In every tourist guide it is written that the driver and the group with which you are together decide if it’s going to be a great trip or one that you want to forget as soon as possible. Our guide, Beimar, first looked not to care about us at all, but after we started some conversations about the places, he told us more and more information about the nature and the history of Bolivia. In the end it was one of the greatest tours we have been to but we heard that others were not so lucky and at one of the stops in the salt flats we even saw a driver changing the brake pads of the car in the middle of the tour. I guess that in Bolivia there’s nothing like “preventive maintenance” in their vocabulary.

But like I said, our tour was a great one. First we went to a train cemetery outside of the town of Uyuni where we took some funny pictures. Then we went to Salar de Uyuni which is the world’s largest salt flat with over 10.000 square kilometers. To give you an impression on how much that is, think it’s around one quarter of the surface of Switzerland. Here we also saw the process of preparing the salt for selling. Because the desert is a very flat area you can take a lot of funny pictures which look like they were photoshopped. On the first night we slept in a hotel which is built mainly out of salt and which was an experience to remember. On the second day we went to a lot of lagoons with thousands of flamingos and spectacular views and on the third day we went to 5300m to see some other nice lagoons before heading for the border to Chile. Here, we had to pay another illegal tax (call it bribe or black money) for exiting Bolivia. It looks like there is a good reason why Bolivia is on the 118th place on the list of corruption perceptions index in the world because every customs or police officer will invent his own tax for which, of course, you will not get any receipt.

Next stop

Santiago de Chile

Copacabana is famous in Bolivia because this is the place where lots of Bolivians bring their cars to be blessed by a priest. People do it because that’s cheaper than a car insurance and in the days to come we were about to find out a lot more than we wanted about how Bolivians behave in the traffic.

What can I say about La Paz…. Well, it’s the highest capital in the world at around 3650-4100m. Other than that I cannot say much because it’s not something to write home about. People haven’t been too friendly and that’s very polite said. We just wanted to get a small look at it and then move further to the south where the nicer places are. So, after reading lots of horror stories about road accidents and after witnessing it with our own eyes on the way from Copacabana to La Paz we decided to take the plane. On this road the driver of the bus drove more on the left side of the road and he was just speeding and horning in the curves with cliffs on one side and the never ending canyon on the other as if horning would help in a country where the vehicles are so old that if you sit in a truck you can hear nothing but the engine. So, we decided to take the plane, probably an option with statistically just a slightly more chance to reach your destination in one piece in Bolivia. We first wanted to fly directly to Uyuni and already bought the tickets, just to be told a day after that the plane is not flying due to maintenance problems…. At this point Diana already was scared about this “safer” option but I somehow convinced here that it’s better to fly to Sucre than taking the bus. So we bought the tickets and ended up flying with TAM, which stands for Transporte Aereo Militar, you guessed, it’s a military company. I don’t know if the planes were used by the military before or not but they looked quite nice and after some bumpy shakes we landed safely in Sucre which is the constitutional capital of Bolivia. Sucre left us a far better impression than La Paz with quite a few good restaurants. When we wanted to leave Sucre for Uyuni we were again introduced to one of the Bolivians’ favorite activities…the strikes. If you’re now thinking about the typical strikes in France or Germany you’re making a big mistake. This is a different level. When Bolivians strike, which is very often (every two weeks or so), they block all the main roads and because in Bolivia you have just one road between big cities, you are stuck. It’s also very dangerous to try to avoid these blockades and the taxi drivers also don’t do it because they say the strikers have dynamite and they will definitely try to hurt you if they catch that you do not obey their rules… Fortunately for us, this strike lasted only one day so we were able to continue our journey the day after.

One amazing thing we’ve seen or done

In Peru on the Salkantay Trek we met a couple from Switzerland, Marco and Denise, and we talked about a lot of things with one being the food back home and of course cheese fondue, the Swiss specialty. We already arranged for a meeting next summer and never in the world was I hoping to eat cheese fondue before that. But… surprise, surprise… in Sucre we found a restaurant which offered cheese fondue and we tried it out. It was unexpectedly delicious. I know what some of you are thinking now, “This guy goes to Bolivia and all he wants to eat is cheese fondue, what an idiot….” but the Bolivian cuisine is nothing to write home about and after eating so many crap food in the last weeks and also having stomach problems after it we decided to go for a safe choice.

Next stop

Salar de Uyuni

La Paz

Sucre

Copacabana