said we hadn't passed it yet. We asked the first lady's husband when he returned from the bathroom, and he confirmed that we'd passed it. After a few moments of panick, the train guy came past and announced that it would be ten minutes until the Tupiza stop. PHEW! We'd planned it so that we had all day Thursday to relax, check out the town, and get up early Friday to start our Tour.

We got off the train around 9:00am and tried to buy tickets for the train ride from where our tour ended, back to Oruru on Monday. The man at the train station refused to sell us tickets. He gave a weak explanation saying that he only had a certain number of tickets to sell, and that we could only buy them on Monday in Uyuni after our tour ended. By then we knew the Tuesday 1:00am train would be sold out and the next train wasn't for 2 days. We eventually headed to the hotel that is part of the tour guide company we had reserved. The hotel man said that a group of 30 people were arriving that day and so they had moved us to their second hotel that was connected to the tour guide office. The cost was the same (80 b's for each of us) so we hiked the 2 blocks over and checked into a 4 bedroom at Hotel Mitro.

We asked the tour company if they could see about train tickets, and they phoned the train station. At first they were told they only had second class seats (imagine yellow school bus seats at a 90 degree angle that don't recline, no blankets, and no food). When she called a second time she was told they had 4 seats in first class at half price that didn't recline because it was a last row. We took that deal. I should tell you all that often down here customer service is not existent. Especially for "gringos." (The word "gringo" in Bolivia refers to any foreigner, not just American). This is silly in my opinion. Firstly- why would you make it hard for someone to buy something from you? Secondly- gringos have the money to pay for these services. Anyway, we sat down with a tour guide lady and she went over the costs (1200 b's for the 4 day Jeep tour, 96 b's for the train ticket back to Oruro that they helped us purchase, 150 b's to get into the national park to see the Salar on Sunday and Monday). She also showed us the route we'd be taking and explained that at one stop we'd only have 15 minutes maximum because it was 5,000 meters high (twice the altitude of Cochabamba) and that it was difficult to breathe. I realized I would need more money. We all did. Using our credit card to pay for the tour was going to include a 10% tax. Instead of doing that, we headed over to the bank that we had been told had the lowest tax rate. There they demanded passports and would not accept copies. Being without our passports, we tried the next place. They too denied us service without a physical passport. Our last hope, "Prodem" let us take out money as long as we had our passport number. I remembered my number minus 2 digits, but I didn't think this was an OK time to fake it. I knew mom had a copy of my passport at the house. I called mom- no answer. I called the house- no answer. I called dad and he answered and called Morgan who was in fact home and she found the copy and read me the number.

The rest of the day we spent looking for warm clothes and trying to pick between the 10 (not kidding) pizza shops within a two block radius of our hotel. We ate pizza for lunch, then went back to hotel to nap after catching the end of Bridget Jones Diary on TV. We got up and found another, very touristy, pizza place for dinner. The only other people who came in were gringos. When I tried to order desert, the waiter interrupted me before I said two words and said "no" and made the strike symbol with his hands. After calling him back to ask what he meant, it turns out they didn't have anything to make for dessert, even though there were about 10 dessert things on the menu. We returned to the hotel for showers and early to bed to start our tour for the next day.

After traveling for over a day and having weird stomach issues (which correlated to anytime I had coca tea which is meant to help calm your stomach), I realized I should not have left my travelers diarrhea medication in Cochabamba. I just had to cross my fingers and hope that I would be alright. I bought a gatorade at a tienda in Tupiza just in case I was going to need some electrolytes should I come down with some travelers diarrhea. I did however take the rest of my altitude medication between Wednesday and Friday morning because we were living at a steady 4,000 meters and up for the entire trip.

That's it for now folks!! I'll update soon with Friday and possibly Saturday!

Love,

Hillary