Day 2 of the Altiplano
Trip Start
Jan 19, 2008
1
21
30
Trip End
May 01, 2008
Uyuni,
Bolivia
Monday, February 25, 2008
We arose, as instructed in time for breakfast at 5:30. We were supposed to leave at 6 but didn't count on 'Israeli time'. I don't know why people who have just spent 3 years getting shouted at to get out of bed at silly hours of the morning suddenly cant when they're supposed to want to out of their own free will - but throughout the trip we were constantly being held up by them. We eventually left at around 7:30am after much standing around in the cold.
First stop was a ghost town. The mines had run dry sometime around 50 years ago. The place looked like it had been deserted for hundreds of years but apparently the last people to leave did so only 30 years back. I guess that because the roofs are made from some sort of straw they rot quickly and leave no trace which makes the place look a lot older than it really is
Ghost town
.The second day was a very long day, and again a bit disappointingly it was mainly driving with relatively few stops.
Late in the morning we entered the national park which houses the lagoons, geysers and thermal pools. After a drive across a salt desert we found the first of many lagoons to house the various types of flamingo in the park (apparently 6 different species, but we couldn't tell them apart!)
The highlight of the day was the stop at the thermal pools. The view was simply surreal. The pools were artificial in the sense that the geologically heated water was pumped into pools rather than them being heated directly. But this meant the water was nice and clean and the temperature just perfect. Kat, along with a couple of others, didn't fancy a dip, but the rest of us wallowed around for about an hour. Just as we were about to leave the jeep with the Irish turned up.
And did they have a story to tell. The jeep had been repaired shortly after we left them, but no more than a few miles further the engine blew itself to bits. Apparently some important bit of machinery hadn't been replaced by the driver
Up at nearly 5km - feeling a bit nippy
. The driver then flagged down a motorbike heading back to Tupiza and 7 hours later returned with a decent mechanic with the necessary parts to repair the jeep. They finally set off again at about 7pm in the evening. There was no way they could make it to the same village as the rest of us so for dinner they just stopped at someones house and asked for some food and they spent the night in beds at a nearby 'hospital'.As they had been driving like crazy to catch us up they were now running only an hour behind, so we expected to catch up properly at the hostel on the coming evening.
On the second day we also stopped at Laguna Verde, which was a little disappointing - we think that a lot of the coloured lakes require the sun to be at the right height in the sky (and behind you) to really bring out the colours and I think with the various stops we were running behind the ideal schedule. Our final stop on the second day was at the highest point of our trip up at 5km in basically the crater of an old volcano to see the geysers and bubbling mud pools. It was sunset and well below zero and the wind made staying outside pretty unpleasant - to say nothing of the smell and fumes - but it was a pretty impressive sight nonetheless.
The hostels got progressively better throughout the trip and, as the second night was our half year wedding anniversary we treated ourselves to a few drinks. Indeed, although Kat went to bed at a sensible time, Matt stayed up chatting until the locales started flashing the lights and eventually just turned them off altogether...
No sign of the Irish guys and their jeep though.
