Samstag, 16. Januar 2016
BOLIVIA
tadpat22, 00:05h
Bolivia has incredible landscape.
We started on Bolivian site of Lake Titicaca in Copacabana. Beautiful sunsets on the lakeside. Also every morning there are a few people who come to Copacabana to let bless their car. Sound weird and it is. It's not super spectacular when the priest does his circle around the cars which are decorated with flowers and stuff, anyway its fun to see!
Afterwards we hoped on a bus to La Paz. Not the real capital but the government is there. Officially Bolivia has two capitals... again weird!
La Paz is super big and special because its splitted up in 'el Alto' and the 'centre'.
El Alto is the higher part. Up there everything is plane. Its the newer part of the city, so there are no old buildings or sights. Thats why its the untouristy part. Very interesting, with a witches market and the two uphill cable car stations.
The cable cars are awesome. You can see the city from above and especially in La Paz it offers stunning views.
The centre is like a normal city, but with super steep roads sometimes!
One day we went to the death road. World famous but nowerdays not so dangerous anymore. What it made so dangerous 10 years ago: first, yap it is deep and steep. We had bad weather so we only could imagine the views. Second: the steep parts often are only one way. The smallest width is 2,5 meter. Third: 10 years ago this road was the only connection to the jungle and the Brazil border. Therefor a lot of traffic. If you combine these 3 points its becoming dangerous. There were busses, cars and trucks falling down, when they needed to back their vehicle. Horrible imagination!
Today there is a new, paved road. So almost no traffic on the death road anymore.
From La Paz our next stop was Oruro. But we couldn't find a proper hostel... famous for its carnival, which is now they putted their prices super high. We saw a parade where they practiced for carnival. So we got a glimpse how cool that is. But we will see carnival in Rio, this time. :-)
Bolivias other international popular sight is 'Salar de Uyuni'. A salt dessert. Normally in december it rains a little and there is a small waterfilm in the dessert, which reflects the sky and surrounding landscape. Check google for pics, because we didn't had luck with the water... but we got a stunning sunset ;-)
Potosí, famous for its mining, we didn't went inside. When we heard the conditions, small and narrow tunnels, I could not stand that. I'm sorry for the miners who need to work there day by day.
Christmas we celebrated in Bolivias 'real' capital: Sucre. Nice city but with a lot of begging kids. Because it was Christmas we gave a book to two kids (each one got one). They wanted to sell us chewing gums and we declined and talked to them. When they told us that they can read, we decided to buy each of them a book. Next day after handing over the book one of the two kids proudly told us that he already read 4 pages! We saw that he enjoyed reading the book! That was awesome. Good luck to you two, Mariella and Christian.
From Sucre we started our way to the Border with Paraguay. I didn't imagine that it's going to be that hard.
The border to Paraguay is almost unused. In the town Villamontes they told us that Imigration is open 24h. So we went there arriving at 7p.m. and the office was closed. Because its in the middle of nowhere and this border is not frequently used by travellers on their own, there are no Hotels to sleep. So we sleept on a bench (out of 3 seats) and on a table (school style...). Because we knew there will be a bus crossing the border at 3 or 4 a.m.
This night was awful. Rain, Moskitos and all the noices of the wild around us didn't let us sleep very well. But we got our exit stamp when the bus arrived and with this bus we drove over to Paraguay. Here the story isn't finished....
But to be continued in next article, because it belongs to Paraguay...
Cheers guys!
We started on Bolivian site of Lake Titicaca in Copacabana. Beautiful sunsets on the lakeside. Also every morning there are a few people who come to Copacabana to let bless their car. Sound weird and it is. It's not super spectacular when the priest does his circle around the cars which are decorated with flowers and stuff, anyway its fun to see!
Afterwards we hoped on a bus to La Paz. Not the real capital but the government is there. Officially Bolivia has two capitals... again weird!
La Paz is super big and special because its splitted up in 'el Alto' and the 'centre'.
El Alto is the higher part. Up there everything is plane. Its the newer part of the city, so there are no old buildings or sights. Thats why its the untouristy part. Very interesting, with a witches market and the two uphill cable car stations.
The cable cars are awesome. You can see the city from above and especially in La Paz it offers stunning views.
The centre is like a normal city, but with super steep roads sometimes!
One day we went to the death road. World famous but nowerdays not so dangerous anymore. What it made so dangerous 10 years ago: first, yap it is deep and steep. We had bad weather so we only could imagine the views. Second: the steep parts often are only one way. The smallest width is 2,5 meter. Third: 10 years ago this road was the only connection to the jungle and the Brazil border. Therefor a lot of traffic. If you combine these 3 points its becoming dangerous. There were busses, cars and trucks falling down, when they needed to back their vehicle. Horrible imagination!
Today there is a new, paved road. So almost no traffic on the death road anymore.
From La Paz our next stop was Oruro. But we couldn't find a proper hostel... famous for its carnival, which is now they putted their prices super high. We saw a parade where they practiced for carnival. So we got a glimpse how cool that is. But we will see carnival in Rio, this time. :-)
Bolivias other international popular sight is 'Salar de Uyuni'. A salt dessert. Normally in december it rains a little and there is a small waterfilm in the dessert, which reflects the sky and surrounding landscape. Check google for pics, because we didn't had luck with the water... but we got a stunning sunset ;-)
Potosí, famous for its mining, we didn't went inside. When we heard the conditions, small and narrow tunnels, I could not stand that. I'm sorry for the miners who need to work there day by day.
Christmas we celebrated in Bolivias 'real' capital: Sucre. Nice city but with a lot of begging kids. Because it was Christmas we gave a book to two kids (each one got one). They wanted to sell us chewing gums and we declined and talked to them. When they told us that they can read, we decided to buy each of them a book. Next day after handing over the book one of the two kids proudly told us that he already read 4 pages! We saw that he enjoyed reading the book! That was awesome. Good luck to you two, Mariella and Christian.
From Sucre we started our way to the Border with Paraguay. I didn't imagine that it's going to be that hard.
The border to Paraguay is almost unused. In the town Villamontes they told us that Imigration is open 24h. So we went there arriving at 7p.m. and the office was closed. Because its in the middle of nowhere and this border is not frequently used by travellers on their own, there are no Hotels to sleep. So we sleept on a bench (out of 3 seats) and on a table (school style...). Because we knew there will be a bus crossing the border at 3 or 4 a.m.
This night was awful. Rain, Moskitos and all the noices of the wild around us didn't let us sleep very well. But we got our exit stamp when the bus arrived and with this bus we drove over to Paraguay. Here the story isn't finished....
But to be continued in next article, because it belongs to Paraguay...
Cheers guys!
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