Salar Saga-Part 2

Let's see, where was I?

Oh right, so we went to bed early Thursday night and were asked to be at the front desk at 8:30am Friday morning to leave for our tour. I should explain what exactly this "tour" I've been mentioning entailed. We had a guide, a cook, and a jeep. Our guide spoke in spanish, along with our cook. Together we rode all around Southern Bolivia looking at the beautiful topography of the region. We spent each night in a different location and drove all day with frequent stops to get out, take pictures, use the "baño natural" (natural bathroom), and walk around an area.

We got up and ate the complimentary breakfast at our hotel. We had eggs, OJ, tea, bread, fig jam, yogurt, and a granola of puffed rice. I ate seconds of everything because I didn't know when and how much we would eat on this trip. After eating quickly, we went to the front office where we met our Guide; Carmelo. He packed our things on the top of the truck (which was some sort of Toyota Jeep), and we got in the car to leave. We noticed the cook was not in the car, and he said we had to pick her up. 3 blocks down the road we saw a cholita running towards our car with a big smile on her face. He pulled over and she got in- we picked up our cook from the side of the road. Her name was Olga and she was fairly young looking and very beautiful. Carmelo turned 33 on the final day of our tour. He's been doing tours for 5 years and wants to do it for 5 more years. He and Olga both have kids (not together). Olga has been doing tours for 2 years and has always worked with Carmelo. While we drove, Olga spent her time knitting a lime green cover to decorate the dashboard of the truck.

As soon as we left the city of Tupiza, the scenery began to change:

At our first stop we were accompanied by a jeep filled with 5 french men in their 20's, their guide, and their cook. Our guides chatted and we took turns taking pictures for each other. After ten minutes admiring the scenery, we said au revoir to them, figuring we'd run into them again soon along our tour.

In the car for the first two hours we listened to Bolivian music (not the good kind). Let me correct that, we listened to a single Bolivian song on repeat for two hours. Finally, Carmelo showed us he had a cord so we could listen to an iPod if we had one. For the rest of the day we listened to the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Manu Chao, and Rodrigo y Gabriela. All throughout the day we saw lots of llamas, baby llama (which our guide loved to point out), ostrich, picuña, small cows, donkeys, and small bird-like critters our guide called "pollo del campo" (chicken of the country).

We stopped in a few little pueblitos of mud houses and walked around. They were fairly empty because the people who live there travel to the fields during the day. In one little village there was a little girl who timidly and silently followed us around. She didn't say anything to us but we decided she must be the Keeper of the City. During the day we also saw lots of skulls, bones, and llama parts (legs mostly) strewn about the various villages.

Around noon we pulled over on the side of the road where there were bits of what used to be walls half standing in disarray. We were hesitant to use the baño natural here, because we weren't sure if these old walls were actually ruins. We did it anyway and when we returned Olga had lunch laid out in the trunk of the jeep. For lunch we had ham and cheese sandwiches, cucumbers, bananas, onions, tomatoes, and the best part of all: tamales de llama. It was a kind of bread like potato substance shaped like a fist stuffed with spicy llama meat, all inside a tamale peel. It was actually very delicious. There was a grape like thing in with the meat to make it sweet.

At one point an hour later we took a break to take some close up pictures of llamas but they slowly walked away from us. At another more "modern" pueblito we actually peeked into a schoolroom and I found a table of what seem to be chemical elements and their charges.

Around 4pm we pulled into another pueblito and learned that this was where we'd be spending the night. Half an hour later Olga prepared tea and crackers which we warmed our tummies and our hands with, and then we spent the next couple of hours checking out the town and chatting with several other gringos whose tours also had them sleeping there that night. One of the groups, who I will henceforth refer to as the Yale group because their tour jeep had a yale sticker on it, was composed of two American girls, one English girl, and a guy from Belgium. Apparently, they woke up at 5:30am that morning in the back of an empty bus in a dark bus lot. They were locked in and had to bang on the doors until a very alarmed janitor let them out. From there they were able to catch a bus to Tupiza for their tour, but that bus broke down for two hours! We ran into the Yale group several times throughout our tour and they became a friendly face for us. That night we also met some other gringos who we would run into several more times over the next few days. There was an obnoxious Israeli couple who told Claire that Hindi (the language) frightened them. (Every Israeli tourist I've met while in Bolivia has been incredibly rude, there are a surprisingly high number of them). There was also a hipster group. These people were mostly English, 2 guys and 2 girls (hipster, wannabe old hipster, girl who isn't a hipster at all, and hipster girl). They wore very little layers, big baggy sweaters, and the guys had earrings, smoked, and wore leggings- just leggings.

Dinner Friday night began with vegetable and potato soup and was accompanied by bread, mashed potatoes, and ground meat of some sort which we assumed was llama.

Note: the picture below is where we ate, the light is powered by a gas canister that it is attached to.

Our accommodations consisted of one room with 5 beds. We pushed four of the beds together to increase the heat we would have to sleep with. To go to the bathroom required going outside and then going into the indoor bathroom. There was only electricity for a few hours at night, so after the lights went out, and when we were awoken at 5am the next morning by Carmelo, we used headlamps.

That's it for today, tune in next time for Salar Saga- Part 3!

Love,

Hillary