Rolo on Tour

Goodbye Bolivia and Welcome to Europe

At least that´s how it feels like right now. After nearly 6 months in all those other Countries crossing the border from Bolivia to Chile shows you a huge contrast. Many things change:

There is no more trash in the streets. There are hardly any street sellers. The busses only make stops at certain predefined points. (It took me some time standing on the street and seeing all those buses passing by in Santiago before I realized that ;-)) There are no people wearing traditional clothes. The roads are mostly paved. You cannot buy lunch for a dollar.
Everything feels so familiarly european. Having improved my spanish a lot the language does not even play a big role although the chilean accent can really mess you up, cachay. The only „big difference“ I could recognize so far is that Kermit the frog is called la rana Rene.

What else is there to tell? Things I did so far in Chile:

Cycling and Crawling under some rocks in San Pedro de Atacama:

As the name tells, San Pedro de Atacama lies in the Atacama desert, which is supposed  to be the driest desert on earth. And it is probably one of the best places worldwide to watch the stars, as there are absolutely no clouds! Unluckily there was a full moon while we were there, so we could not visit one of the observatories.

Next I went south to La Serena from where I visited the Valle del Elqui. There I was shown how Pisco, the chilean national liquor, is made. The way they organize their tour is quite clever: First they bore you with a walk around the area. Then you try all those different flavors. And finally you can buy stuff you don´t need in their shop.

Continuing southwards I explored the beautiful town of Valparaiso. Is is an interesting place – lying next to the sea and having lots of stairs and elevators. There I was meeting some of the greatest chilean poets:

Mr. Huidobro

Mr. Neruda

and Mrs. Mistral

Valparaiso also seems to be a paradise for street dogs. There are so many of them. But they are quite friendly. One of them decided to be my friend without me doing anything. He even waited in front of the supermarket while I was buying groceries and barked at other dogs or persons approaching me. I could have used that one in Guatemala!

Right next to Valparaiso lies Viña del Mar, where I ran into one of the stone heads from Easter Island. Some of them had been brought to the chilean main land and as I won´t visit the island it was nice to see one „live“.

Hi, I´m a Moai and you?

In Santiago I was staying now for a while in the apartment of Rodrigo, whom I had met in Uyuni. It was really nice of him to offer to stay at his place just after knowing me one day. And he shared everything: His knowledge of Chile, his apartment, his bike, the weekend house of his parents. But baby, he did not let me drive his car.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

There is a lot of time to kill while travelling, especially considering all those long bus rides. So reading books is a very good thing. But there is a problem: You don’t want to carry around all those books you read and also you don’t want to buy new books all the time. So book exchanges are the perfect solution. You can find those in many hostels (in book shops you normally can´t really make a good deal exchanging!) and the idea is simple: You just exchange a book you already read for one you still want to read. Of course often you have to take what there is to offer (hoping to find a specific book in a book exchange is a long shot) but as you never know how it will be before it does not matter that much I think. Be careful though: A quick look if the book is complete can be useful or you end up getting a book like that one:

Bad Luck starting a book on page 209

——————————————————————————————————————————-

if I saw you in heaven?

The magnificent Salar de Uyuni. It was the thing I was most looking forward to on this trip (that is why I choose a picture of the Salar as the header image of this blog) and finally I got there.

Time for some creative pictures:
I said to myself: „I want to get away,

I wanna fly away, yeah, yeah, yeah!“

By the way, walking barefooted on salt hurts a lot. So does jumping so I  hope you appreciate the picture 😉

Genie on a bottle

Loch Ness has Nessie and the Salar de Uyuni has Dino:

Be careful who you are  messing with

But then there was peace:

No happy ending though 🙁

Our trip continued with passing some interesting rock formations:

The chicken,

The turtle

and this one.

Another famous rock in the background called Arbol de Piedra (Rock tree)

Afterwards we passed some lagoons full of flamingos, watched some geysirs

Can you find me?

and finally relaxed in some hot springs. What a nice trip and we can only thank Agustino, our driver, mechanic, guide and cook – all in one person, for the good time we had!

Germany, Austria and Chile say thx!

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Time to see more of Bolivia, so I was heading south to the city of Sucre. Nearby there were found some footsteps of dinosaurs, so they built a museum next to it which was quite informative.

How big is your footprint?

Something has survived…

Having seen that museum made me wanna watch Jurassic Park again, instead I got to see the Motorcyle Diaries, which is as well a quite inspiring movie.

Also Sucre has some nice parks which is not too common in Bolivia:

The mini eiffel tower in Sucre

Sucre was followed by Potosi, one of the highest cities in the world. The reason for the people living there is simple: There is a mountain called Cerro Rico, whose minerals (mainly silver) have been exploited for nearly 500 years now. And those mines can be visited daily by interested groups and of course I was interested as well.

On my way to Cerro Rico, where all the silver is found

3 hobby miners + guide Rolando

A visit there definitively shows you that there is some work way harder than the thing you are doing. Also the visit made me think about the fact that in some years when there is no more silver to dug for the whole city might be a ghost town, as there will be no more reason for people to live here.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Having survived the Death Road I was looking for new challenges and I was about to find one near La Paz. But we will come to that further on in this entry…
Before I went to see some Wrestling in La Paz. But not some usual Wrestling, but Cholitas Wrestling involving women fighting in their traditional outfits. As I have never seen Wrestling live, it was interesting to see, but I guess it is a little bit too simple-minded to draw more attention to me than for this one visit.

The guy just lost his wrestling match, but what is he doing now??

So as I said it was time for a new challenge. And this one presented itself in climbing the mountain Huayna Potosi – lying at an altitude of 6088 metres – to be done within 3 days.

The first day consisted of getting the equipment, driving to the base camp at 4700 metres and practicing on a glacier the skills needed for getting to the top. Well actually most of those things ended up not beeing needed, but all in all it helped to get accustomed to the equipment.

Are you ready? I was born ready!

The second day consisted of walking up to the second camp lying at 5300 metres. It involved carrying all the equipment in (and outside of) my bagpack, which made it quite heavy:

Carrying that uphill, lots of fun 😉

Having done that it was time to relax a little and enjoy the views. And relaxing was very necessary as we had to get up at midnight to start climbing to the top. But who can sleep at 6 pm and at this altitude? I can´t and so the task of climbing the mountain had to be approached without sleep.

Anyway me and my guide walked for about 5 hours during which my speed decreased continously due to the altitude and the resulting lack of oxygen. At the beginning the rhytm went like step, step, exhale, step, step, inhale while at the end it was more like step, exhale, inhale, break, step, exhale, inhale, break. Anyway we arrived a little bit too early in my opinion at the top at 6 am and were waiting for the sun to show up. But how nice was it to be at the top! 6000 metres is a real freaking height and I am not sure if I will ever do it again, but it was all worth it, even if I was feeling the effects of those efforts for some more days in my body.

Welcome to the internet mountains, I´ll be your guide!

On the top of Huayna Potosi

Time to celebrate!

Been there, done that…

I thought I had to show you the nice outfit I was given to

——————————————————————————————————————————-