Swimming with dolphins in the Amazon

Took a bus ride from la Paz to rurrenebaque on the edge of the amazon basin, or as I like to call it, the "death bus". 22 hours on the scariest road I have ever SEEN let alone been on in an enormous bus. In fairness to the driver, he was clearly very experienced and drove very carefully, sounding his horn round every corner, although the hgv's coming in the opposite direction still scared the life out of me! Anyway, in short, we will be getting a PLANE back again.
So back to the jungle...



First of all we took a 3day trip to the pampas, which took us in a boat all around the little rivers around the basin. It is so gorgeous and lush and green around here, which makes a big change to the desert we were in last week! And we saw so many animals! Caimans, alligators, tortoises, piranas, squirrel monkeys (which jumped on my head and then on pete's), howler monkeys, cappaccino monkeys, parrots, capyburras, cobras, an anaconda (which we held), pink river dolphins, and a gazillion mosquitos.





The dolphins were amazing, and we got to swim with them in this big lagoon area, which according to our awesome guide tony (who knows everything and is like a Bolivian Chuck Norris), is safe from alligators (although I kept my eye open!). It really was so incredible to see all these animals in the wild yet so close up.



After this tour we took another 2 day trip into the jungle where you can trek through the rainforest (at night if you want) and go and see indigenous communities and have a go at making traditional handicrafts.. The night trek was my favourite, although it's not for people who don't like enormous spiders!
Back in la Paz again now, where it's pleasantly cool compared to the swealtering heat of the jungle, although maybe a bit too chilly. We brits are never happy.

Sucre

Working our way north in Bolivia we made a stop at sucre, which amazingly looks more like Florence than a town in the middle of Latin America. It's very pretty actually, we found a brilliant lookout point in the middle of town, where you can look over the sea of white washed houses and terracota rooves. The other main attraction of sucre is that you can ride the "dino truck" that takes you to a quarry where some of the clearest and longest dinosaur tracks in the world have been found (it's a unesco world heritage sight). They are pretty amazing, you can see where two dinosaurs have walked along side by side, and where one carnivore has been chasing a herbivore.



After this we splashed out and spent 13 quid on a fancy overnight bus to La Paz that had fully reclining arm chair type seats. Gotta love this country, the same bus would have cost 60 pounds in argentina!

Into Bolivia

So after all the fun in San Pedro we set off on a 3 day 4x4 tour to get to Uyuni in Bolivia. We took a bus from San Pedro to the bolivian border (going from 2400m to 4300) in about 1 hr and were then bundled into a jeep with the 2 english girls we already knew and 2 Californian girls and our driver Marcos (who was meant to be Carlos as we'd requested and been promised him and were also told was Carlos but we soon worked out that he was infact Marcos).

The 1st day of the trip was really awesome crossing the amazing sandy nothingness of the Atacama at really high altitude (went over 5000m on the first day and didn't go below 4250m til the 3rd day) and occasionally finding something amazing to stop at such as enourmous salt lagoons, bubbling geysers, thermal pools we could swim in and eventually stopping a a very basic refugio at 4300m which had a few beds and we got served a pasta meal. It's location was awesome - right next to an enourmous salt lake with loads of flamingos in it, however it soon got very cold (apparently it got down to -15) but we had our sleeping bags so it wasn't too bad.



The 2nd day included more of almost the same, stopping off occasionally to see sights such as the stone tree and some iced over salt lakes and passing through some tiny little towns which seemed completely deserted and we stopped at another little hostel which was a little warmer and nicer than the night befores.



The 3rd day included an very early start to get to the Salar de Uyuni salt flat (the biggest in the world) for sunrise. The sunrise was really gorgeous and we then went to the nearby "island" for breakfast and another view of the salt flats. After spending some time taking photos we headed into Uyuni via a train graveyard (just lots of old rusty trains).







All in all a pretty good trip, we all seemed to handle the altitude pretty well which was lucky and very useful for being in Bolivia!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Our next big stop was San Pedro de Atacama, which is a pretty small town about an hour from the Bolivian border, which makes it an important stop on the tourist trail because you can cross into Bolivia from here by jeep.
First of all however, it was my Birthday! Spent the first part of the day hunting around market stalls for nice things, then we teamed up with four other Brits we met and got ourselves a discount on a sandboarding session. The boarding was cool but quite hard. Going downhill fast is not a problem, but it's very difficult to stop gracefully.



After that we went to the Valle de la Luna to watch the sunset. It was really beautiful, because after the sun had set the valley (which had at least five volcanoes in it) turned from yellow to red to blue, and to make it even better there was a full moon too! It was a pretty cool Birthday!



The day after we got ourselves another discount on a tour which took us to these big salt water pools where you can float around. It was so much fun, especially because there were eight of us this time, so it was kind of like a pool party in the middle of the desert!



Then they took us to these gorgeous salt flats, where we could sit and drink Pisco Sour (strong rum-like drink with lime) and watched the sunset again. This was definately one of my favourite spots so far I think.

Now we just need to get a good night's sleep before our three day trip accross the desert tomorrow!

Northern Argentina

We´re up in the north of Argentina in a nice town called Salta. We got here this morning after another nice long bus journey (20 hrs this time) and we´re heading back over to Chile really early tomorrow morning to have a look at the Atacama desert!

We had a really good time in Mendoza, on Monday we went to see a natural Inca bridge and tried to see Aconcagua (the highest mountain in the Andes at 6,962m) but unfortunatly the weather was hiding it. The Inca bridge was cool, out in the middle of nowhere with a little market and a restaurant next to it.





Then on Tuesday we hired bikes and did a tour of a few wineries and also saw an olive oil factory and a chocolate factory. 80% of Argentina´s wine comes from Mendoza and there´s vinyards and little wineries all over the place. Each winery gives you a little tour and then some samples of their wine so we got to taste quite a few very nice expensive wines (one of them made a wine which cost US$500 per bottle! tho they wouldn´t let us taste it). Anyway it was a really good day and although we got a little tipsy it didn´t seem too dangerous!

Is quite sad to be leaving Argentina as it´s been great but hopefully we should be in Bolivia by the time we post next (or maybe on Becky´s birthday)!

Anyway, hope you like the photos!

Santiago

After another overnight bus journey we got to Santiago. Found ourselves a nice hostel with a POOL no-less, although we were too chicken to go in because it was cold.
Santiago´s a pretty nice city, although it´s really smoggy at times. We think we liked it better than Buenos Aires, although maybe that´s cos nobody tried to mug us this time!



We also got to meet up with Anna (from Uni) which was cool, and we met some of her Chilean friends who are really nice too (and were nice enough to speak in English to us). They took us to a bar to see a friend´s band, and we tried our hardest to look like locals, although that never works very well.



After Santiago we went to a nearby city called Valparaiso. It´s a really crazy sort of town, with mulitcoloured houses built on winding streets all over the hillside. There are old elevators all over the place too that take you up between the houses. It´s a world heritage site, and was pretty cool, if not a bit decrepid. Unfortunately the photos aren´t great cos it was a pretty cloudy day.



Back in Argentina AGAIN now, in Mendoza this time - which is wine country. Investigating doing a wine tour by bike, which could either be huge fun, or a big mistake - we´ll let you know which!