The Salar 2

Standing on a dried out lake of borax

Flamingo prints

Yellow lake

Lake of arsenic

Cochabamba to Uyuni

Sucre in the sun

We left La Paz quickly, too noisy and busy after the peace of Isla del Sol. We arrived into Cochabamba, an odd town. Firstly we honestly thought our taxi driver was trying to kidnap us, he kept slowing right down and flashing his lights at other cars. Turned out he was lost. Then our hostel didn't have our booking, the staff were rude and unhelpful. When we went out to explore we discovered that half of the city closed from midday until 3pm and the other half closed from 4pm indefinitely. We were always at the wrong place at the wrong time.

So we left the pretty sounding Cochabamba in a hurry and 

went on to Sucre. An extremely lovely UNESCO protected town with cobbled streets and a warm climate. We stayed in a beautiful pension, Casa Al Tronco, so beautiful in fact that we extended our time in Sucre just to stay on at the pension. We wanted to see dinosaur footprints but no one seemed to be able to tell us how to get to them. So we just relaxed.

From Sucre we continued on down to Potosi. We didn't do our research very well, apart from going down the mines there is very little to do in this dusty, dull brown coloured mining town. So we did very little and kept on moving south through amazing scenery, from sand dune like mountains with lush oasis hidden beneath that hundreds of llamas grazed in, to huge red rock cliffs rising out of the horizon. 

Beautiful Neo Gothic bridge over a highly polluted river in the middle of nowhere

Potosi Mint

The road to Uyuni

La Paz

After the peace and quiet of Lake Titicaca, La Paz came as a bit of a shock. We drove across the plains for miles upon miles. We had met an Australian couple back in Bogota who described parts of Bolivia as looking like the Australian outback. We finally understood what they were talking about when we saw this landscape, dry grass and gum trees right up to the horizon. After driving through El Alto, a strange barren town of muddy streets and forlorn looking women, we suddenly crested the top of the valley where La Paz lies. Not a beautiful city, set in a gaping canyon, it sort of rears out of the surrounding cliffs. Loud and polluted, endless horns and belching minivans. But we found solace in our little hostel, Arthy's Guesthouse.
We explored the Witches Markets, mainly a lot of dried llama fetus's in varying states of growth, to be buried under new homes for good luck.
We witnessed an amazingly colourful parade, full of the wonderfully dressed Bolivian women in their bowler hats and huge full skirts. Sadly it started to hail and they all looked a bit bedraggled.
 But La Paz was not for us and after 2 nights we quickly decided to move on.

Lake Titicaca & The Island of the Sun

For Mum

Another day, another country. Bolivia. Our first taste of it was Lake Titicaca. An extraordinarily vast body of water. An inland sea spreading as far as the eye can see, a deep greeny blue sparkling in the light. We avoided Puno with its crowds and headed straight to Copacobana, maybe not as glamorous as its Brasilian counterpart, but lovely just the same.

We caught a horribly overcrowded boat across to Isla del Sol and landed on a quietly picturesque beach, the world's highest island at almost 4000m. Believed to be the birthplace of the Inca sun and moon gods, it is covered in ruins. No cars or paved roads. Lots of grumpy donkeys
.
We stumbled upon a tiny family run hostel and stayed in a room with a perfect view out across the lake to the Andes. It felt like a mini break away from our holiday. We climbed the ridge behind the village, what looked like a short wander took us over an hour, the high altitude was getting to us yet again. Not to mention the heat.

Lost

Our first real view of the Andes