Fun with Phil.... the different climates of Bolivia

La Paz

We met Phil,

 a friend of Lizas from University, in La Paz and came up with a plan of what we wanted to do whilst he was here. This involved some quite hectic travel returning to La Paz in between each excursion.  This is a summary of all 4 visits.

 As with most things in Bolivia booking tours and travel took a while and was Phils first experience of the laid back, bureaucracy laden business practices in Bolivia.  Some tour agencies charge twice as much as others for exactly the same service, so you have to shop around and everyone has to have all paper work in triplicate, sometimes being cut into different sections, stapled and highlighted.  We also came across the delights of the ATMs where we found only one bank would give us any money without threatening to take our cards and our credit cards wouldn't work because there were 'connection issues.' 

The other thing Phil found out was that despite the fact that its very cold, rather than having heating the hotels just give you loads of blankets. We moved hotel to somewhere which was meant to have heating and it was warmer due to better design and insulation but there were no heating. After we had checked out we found out you could hire a heater ggrrr.

La Paz is the tallest capital in the world.  Well it would be if it was the capital.  In fact Sucre is the official capital despite parliament and most of the power being in La Paz, it was a political compromise made in the 19th century that seems to have stuck.

La Paz is on the high plain between the two mountain ranges of the Andes. It is in a valley and surrounded by hills on all sides.  When you fly over or drive to the top of the hill the view is stunning.  At its lowest point its 3800 meters above sea level and at its highest 4800 meters.  Ben Nevis is at about 1600 meters above sea level.

 Yes lots of women do wear bowler hats here!!! (Purple additions by Andy)

At the top of the city on the high plain proper is another city called El Alto, its a new city only 28 years old and is effectively the over flow from La Paz which doesn't have any habitable land left.  Over a million people live in it now and most have come from the near by indigenous communities.  Changes in climate have led to water shortages and the traditional way of living, which was pretty hard to start with, has become impossible causing many to relocated to the city.  They call La Paz 'the hole.'

 At over 1000m from high to low it does make San Francisco look like a small place in Norfolk!

La Paz is very gentle and laid back.  The only thing that seems in the least bit hectic is the aggressive driving made worse by traffic jams in El Alto. At one point 2 lanes of a three lane road were taken up by a minibus terminal.  There was also a dump or gravel which was going to be used for construction blocking one lane of traffic.  At one point we were in a taxi and trying to avoid a protest.  In order to do this our taxi driver tried to turn left, left was up and very very steep and the car wouldn't make it, so he reversed down the hill, then put his foot to the floor until we had built up enough momentum to make the climb.  As in Potosi and Sucre there were demonstrations or celebrations every day.  Sometimes it was difficult to tell which was which.  The last evening we spent in La Paz was a fiesta to celebrate the founding of the city.  The population was out in force, playing in marching bands, processing in uniform, carrying lanterns, setting off fire crackers and fire works and generally getting quite drunk, the music stopped at half past three but the next morning drunk people were still wandering around and lots of other people looked very hung over.

Unfortunately children are working on the street selling things or asking to brush your shoes but we are told it is the school holidays and normally they would be in school which is free here up to and including university.  According to our guides Bolivia is on the up, they have a president called  Evo Morales who is introducing lots of social reforms and has nationalised the oil and gas industry so the Bolivans and not foreign companies get the benefit. They are certainly building everywhere which has to be a good sign, in fact on our first journey into town we thought it was one big building site.  In October they are getting 100 buses from China to replace the old belching minibuses they currently use and next year they are going to have a cable car installed from the bottom of La Paz to El Alto.  Despite the evident corruption there seems to be a certain optimism about the future here which is tangible, although the rich are getting poorer and the redistribution of wealth is causing tensions.

There are some great museums in La Paz but we mostly missed out on these as we kept ending up in La Paz on Sunday when they are closed.  We did make it the modern art museum which had some very interesting pieces but more nudes than I thought was strictly necessary.

We also had a great meal for Phils 40th in La Paz, we were only a few months late! It was absolutely delicious.  One of the starters we had was called 'A study in trout' and contained trout pate, smoke trout and cooked in lemon juice basically raw trout with 4 pickles, bread, chutney and greens.  It would have been enough for all of us for a main. So it was basically cordon bleu food standard and menu descriptions but with the standard large Bolivian quantities.  They eat a lot here and the women especially are very big, I think its to try and add some blubber to keep warm.

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is in the East of the country and at 1780m above sea level.  So its hot!!!! Yay.

This is great news as we had been in the cold or warm for ages and I was really missing hot.

In order to get here we took a 18 hour bus ride overnight.  The buses that ply this route are great, they have three seats to a row so the seats are extra wide and they recline to almost horizontal. We have come across other buses in Bolivia that are mainly made of rust and don't have any suspension so we were very lucky to have these smart modern ones.

The way the country is organised is that starting from the west there are the Andes, which consists of two sets of mountain ranges running north to south with a high plain in between them, then in the north it drops to jungle and in the south it drops (but not as far) to a temperate plateau.

So on the way from La Paz to Santa Cruz we slept through the mountains and woke up to cloud forest and then the savannah of the plateau.  On the way back to La Paz we slept through the plateau and woke up to superb mountain views.  3 very distinct climates in 18 hours.

Santa Cruz itself is a warm sprawling large town of 1.5 million people.  It doesn't hold much charm itself and there is little here for tourist,s one of its museums has been shut down and the other was very underwhelming, a room of paintings and a few sculptures in a garden.  The garden was being used for a children’s party when we turned up which seemed a good use for it as there’s not much green space in Santa Cruz.

In the 1970s & 80s Santa Cruz was the centre of the Bolivian cocaine industry and much of the money was reinvested in legitimate business's like land, agriculture and construction.  Then Oil and Gas was found in Santa Cruz and more money rolled in.  Now the president Evo Morales has nationalised some of the Oil and Gas industry and reclaimed two hundred thousand square meters of land from wealthy Santa Cruz land owners for redistribution to the poor.  This has caused a lot of resentment and there are calls for Santa Cruz to become independent. 

We had lunch in a small restaurant in an alley way off the main square. As we were busy munching on our sandwiches we realised that we had wondered into a money changing area.  They were not changing small amounts of tourist money, there was more cash being exchanged in big wodges than I have seen anywhere outside a bank.  We ate up quickly.

We went to a traditional Cruceno restaurant at the weekend, along with lots of locals, and ordered the mixed grill.  It included a large steak, sausages, blood sausages and lots of interesting offal.  It was very nice, no where near as nice as Donalds bbq, but certainly very tasty.  In fact I think Donald may have ruined us for bbqs as nothing in a restaurant will ever be that good. I am not sure how much Phil enjoyed the offal but he tried everything with a spirit of adventure.  We enjoyed the traditional Camba, music whilst we ate except when the guy sang.  He really should have left it to the women who had a voice that was capable of staying in key.

In another restaurant we saw a young man come in with his girlfriend and 4 other large men dressed sunglasses and suits which didn't sit right due to gun bulges.  It is not a status symbol to have your children accompanied by body guards here, but in some families a necessity. The 4 wheel drive cars they drive are colloquially known as Narco-Cruisers. 

We took a day trip to an Inca ruin called El Fuerte.  The drive from Santa Cruz to the ruins was amazing and we passed through wonderful hills and mountains.  The main highlight of the site is a massive stone which was carved with lots of symbolic carvings.  Surrounding this area are some reconstructed remains of old housing or administration building although some are still in ruins. 

 A long shot of Liza & Phil on the observation deck.

 They had built a wooden structure all around the main block so you could look at it from the most advantageous angles without having to climb all over it  With very limited resources the site was able to be excellently protected and as much as possible displayed to the visitors.

In fact we have come to two conclusions about the museums we have been to so far in South America.  1) They have been really well curated, often giving incredibly rich experiences with very few artefacts on show and 2) The people that run them are very enthusiastic and a tad eccentric. Like the women who knew we couldn't speak Spanish but kept explaining to us in Spanish all about the funeral pots on show.  Or the guy here who looked a bit like Crocodile Dundee who had been here with the first archaeologists began to uncover the site and showed us photos of his family having picnics on the site more than 40 years ago.

The manager at our Santa Cruz  Hotel.... well he seemed to think he was, an injunction to not keep fruit in our rooms was disobeyed by my wife with the inevitable repercussions, one bitten toe, mine not the Mrs!  New travel policy - never trust a Toucan!

Liza loved the Santa Cruz take on phone boxes!

Rurrenabaque

The bus journey from La Paz to Rurrenabaque takes 24 hours, as we had Phil with us and he was on a short holiday we decided to splash out and take a small propeller driven plane with a passenger load of about 30.  On the way out we were delayed because they wanted to load a washing machine onto the plane but the hatch wasn't big enough.  Once we eventually got started there were lots of cloud so we couldn't see much but on the return journey there was very little cloud and we passed over the jungle then the first strip of mountains in the Andes to land on the high plain in El Alto.  As we came into land we came swooping over the valley giving us magnificent views over La Paz.  It was a beautiful plane ride and very spectacular, showing off Bolivia's diverse terrain with great effect.

Rurrenabaque is a town on the river Beni which eventually feeds into the Amazon.  It provides easy access for the both the Pampas (which is like a swampy area) and the jungle.  There are lots of cheap tours to the Pampas which do lots of activities like canoeing and piranha fishing along the way.  There is an abundance of wildlife and you get to see lots.   So perversely we decided to go on an eco-tour into the jungle with the promise of not seeing very much and no activities.

It was fabulous.  We got a boat on the Beni for 3 hours down to their conservation reserve.  

 This boat carries gas powered freezers full of fish..... over fishing is becoming an issue.

Rosa Maria Ruiz runs the agency and she had spent years convincing the government to make Park National Madidi a national park which is a 150,000sq km network of protected areas. She then went on to create the Reserva de Serere a pristine privately owned 40sq km area which is where we stayed. She is a formidable women and I am not surprised she has achieved so much, despite the government threatening to burn her resort to the ground with her in it.

When we got there we were shown to our mosquito screened huts.  Which had mosquito nets as well.  This was good as mosquitoes were a constant nuisance.

  Our guide gave us a fan made of a piece of a palm like leaf and I spent most of the time using it to bat the things out of my face.

Whilst we were there we went on three 4 hour treks and 2 boat trip round the lakes.  We had a guide who could read the jungle like the back of his hand and a student to translate for us.  

They have a volunteer programme where students come over to help with the conservation and part of that is translating for tourists as the tourists fund the conservation, it also gives them a chance to see the jungle and learn from the guide just like us.  

Our guide cared deeply about the jungle and conservation and would divert us round the paths so we wouldn't disturb a spider webs.  Luckily for me the paths were fairly dry and flat so I was able to manage the trekking easily.

In the lakes there are cayman, anacondas and piranhas so we weren't able to go swimming.  You can't see many cayman during the day but at night we went out and shone torches onto the lake and this picks out there eyes.  There were lots and lots of them and I was glad when we were on the lake earlier I hadn't known just how many there were.

We were on the lake at dusk both nights to see the bats come to feed and watch the stunning sun set which was truly magical.

The video is not too good but gives some idea!

Bats on an amazon sunset

 An owl eyed butterfly

 These wonderful birds make a great sound - it's just that it sounds like it's coming from somewhere else so we called it the ventriloquist bird!

We saw trees that were hundreds of years old and a tree that was the home for lots of bats.  Our guide explained the medicinal properties of some of the trees and took a small piece of bark off one tree which smelt exactly like garlic.

We saw leaf cutter ants doing there thing, they travel across the jungle for up to 200m with these leaves, add them to there store house where they turn into a fungus which they eat.  There are soldiers, leaf carriers and an ant that checks whether the leaves that are being carried are the right ones.  Its very clever but evolution seems to have taken a round about route, why not make the ants just capable of eating the leaves?

Leaf cutter ants video.

We also saw a coati (a raccoon like thing), wild pigs (which are very very smelly),cappuccino monkeys, howler monkeys, chichillo or yellow monkeys, a red squirrel and a Toyra (a bit like a big stoat which eats monkeys). 

 In the main block they also had a baby Tapier (a long nosed pig with fur) they were raising as it had lost its mum and two parrots who had hurt their wing.

The highlight for me though was the spider monkeys.  Spider monkeys are endangered but they are also good eating and the local population kill them for food.  At the reserve they look after the orphans, there is not enough money available to treat them in such a way that they could be released later on and these monkeys will always be in captivity but at least it keeps some of the gene pool alive.  They were also lots of fun to play with.

Lago  Titicaca

As we only had two days before Phil left we decided to take a tour to the Lake.  It was not much more expensive than if we had made the journey on public transport and we got a guide who was excellent.

When we first saw the lake on the bus I was underwhelmed and wondered what all the fuss was about but as we drove round the mountain came into the background and it was truly beautiful.  

Copacabana is a small town which caters to tourists and pilgrims who have come to pray to the Virgin of Copacabana

The cathedral is in the baroque style with a fabulously intricate alter piece with the Virgin of Copacabana in the centre.  It was made by a native convert and encrusted in jewels, her dress is shaped like a mountain and there are also moon and sun symbols.  The Bolivians seem to easily combine there indigenous beliefs with Catholicism.  Our guide talks to the mountain gods as well as the catholic one.

Outside the cathedral are a row of cars decorated with flowers.  The priest blesses them with holy water and the owners pour alcohol around the car as a gift for mother earth.  This combination will ensure your cars safety and people come from as far a way as Peru and Chile to perform this ritual.

 The beach in Brazil was named after her; a captain in the 17th century couldn't find land and prayed to her for help, she came through for them and they saw the beach the next day and he then named it Copacabana after her.

We then got a boat over to Isla del Sol (Sun Island) in the middle of the lakes which is where we were going to stay the night.  Our guide showed us the sacred Inca fountain.  This is where all of the island gets its water from and it is carried up the hills by donkeys.  The Incas had an intricate irrigation system which unfortunately is now in disrepair.  The villagers can only grow one crop a year during the rainy season but the Incas grew crops all year round.  All three holes used to work but now only two provide water, this is blamed on climate change but could as easily be caused by a blockage in the system which is no longer understood.

We then got a short hop on a boat to see the Sun Temple,  it was very interesting but underwhelming.

From here we then climbed over the ridge to see some fabulous views on he way to our hotel.  We stayed the night on the island with beautiful views at dusk and dawn and returned the next day to La Paz.

Phil had to get up at silly O Clock to get to the airport for flights back to his desk in the city via Miami.... we hear he made it home safe leaving us with one day in La Paz before heading on to Peru.

We spent the day on a trip to the Inca ruins about 50 km out of town at Tiwanaku

We found them fascinating although the total reconstruction school of archaeology seems a little much. The plan seems to be to put the whole thing back together as was sometime in about 1500 with a lot of best guessing and even creative placement along the lines of 'well we thought this bit looked better here than where we found it anyway.'

 The high alto plateau from a viewpoint, at around 4500m .

 Note the locals rebuilding the stepped pyramid!

 The lines of water are Inca irrigation lakes, the water also acted as thermal insulators on the crops at this altitude.

 The arch in the background is a new construction! and all the standing stones were found elsewhere on the site.... Here they line up with the sun at mid winter.

 Apparently this is of an Inca priest holding a jar to drink alcohol out of and a staff to sniff hallucinogenic herbs out of. I don't expect these priests were expected to be coherent as well! 

 Liza looks through another relocated arch!

Although the picture does not do it justice these heavy un-relocated slabs were what I found the most impressive as their size was just incredible and were obviously quite a stunning floor space of another pyramid untouched by the locals. How they were moved there must have been an amazing feat of strength and organisation.

After the trip we returned to La Paz for the final time and next morning caught the 30 hour (new record!) bus to Lima so a new country starts. Goodbye Bolivia, a wonderfully contrasting country and hello Peru!