We rose last Sunday, very excited for our adventure thru northern Chile into Bolivia. Unfortunately for us, we rose an hour early, thinking we were late as James’ iphone hasn’t yet adjusted to reflect local time. Once we realized our mistake, we slowed our pace down and were packed and ready to go when the van picked us up. Our group was 14 strong, representing Holland, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and the US of A. (The Spanish guys turned out to be climbers much to our delight.) It was an hour ride to the Bolivian border, which consisted of a hut type building and men stamping your passport. We were in the middle of nowhere, yet surrounded by the many 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers that were ready to load up with our backpacks and set off across this high desert. A quick breakfast of bread, juice, and jam and we were off!
In our 4×4 was a couple from Chicago and a couple from Germany (we miss you guys!)Our driver was a 27 year old Bolivian named Jorge who had been driving these tours for 7 years. He turned out to be the lead driver of the group as our jeep always went first. The drivers weren’t very talkative, but as the days went on, Jorge got a bit more chatty with us, or specifically me as I became the established translator for the group, even though there were other Spanish speakers.
Our first day was jam packed and for the sake of space and time, I will just outline what we did. The pictures will do a much better job of helping you imagine you were traveling along with us than my writing would! Soon after going thru immigration, we visited 2 gorgeous lagoons. They were appropriately named the White and Green Lagoons with the ever present Flamingo. This time the James Flamingo was in abundance, although we did see all 3 types of Flamingo. Then off to some geysers and fumeroles along the way, which were located at 4900 meters above sea level, our highest point of the trip. We drove thru the Desert of Salvador Dali on our way to some Hot Springs. Our journey continued thru the deserted Bolivia Desert until we reached our destination for the evening, as well as our lunch spot. I have no idea where we were, but it was pretty desolated. It was a hostel for our group and the nearest “town” consisted of about 7 buildings, a 5 min walk away. There were llamas wandering aimlessly around and James and I grouped up with some other people on the tour to go hiking thru this canyon which is where we discovered llama bones. We also stumbled upon some alive llama in a llama pen which housed about 5 little llamas.
The lodging was pretty basic, not much lightening and we slept about 6 people per room. Unfortunately at this point, some people in our group were feeling the affects of the altitude. Funny enough, it was the 4 tallest guys on our trip that were lightheaded and had headaches. Yay for us shorter people! Our group really bonded that evening as we sat around and played cards for hours on end. It was fun to hear the translations fly back and forth between Dutch, Spanish and English as the rules were explained. English became the common language when playing which added to everyone’s amusement. At this point, there wasn’t anything else to do, except go to sleep, so we entertained ourselves until about 9pm when most people hunkered down under their sheets to keep warm until the morning came creeping by.
