Tupiza, Tarija, Potosi and Sucre

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Our 4-day desert Jeep adventure ended in Tupiza. We stayed in the Annex of hotel Mitru, which was a cheaper option, but still allowed us to use their pool... so we spent a good day doing laundry, lounging by the pool and exploring Tupiza. The market in Tupiza was a dark maze of little tin stalls, selling everything imaginable. We bought some snacks and wire to fix Lisa's pack (the strap broke!).

The next day, Kayleigh and Russ rented some horses and a guide to explore the nearby Cayon del Inca, but ourselves and Dewey opted for the D.I.Y. route and just followed the horse prints out of town and up to the canyon.  

We saw the famous Devil's gate, and climbed around  a bit on it.

People on horseback could only make it so far up the canyon, where you encountered a fairly vertical rock face. We stopped here for lunch (the classic: tuna, bread, apples) then decided to see how far up the Canyon we could get. It was a fun hike up the cayon, with a few places where we got to do some good bouldering. 

The hike up the canyon wasn't a marked trail, and we did a fair bit of guesswork as to where we were going. You can't say we were lost, because there wasn't really a route to begin with. We were hoping to come out the other side of the canyon, but after trying two different routes, gave up and went back the way we came in.

Going down bouldering routes is often more challenging than finding a way up...

After Tupiza we all took a night bus to Tarija, the main city in Bolivia's wine region. The two cities look very close on a map, but the bus was scheduled to take 10 hours. This should have been some indication to the quality of the road... and it was. Another unpaved, switchback, single track road... in the fog. The bus was beyond basic, and we got bumped around pretty good (what can you expect for $5?). At some point in the middle of the night we woke up and realized we were stopped, and had been for a good couple hours (hence why we were actually asleep). It was just begining to get light out, and we could see that there were other buses and trucks stopped in front and behind us, but couldn't figure out what was going on. We never really did figure out what was going on, but it was possibly a truck strike (a few weeks earlier, bus drivers in Bolivia had striked for 3 days because a new law had been passed making it illegal for bus drivers to drink and drive!!). Most of the locals had gotten off the bus, but we started to move (very slowly) and Lisa made the mistake of standing up and looking out the window to see what was going on... and we were pretty much inches from the edge of a cliff. It appears that the bus driver decided to pass the trucks on the one-track road (after 2 hours of debating the safety of doing so), and then all the locals cheered and got back on the bus. Just another bizarre Bolivian bus situation.

We arrived to Tarija hours later than planned, but that turned out to be fine, because it's hard to find a hostel at 4:30 am anyways. We stayed at Zeballos hostel, a rough-around-the edges hostel run by a disfunctional extended family. They would have loud, spanish arguments, right outside our non-even-remotely-soundproof dorm room at silly hours in the morning. We ended up staying a few nights mostly out of convenience. We tried tamales (meat and corn bread stuffed in a corn husk and steamed), and local breakfast at the market too (chorizo with bread and salad). We also went out for steak dinner one night, and were intrigued by the steak-dinner-for-two on the menu, so we ordered it and out came a mini grill full with various cuts of beef (including heart, intestine, ribs, steak, sausage....) and nothing else (well, there were potato fries). We ate all but the two sketchiest looking pieces of meat.

We caught a micro bus (along with all the local school children) to the nearby village of Tomatitas for some soft-shelled crab (a local specialty) and a hike to a waterfall. When we got there, the river was all but dried up, so we didn't bother hiking up to the waterfall. We ordered soft-shell crab (pictured below), enjoyed some Bolivian wine, and played cards instead. Below is our lunch... not as bad as it looks, but not as good as it was reputed to be either. The white stuff is dried white corn kernels, soaked and then cooked.

The next day we went on a wine tour of the Tarija wine region. We arranged for an english guide and a tour of 5 wineries, but got a Spanish guide and 3 wineries. Lisa acted as the translator, but it's always a bit difficult to translate specialized vocabulary.

We tried straight Singani, a famous 40-proof local spirit made from white grapes. It was unbearably toxic. We later discovered it to be much better in Chuflay form (singani, sprite, and lime). 

Below is a natural wonder of the wine region. The pressure from the lake built up and caused the rock to split, creating this very deep canyon. We'd tell you more about it, but that was all Lisa could manage to translate.

After Tarija, we headed back up north to Potosi. It was backtracking a bit, but there is really no way not to do so in Bolivia. The night bus was atrocious, as usual. Locals don't use earphones here (they just blare their music from their cellphones), babies crying, locals trying to sell food on the bus, and crappy music blaring from a broken (and screeching) speaker right above our heads. There was a even a cat, but it was pretty quiet. For some reason, they also leave the windows open on the bus, and the dust from the dirt roads fills the bus. Buses also stop frequently to let people off to pee, and try to fill up the bus with more passengers (or in this case, overfill the bus so that people end up sleeping in the aisles). We got to Potosi around 3 in the morning, and checked into Hostal La Casona.

Potosi is a fascinating city with a lot of history. It is the highest city in the world, at 4090 meters above sea level. Behind the city is Cerro Rico mountain. In 1546, silver was discovered in Cerro Rico, and the city rapidly became one of the largest, and wealthiest cities in the world. Over 40,000 tonnes of silver were mined in the first 200 years, but caused the death of between 8 and 12 million slaves (no, that is not a typo). Cerro Rico is known as the "mountain that eats people". We wanted to tour the mines, but arrived on a Sunday, and locals don't work in the mines on Mondays, and guides (ex-miners) don't work on Sundays, we we decided to go to Sucre for a few days and come back.

We tried Viscacha (that cute rabit-like creature from our last post), in a spicy sauce. It was very tasty, but a fair bit of work to eat. There was also a decent amount of fur in the dish. We tried out best to try ALL the Bolivian culinary specialites!

We took a shared taxi to Sucre from Potosi, because the cost between that at a local bus was only negligibly different. Sucre, known as the white city, had a very different feel from other cities in Bolivia. The city is very clean, and fairly wealthy. Buildings are required to be whitewashed every year.

We tried several restaurants and internet cafes trying to get our pictures uploaded for the blog, but internet has been notoriously poor in Bolivia. We eventually discovered a small mexican restaurant which had wifi, so we ate dinner, sipped Chuflay's and played cards for hours while our pictures uploaded (success!).

You are supposed to be able to climb the building below to get a great view of the city, but it wasn't open when we tried.  

We finally got a hang of the eating schedule in Bolivia. Lunch is from 12 until 3, "tea" is between 5 and 7, and dinner after 8pm. One afternoon, during tea, we sampled 6 different local speciality snacks at an adorable cafe (Salon de Te Las Delicias). We tried sonso (pictured below; mashed Yuca and cheese baked on a stick), empanadas de arroz (fried rice cakes), empanadas de pollo (chicken baked in a pastry package), cunape (mystery dough with cheese), some plantain and cheese pastry cake thing (we forget the name), and humintas (a type of corn bread with cheese steamed in a corn husk). Our favorites were the humintas and the sonso.

We spent a couple days in Sucre enjoying the warm temperature and laid back atmosphere, then headed back to Potosi. We nearly missed our bus because we didn't time things right and there wasn't a vacant taxi to be found when we needed to get to the terminal. We eventually found one, and the kind cabby rushed us there as fast as he could. We figured we would be fine, because buses never leave on time here, but we arrived at 1:00 on the dot, and the bus had already left. Fortunately, the locals were extremely kind, and offered to call the bus, and ask it to wait at the next stop, while we jumped in a cab and rushed off to catch up with the bus. Intersections here aren't very orderly; the first car into the intersection gets to go. If it's a blind corner (as most are), the cab will honk to let cars coming from other directions know that he's entering the intersection. We caught up with the bus after 15 minutes or so, and hopped on.