More South American Stories

We are now is Cusco, Peru, but I am going to try and finish up our Bolivian adventures before I move on to Peru.

While in Bolivia, we went on a four day trip to the Salar de Uyuni, which is a HUGE salt flat area in the southern part of Bolivia.  At one point we could see into both Chile and Argentina.  It is way bigger than Bonneville.

 

 

Here  I am in a chair made of salt at a hotel made of salt.  The walls were made of salt bricks, whitewashed with more salt.  We stayed at a different salt hotel, but it was just like this one.

This is Mike standing next to a pile of - you guessed it - salt.  We toured a plant that turned this salt into table salt.  If you lived here, you would never have to buy salt.  Just break off a piece of ground and put it in the soup.

The whole place looked like this, with the ground broken into hexagonal shapes.  It went on for miles and miles.  We were there in the dry season, and in the rainy season the whole thing is covered in really shallow water.  It is hard to visit then, although warmer.  We were pretty cold.

Here I am, standing on salt.  This is what it looked like for most of the trip. 

Our driver and guide made lunch for us every day while we were out.  They set up a nice table and the food was great. 

 

Our guide, Victor, set up these great photos.  It was really fun to see them.

We also learned that flamingos do not just live in Florida.  We saw so many here at the various lagoons.  The color of the lagoons is determined by the minerals in the water.  It was really cold, and I am surprised these birds did not mind it.

There were literally hundreds and hundreds of them.  You weren't supposed to get too close, and we respected that, but there were a lot of tourists that seemed to be ignoring that very reasonable request. 

Anyway, after we finished the Salar de Uyuni trip, we decided to go to the city of Potosi, which is famous as the source of more silver than anywhere else in the world.  It is said that the Spanish took enough silver from Potosi to build a silver bridge from Potosi to Spain and still have enough silver left over to ship it to Spain over that silver bridge.  While that may be hyperbole, it is true that Bolivian silver propped up the Spanish empire for literally hundreds of years.  Potosi is an interesting city, built at the foot of a big mountain where all the silver was found.  It is still mined today, and there is still some silver, but there is more copper, zinc, tin, and other metals.

We took a tour of one of the mines.  The miners still have a very hard life and the techniques are pretty much the same as they were in the 1500s.  I had mixed feelings about taking the tour, from both a safety standpoint and because I felt sort of intrusive about it.  But after some soul searching and talking to locals, we decided to do it.  The tour begins with a trip to the mining market, where we bought gifts for the miners.  We bought dynamite, coca leaves, and large bottles of water and soft drinks.

This is one of our fellow tourists inside the mine.  It was dark and very close inside.

This is me holding two sticks of dynamite with the wire and blasting cap in my teeth. Mike was way more enthralled with the dynamite than I was, despite the picture.

Another one of us inside the mine.

That is my back as I head deeper into the mine.  It did not seem to be very stable.  I just kept telling myself that there were no reports of any dead tourists.

 These are some of the tools that the miners use.

 

 

 

Here I am with my bandana over my face because of all the toxic dust in the air.

This is the little god-like thing that the miners regard as the deity who rules the underworld where they work.  They believe that Jesus rules the heavens, but "tio" rules below.  They give tribute to him with cigarettes, liquor, and coca leaves.

Here I am with a couple of the miners.  They were taking a break from their incredibly hard labor.

We had to walk over this bridge, and it was scary as hell.  It was a long way down beneath it.

Well, this will be it for a while now.  We are trying to decide at which one of the incredible restaurants we are going to eat tonight.  There is still more to tell about Bolivia, before I can begin to describe the wonderful things about Peru.  I am glad we get to stay pretty much as long as we want to - the boat is safe and sound in a quiet estuary, so we are free to wander on.  Life is good.

"With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?"  (Oscar Wilde)