Rolo on Tour

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

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

Arriving in Bolivia I spent one day in Copacabana, situated on the bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. It appeared nice, but I wanted to move on, so the next day I continued my journey to La Paz. During that we had to cross the Lake:

There it goes

La Paz shows an interesting scenery. It is the highest capital in the world – lying at 3600 metres of altitude. And it is full of taxis and minibusses.
Also it is the starting point for a really thrilling adventure: Going down the so-called Death Road by mountainbike. This road leads from La Paz to Coroico and received its name as a consequence of various accidents occuring there. The road is very narrow for cars and falling off will result deadly. As a result of all those accidents the government has built a new paved road. The old road is now just used by mountainbikers and their escort vehicles.
So there we were going that road downhill for some hours and having great fun. I might want to add that for people knowing how to ride a bike the road is not that dangerous as for a bike there is always enough space.
The only bad news was that the majority of the pictures taken by the tour agency suck as the guy handling the camera did not seem to have the best clue of doing that.

Oh yes and regarding the title: Our bus driver seemed to have been suicidal and took the Death Road back up to La Paz (and not the paved road as all the other vehicles did). Our hearts froze when suddenly a car going down showed up in a turn. Well, it passed us and we arrived in La Paz unharmed but still it may have been a better idea to pick another agency for this trip, who knows how to take pictures and how to guarantee for more safety.

Some part of the death road

You’re doing it wrong!

Good to be small sometimes

The only showable group picture

Enough said

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