Category Archives: Bolivia

23 Days in Bolivia – an Overview

Itinerary

– Booked three day Salar De Uyuni tour from San Pedro De Atacama. Cross the Bolivia border on day 1 and ended the tour at Uyuni, Bolivia on Day 3 after visiting the salt flats of Uyuni.

Tupiza

– Got the 2 AM train from Uyuni to Tupiza @ 71 Bs/perso. Stayed @ Tupiza for 3 nights. Did a jeep tour; a bicycle adventure trip and a horse riding trip. Used Tupiza Tours for Jeep tour, Alexander tours for the bicycle. Met with a fellow traveler we met way back in Salento and enjoyed a few hours with him.

– From Tupiza, took a but to Potosi, an old colonial city known for its silver mines. I didnt want to go exploring a mine, but Swami did. Really enjoyed walking around plaza major and market.

– Next stop, Sucre. Loved Sucre! Sucre is lower (2800 masl only!), the climate is warmer (relatively), the city is lovely and old and there is very good veg food to be found. The market is a treasure trove! We were in constant email contact with the US embassy and getting documents ready, so no sightseeing, only internet cafes. 😀 Split our stay between forrestero and hostal colon. Colon was so cute!

– From Sucre, boarded a very comfortable overnight bus to La Paz. Wandered around La Paz’s hilly streets while awaiting our appointment at the US embassy. Once that got through, we headed out to Copacabana to spend some time at Lago Titicaca.

– Isla Del Sol, the island on Lake Titicaca can only be reached via boat from Copacabana. Spent a peaceful night there.

– It was back to La Paz where we started unwinding and getting ready for the trip back to California.

Highlights:

– Salar De Uyuni is not to be missed! Its an otherwordly experience out there on the Altiplano.

– Sucre is a beautiful town and one can easily spend a few days here.

– La Paz is a big, modern city, but there is so much to see and do. Just walk around town and maybe do a trek in the nearby mountains. The food is great and hotels are really cheap.

– Isla del sol is cold and really isolated. A great place to unwind or write, but the food leaves a lot to be desired, especially for veg folks.

– Bolivians are unfailingly polite. Everyone says por favor and gracias to EVERYONE, irrespective of social status. Even the cops are incredibly patient during traffic bottlenecks.

– No Hare Krishna restaurants anywhere in the country!

Check out:

– La Paz: plaza murillo and plaza san francisco

– Shop @ calle sagarnaga and linares

– Calle mercadores just off plaza murillo

– For B 2.50, try api at Mercado Lanza. Dont miss – we only found this in Bolivia.

– Really tasty tofu sandwiches at Namaste Restaurant

– Hitch a ride on one of those shared van-taxis with barely any leg room.

– Museums in La Paz are really cheap and nice way to spend an afternoon.

– Cholita wrestling

Salt Flats of Salar De Uyuni, Bolovia

Travel tips for Salar De Uyuni:

Book a four day tour from San Pedro de atacama or from Tupiza, Bolivia. From San Pedro, its a good way to get into the Bolivia part of your trip. You can also get to Uyuni via public transport from elsewhere in Bolivia and take a day trip to the salt flats – cheaper and faster, but a tour group is more enjoyable and affords the opportunity to bond with fellow travelers.
Ask for prices at many tour agencies. Get to know your tour group members – variety in nationality makes for a more enjoyable time. If everyone is of the same nationality and speak a single language that you dont know, it wont be as much fun.
Get an itemized list of the services included in the tour package. Check with tourist office for reputed tour companies.
All tour companies are Bolivian as the tour begins only after you cross Chile border.
Pack in layers as the weather gets chilly in the mornings. On the day of the salt flat tour, you’ll leave your hotel before dawn.

Early morning at Salar De Uyuni

Waiting at the Bolivian border for immigration and breakfast

Rather fancy immigration building

Breakfast at the border

Snow capped vistas

Tour jeeps

Country love!

Altitude check – altiplano is really really high!

Flamingos and red lake

Train graveyard

We were excited that we’d get to take cool photos with our really nice DSLR (Nikon D7000 for the photo enthusiast) and our handy compact camera Canon S95. We lugged it around the rest of the continent and got great pictures, but as luck would have it, two things happened. Our DSLR got stolen with a bunch of other things, and our S95 got ruined thanks to a sandboarding event at San Pedro de atacama. We were thoroughly disillusioned that we were suddenly camera-less for the last one month of our trip and that too, in Salar De Uyuni.

All this happened in San Pedro De Atacama, a really small town in the atacama desert. So we had to go back to Calama (not our favorite city at all) and went to a really swanky mall there to buy a basic digital camera way overpriced than the rates at Amazon (we really missed Amazon.com).

Sadly, the rest of our pictures, including those from Salar De Uyuni would be from this camera, though we should be fortunate for having one at all. We were not able to get those cool shots travelers get from Uyuni, but had to make do with some of these.

4-day trips to Salar De Uyuni can be arranged from San Pedro De Atacama from any tourist agency. The tour begins in Chile and can either end in Uyuni or you can return back to Chile. The four day tour costs 68,000 chilean pesos or ~USD 140 and includes food, stay, transportation and guide in a jeep that can carry 5-6 people. You will visit the salt flats on the 4th day, but the first three days are through a national reserve area at high altitudes (called the altiplano region).

Sunrise at salar

Yummy! Breakfast

Our cook and her things make a pretty picture

Kiss time!

A Guide to La Paz Bolivia

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We spent a lot of time in La Paz, Bolivia. Nearly 10 days in all. We had to go early to the US embassy to get our transportation letters (having lost our green cards) and our flight back home wasn’t departing until 10 days later. We did take a side trip to Copacabana and Isla Del Sol, but we still had a lot of time to spare.

La Paz is incredibly hilly, cold, high, bustling with life and activity and a great place to walk around. We did take a side trip to Copacabana and Isla Del Sol, but we still had a lot of time to spare.

This was the last stop on our backpacking journey, so we were taking it easy and not doing anything hectic. Also, I was getting a bit stressed out that the trip was ending. I wasn’t sure what I had to look forward to – in terms of my career, in terms of living in India etc.

The view from Valle Del Luna

La Paz street scene

Here’s a recap of what we did in La Paz, if you have a lot of time to kill:

– We walked a lot. A LOT!! We walked tens of blocks every day and it was amazing. La Paz is extremely hilly and this is a superb workout.

– Spend time at Plaza Murillo. Plaza Murillo is the central plaza and one my favorite ways to spend time in any new Latin American city. People actually come here in droves in the evening and relax after the day’s work is done. I can never imagine this in Silicon Valley, where we’d still be at the office or heading home to watch Netflix or browse the web.

– From Plaza Murillo, walk to Mercado Lanza. Explore the labyrinth like multi-level shopping and living center. The shops are categorized by food, breakfast, meals, artisanal stuff, beauty products and everything under the sun.

– In the breakfast stalls, get Api every morning. Get the purple one, not the yellow one. Its a porridge made out of purple maize and is highly addictive.

– Palta sandwiches. I am a huge fan of palta sandwiches, ask any of the breakfast booths to make this for you.

– Walk up from Mercado Lanza on Calle Sagarnaga. Plenty of great souvenir shopping on this road. Check out all the side streets. We wandered a ways once and I happened to look up, only to spot a vegetarian restaurant out of the blue.

– Get a haircut! I got a great haircut for 45 Bs which included the wash, set and cut. Swami’s was much cheaper, but I went to a salon in the mall.

– We explored all the veg restaurants. We’d walk many blocks to each of them and just enjoy the process.

– Valle del luna. Nice day trip from the plaza. A nice hike there too.

– Check out Cholita wrestling. Hilarious Bolivian wrestling, where mean-looking women come to fight turned out in perfect Bolivian traditional wear, skirt and all. It is not advisable to go alone as the areas safety looked questionable, but with a tour organized by your hotel.