We changed our plans and entered Bolivia in the southern town of Villazon, spent a day in Tupiza, and started the Salar de Uyuni tour from there. The tour ends in Uyuni, from where we will head to Sucre for a couple of days before continuing on to La Paz. Then we are off to Sorata for our first trek (3 days), and then to Lake Titicaca where we will do another 3-day trek around Isla del Sol.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 10:44PM We arrived in Tupiza around 6:30 and went through the chaos to get our backpacks off the luggage car. We ended up staying at Hotel Mitru for 90 bolivanos (that’s around $11). We promptly went to a tour agency to try and book something for tomorrow, and booked a ½ day jeep tour to see some of the sights in the area.
Monday, May 22, 2006 at 6:28PM The landscape around Tupiza is absolutely gorgeous. The hills and rocks are all different colours – red, orange, various shades of brown, black, and the odd shade of green thrown in.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 6:11PM Our four-day tour around Southwest Boliva was absolutely fantastic! Our guide Panchito was excellent (and hilarious, he's the guy with the helmet on in the pictures), the cook was his wife and she made us delicious meals! Our jeep mates were a nice Australian couple and an English interpreter, although Deb did a lot of the translating as well.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 6:16PM The ride from Uyuni to Potosi was supposed to take six hours, leaving at 10am and arriving at 4pm. We read in our guide book that the buses from Potosi to Sucre leave at 5pm, so we figured we’d have enough time to buy a bus ticket when we arrived in Potosi. However, we seemed to be on the super-slow bus (all the other buses passed us and zoomed on ahead), and it ended up taking us seven hours to get to Potosi.
Friday, May 26, 2006 at 2:21PM We wandered around the city most of the day, admiring colonial architecture and peeking in the large doors of buildings to see the courtyards within. We went to the lovely main square for a while, looked into tours in the area and decided that we would just do the dinosaur tour tomorrow, and went to the Museum of Indigenous Art, which was really interesting.