Wednesday, January 21, 2009

I fell in love with San Pedro!

Bloody Madonna and her 'La Isla Bonita' and me on my way to San Pedro- grrrrrr, 26 hours of her rattling around my head. Well I darted up Chile pretty quick smart and the bus was only delayed by an hour when we got a puncture. I arrived in San Pedro around 1am and found a place to lay my head and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The next day I finally got out of bed and went out for a little explore. Little because San Pedro is not exactly Buenos Aires. It is a weird little place, made of mud and teeming with tourists either coming from or heading to Bolivia. Of course I was of the latter variety and didnt take much time before booking my three day jeep ride to Uyuni in Bolivia.

Three days, two nights and all the meals included set me back $100- ah how I wish that the pound wasnt so piss poor at the moment, it takes all the fun out of seeing prices in dollars when you cant just half them and look smug while the Americans cry. Huff. But at least it makes it easier to talk to Europeans about prices now that I finally know how much a euro is worth.

Anyway, the next day saw me waiting for the jeep at 7.45am. Another guy turned up for the tour and my heart sank. Herman the German (no, really that was his name) didnt speak English and didnt look like a barrel of fun either. Hum, a little fact I had forgotten when questioning the tour office the day before, did the guide speak English? Apparentely not. We all spoke Spanish that first day.

And oh my goodness was it the best hundred bucks I have ever spent?? Oh yes it was! Half an hour after leaving San Pedro we were breakfasting at the Bolivian border, being carefully watched by a couple of Andean wolves. After that it was lagunas and flamingos agogo for the next two days.

The first night I didnt sleep at all and was pleased to discover that no one else had either- damn that altitude sickness. After a day of sun we had arrived at our basic accommodation just before the hail and snow started. Yes, it was cold. I gathered together all the spare blankets in the room and nearly suffocated under the weight of them to try and block out the coldness.

Day two was more flamingos and llamas and vicuñas (kinda like a llama but not actually a llama, the tour guide did explain the difference but it was all in Spanish so I might have lost the finer points). And day three was an incredibly early start- not helped by Marie forgetting to change her clock to Bolivian time before setting the alarm, therefore waking us up at 3.30 rather than the 4.30 we had to be up by.

I was first out of bed and out of the salt hotel and waiting outside admiring the night sky by the time the others crawled out of bed. Guess that they had gone back to sleep after Marie's alarm went off.

We drove onto the Salar de Uyuni- google it, it is amazing- an ancient salt lake which at this time of year looks and sounds like snow. We watched the sun rise and I cant really tell you how amazing it was!

WE spent a lot of time on the salt plains before finally making it to Uyuni, a town which looked really grim on the outskirts (the kind of town where pigs shag in the middle of the street, I am not making this up) but the centre was really quite nice. I stayed the night along with someone else from the tour and then yesterday I got the bus to Sucre.

Let me just say that Bolivian buses suck almost as much as the internet connection here!

Not looking forward to the trip to La Paz tomorrow but it has to be done. Especially if I am planning to be back in the UK at the end of Feb!

Which I am:)

1 Comments:

At Fri Jan 23, 05:22:00 AM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Helen

Just been reading the blog; good to hear that you're having an interesting and fun time. Photos mostly seem to show you posing with an array of attractive young men! Glad also to hear that you're coming back to the UK; wouldn't want to lose you to Latin America once and for all!

Have fun and enjoy the sunshine.

love
Matt

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

Forklifts
Free Web Counter
Forklifts