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La Luna de Miel Larga
Chris and Aviva's travels through South America and beyond
About
Chris and Aviva got married in September of 2007 and immediately abandoned everything they know to move to Cuzco, Peru for a little over a year. Aviva is conducting her fieldwork towards her PhD in anthropology and Chris is bumming around shooting some short films and trying to look busy.
And the rest of our recent travels: Argentina Part 3 and Bolivia
September 5th, 2008 by AvivaWell, since we last posted it has been two weeks and we have covered alot of ground. Since we are now back in Cusco, we can also add some photos to go with our stories.
We left Iguazu on the night of August 21 and took a night bus to Resistencia. Because we had splurged on “bus cama” (bed bus) seats, we actually got a decent night of sleep. In fact, I was so tired from the humidity and activity of the last two days, that I fell asleep at 9pm right after we got on the bus and didn’t wake up until we arrived the next morning at 7am. We spent the day wandering around Resistencia, a nice little town with sculptures everywhere, lots of quirky museums where the staff are really excited to show you around, and some decent cafes.
That night, we took another overnight bus to Salta. This ride was less comfortable but we arrived early and made our way on the public bus system to the small town of Chicoana. At a bakery there, we asked a lady to call our hosts for the weekend: the owners of the hacienda/finca/estancia (ie ranch) Los Los. As a first anniversary treat to ourselves, we splurged to stay the weekend in a luxurious bedroom, to have our meals by the fireplace, and to go horseback riding. We spent lots of time sleeping, reading, and enjoying the wrap-around patio. While we found it incredibly relaxing (especially after two nights on buses), we were a bit disappointed by the food: it was more like fancy plate service and small portions and not like the huge piles of BBQ meat we were expecting. In fact, we didn’t get much meat at all: we had lentil soup (which I guess is a signature dish of that region) and vegetarian ravioli. We did enjoy all the tea and alfajores (a type of cookie with carmel in the middle) though. On our last day in Salta, we wandered around town, seeing some more museums (more Incan mummy children, found in a glacier in northern Argentina…see post about muesum in Arequipa) and churches and eating the last of our Argentine meat. Then we got on a night bus to the Bolivian border.
So its all well and good to hear the fun stories about what we have been doing, but I cant leave out the (retrospectively funny) stories about our trials and mishaps…and Bolivia is the perfect place to have lots of these. Lets start by crossing the border. Although guide books say the border is open 24 hours, we arrived at a freezing cold 6am and had to wait an hour. Because I am in Peru as an American, I had entered Argentina as an American. So I left Argentina as an American. But when I tried to enter Bolivia as a Canadian (to avoid paying the hefty visa tax that we already had to pay for Chris’s entry), they said that I needed to use the same passport that had my exit stamp from Argentina. In thinking about this later, Chris and I realize that it is so easy for me to switch between US and Canadian passports when travelling in North America because those countries don’t track citizen EXIT. I was floored that Bolivia cared about me having left Argentina, but I solved the problem by entering Argentina again on my Canadian passport (luckily this guy just gave me the look: did you parachute out of nowhere into the area between our borders? Because my Canadian passport was void of any stamps) and then leaving again and entering Bolivia in the end as a Canadian. While I agree with the principle behind Bolivia taxing Americans (that Americans charge Bolivians), we just couldn’t afford two visas and I was also annoyed at the border agent for asking for more money than the official channels say we should be paying. One American girl ended up having quite the fight over what she perceived as a “bribe”, but we all eventually got through okay. We met some British guys while waiting for this other American girl to sort herself out (they wouldn’t take her dollar bills because they were creased, people are very concerned about American money looking clean; I spoke more Spanish so tried to help her out) and then we all ran to the bus station. Chris and I were okay with the altitude change again, although the cold was a bit sudden, but our companions were reminding us that we were back in the Andes by huffing up the street. Of course, how could we not be reminded we were back in the Andes, because everyone was suddenly in Andean clothing again, and with Andean style shops and bathrooms and bus stations.
We caught a bus from Villazon, the border town, to Tupiza, where we stopped for gas before entering town and heard a bus driver calling for Uyuni (our next destination). I asked the price and it seemed high to me, so we just went on to the bus station, where we found out that the was the last bus to Uyuni. Luckily they called it for us, and the bus waited while we (and one of the British guys) took a taxi out to meet the bus on the edge of town. So it ended up costing us the same anyway. The bus was a local deal, with people’s luggage (ie parcels of potatoes and boxes of products to sell, like gum) in the aisles, and no shocks, and men drinking in the back and then peeing out of the moving bus. We were the only tourists and it was a hot and bumpy few hours without having had time to eat or pee, but we stopped once on the way and spent some time talking to a little girl whose dad was the driver and mother was the fare collector. Chris and I felt like we knew how to travel in the Andes and were okay with it at this point in our trip…until our bus to Potosi…but keep reading to find out more about that.
So we arrived in Uyuni and found a hotel and booked a three day tour to the Salar de Uyuni (Salt Flats) for the next day. We went to dinner at Minuteman Pizza (a guy from Boston owns the place; it is rightly touted as the best pizza in South America), where we also had breakfast the next day and dinner a few days later before we moved on. We felt no guilt about not jumping back into Andean cuisine. Our trip to Uyuni was fantastic…we were on a tour with the British guy and three French travelers (a couple, and another guy). We stayed in cold hostels and our tour guide didn’t talk much, but our jeep didn’t break down until the third day (a record, I think, for trips to the Salt Flats) and we played cards at night with our companions and the food was good. We hadn’t realized that the region was so geologically diverse, so we saw a lot more than we had anticipated. You could literally day dream and come to yourself 10 minutes later in a completely different landscape. Still we spent lots of time in the jeep, and the trip was more about taking photos and enjoying the view than doing anything active like we usually enjoy. Only the photos can give you an idea of the place…check them out below.
So after our Uyuni tour, we had a night bus to Potosi (this is the night of August 28). We were supposed to leave at 7pm and arrive at 1am, so we had made a hotel reservation and were preparing for a cold six hours on the bus but then a warm eight hours in a bed. No such luck. This is the part where Chris and I started realizing the differences between Peruvian and Bolivian transport, and being grateful for living in Peru. Something happened to our bus (maybe to the wheels?) during our 15 minutes rest stop at 10pm, and so it was 1am before the bus started moving again. We were freezing and cramped, so couldn’t sleep (this was another local bus, no reclining seats, people’s merchandise including big tangles of hangers practically on top of us) and the man behind us decided to spend his 3 hour delay drinking. So he hiccuped from 1-1:30am and then threw-up the rest of the journey. Because of the problem with the wheels, they drove very slowly and stopped often to bang around some more, so we arrived into Potosi at 7am! So much for sleep in a nice bed. We went to our hotel and slept for three hours before getting up to shower because the hot water was being turned off around 11am (and the clerk kept bothering us to shower too, which was a bit weird…she seemed unhappy to have us arrive during the day since our reservations had been for the night).
So we got a bit of sleep and then went to find a tour to the silver mines, our main reason for wanting to stop in this town. We had some food and had a pretty good 3 hour mine tour that included a stop to buy coca leaves (miners don’t eat their whole time while working in the mines, and coca helps stave off appetite) and dynamite for the miners. Our guide knew a lot and patiently answered questions, and the tour wasn’t as
“scary” (hot and claustrophobic) as others had said it would be.
Not willing to trust any more buses, we took a taxi that night to get to Sucre (it was only a couple hours away) where one of my Fulbright friends lent us a whole apartment to stay in! We had a wonderful few days with her, seeing the town (more museums and churches and colonial architecture) and learning more about her fieldwork, eating good food, and we even went to a festival in a nearby town where we watched bull running!
Still scared of the local buses, we decided to fly to La Paz (12 hours on a bus or $160 for a one hour flight…we splurged). We spent a day wandering around La Paz (the Witches Market, a very good tour of a San Franciscan church, a nice dinner) and then spent our anniversary on a tour of Tiwanaku, which is an archaeological site (pre-Incan) a few hours outside of the city. We had dinner that night at a Quebecoise restaurant, and woke up on Wednesday morning (September 3), ready for our 12 hour bus ride back to Cusco.
No such luck again. We got to the bus station early, to be told that “all of Peru” was on strike, so the borders were closed and no company was leaving for Cusco that day. Flights only leave on Tuesdays and Thursday so we were literally told to spend another 24 hours in La Paz! This wouldn’t have been SO bad if I didn’t have a very important fieldwork meeting at 10am on September 4 (the meeting only happens once a month, and I am missing next month because we will be travelling with my parents)! So we decided to take our chances and got on a bus to Copacabana, which is at the Bolivia-Peru border on Lake Titicaca. In getting off the bus in Copacabana we learned that the problem was only with Cusco, so we could grab a bus in an hour to cross the border and get into Puno (on the Peru side of the lake). We had some yummy trout for lunch and then got on another three hour bus to Puno. Border crossing was easy and we decided to take a short tour of the floating Uros islands before getting on our 8pm bus to Cusco. But the bus didn’t leave at 8pm. In fact, it didn’t arrive at the station until 10:30pm and all us stranded La Paz-Cusco travelers were pacing the station in anxiety for getting back to Cusco for our respective work on Thursday morning. The truly tragic part was that we had all jumped on board with the Copacabana-Puno company because we thought they might be our only option, but we had to watch countless other buses leave on time for Cusco as all the companies were all of a sudden back in business. We finally were on our way, and only had to stop half a dozen times for police to confiscate all the products piled in the aisles that a group of women were trying to bring back with them, tax-free. We arrived in Cusco at 7am…just enough time to grab a shower and get to my meeting. Except the fuse for our shower heater had broken, so Chris helped by heating water for me to bathe navy style. Whew. So here we are, back to normal life…at least for a few weeks until my parents arrive and we are off on more (hopefully undelayed) adventures.
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