He said ‘At least I’m OK in the mornings’
8:15 pm Tuesday, 25 November, 2008
Alright. I am now in Asunción which is the capital of Paraguay. Lets back up a bit now and catchup a little more.
So back to La Paz. I had my power cable fixed and this made me quite happy and so I spent a while sorting out some bits and pieces. Then that evening it was Louise’s birthday and so we went out to a Thai restaurant. Service was shit but the food was pretty good and the beer was flowing. On arriving we found out that there was an Irish pub close by and so we adjourned there before planning to hit a club but we mainly just stayed there till one or two with much entertainment, mainly provided by me berating anyone who would listen as the bar had run out of Guinness the day before (boo hiss) and then Kelly who had taken a shine to a painting on the wall and spent some time trying to buy it.
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The next day we were not leaving until early afternoon and so we went out for some breakfast and I took the chance to run around and take a few photos of La Paz. I had been in a strange mood and I was only taking photos when we were out and about, I realised that I had spent three days there and had not one photo of the city. So I rushed about. Then we took a bus several hours down the road to a train station where we were getting a train to Uyuni which was due to get us in at 3am. Ugh. Anyway we were about three hours early for the train and so we hunted a pub. There wasn’t much luck with this until Baz asked a local where the beer was and we found ourselves ushered into a dark dingy very local drinking room where the beer was dirt cheap, about half the price we had been paying, and we soon made friends with the very drunk locals. Good times.
Then onto the train which was pretty nice. They showed two movies which kept us awake till about 11. The first, to the delight…of the Australians was Rabbit Proof Fence which was okay and the second was Man On Fire which seemed to be the longest movie of all time. So we get in at 3ish and get to our hotels where we crash out till around 10 the next morning. Now we are off into Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flats. Now this is an overnight trip and we are crammed into 4×4s to get out there. We take a quick stop along the way to visit a train graveyard which is fascinating and I’m sorry that we don’t have much more time to play around, it made for fun photos.
Then it’s off into the flats, It’s pretty good going, we stop to take some silly photos as there are some great perceptive tricks.
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That night we are staying in a hotel made entirely of salt. We get there pretty early in the afternoon and those of us that have decided not to do the optional crawling through small caves find the local store, manage to communicate to the nice man that we’d like some beer and so we sit on the basketball court of the local school playing cards and sculling beer. Back when I was a kid this was what was commonly known as knacker drinking!
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That night with nothing else to do we continued to drink beer and play cards and listen to some music and all in all had a most excellent evening. The next morning it was a 4.30 wakeup call to go and watch the sunrise over the desert. This was nothing special, I’m glad I did it as ya know I’ll never be there to do it again but it wasn’t really worth it. It was very very very cold too.
Then it’s off for the day. We first spend about an hour trying to rescue a stuck jeep from another tour company that had tried to take a shortcut. Then we went onto a wander around Fish Island…apparently it’s shaped like a fish but it has lots of cactus and some nice rock formations.
Then it was lunch under a volcano, flamingo watching and a short walk before we were to head back to Uyuni. This was when we found out that one of the 4×4s was out of gas…not good. We did make it back but suffice it to say that it was a cramped ride. Then we had some excellent pizza in Minuteman Revolutionary Pizza (”Pizza With Altitude!”) handily inside our hotel and then a fairly quiet night as Mick got out a guitar and we had a few tunes and a bit of a singalong. An excellent evening!
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Now the next day we took a bus to Sucre where we had for the first time in a while some actual free time and as I may have mentioned already….we drank.
We hadn’t planned on drinking. Back in La Paz we had decided that we’d all go and see the new James Bond which was showing but we just didn’t get organised enough. So when we found a cinema in Sucre there was much excitement especially as Gemma asked and it was showing at 7pm. So we had some food and got all excited and headed to the cinema to find out that her Spanish wasn’t all she had thought and they were in fact showing X-Files 2. The bar we had been in had given us free tickets to a party that night and it seemed rude not to…
I didn’t really see much or indeed anything of Sucre. The free time after rushing around was nice and there were some quiet lunches and some quiet drinks and just some quiet time and I very much enjoyed it. I did nothing touristy and took no photos and while I probably should have, I just needed the downtime and it was lovely lovely lovely.
Bolivia 8 - 17 November
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