Anaconda hunting!

After four days in Lipez we took the nightbus from Uyuni to La Paz. The ride was very unpleasant, the bus was freezing cold and the roads so bumpy that we couldn't even hear our own thoughts anymore. Also a kid who peed in his pants and old ladies were sleeping on the floor of the bus. We came to La Paz feeling tired after a horrible sleepless night. From La Paz we organized a tour to Amazonas. The next day we flew to Rurrenabaque with a tiny airplane that could fit only 19 passengers. It was so small that we couldn't even stand straight up there :) We could also see the cockpit from our seats and all the cool thingies the pilots used. :) The flight was very turbulent and you could really feel it in your stomach when the plane flew into turbulens. We also heard really strange peeping sounds that scared some of the passengers. (Sara du sku int ha kommit med på det här flyget! :) )



Our cute plane on the runway (which was grass!)

We spent one night in the tropical climate in Rurre (it was over 37 degrees all the time) and took a three day tour to the Amazonas the next morning. Our tour guide Victor (aka Pollo) was the cutest Bolivian guy we met. His english was really adorable and he told us great funny stories about monkies and other animals. Our group was great except for Dimitrios, a Greek guy (he had only lived in Greece for six months but he still considered himself as Greek even though he spent his childhood in Germany and now lives in London) who annoyed the shit out of the whole group including our guide Victor. :) The rest of the group was great, we had two Canadian and two Californian girls in our group.


Our group (minus Dimitrios) in the motor canoe

 We had to take a three hour jeep ride (a really bumpy one again) to get to the river. From there we took a motor canoe to our accommodation which was in the middle of nowhere. The boat ride was about three to four hours long and it included us jumping into the river ,which was full with caimans, to push the boat when it got stuck in the bottom. The girls were the first ones to jump into the water while the only guy in the group was only complaining (he was stupid enough not to have brought flip flops to the amazonas) and being the biggest girl of us all.. We also saw a lot of Caypibaras (Vesipossu in finnish). Caypibaras are the biggest rodents in the world and Bolivians don't eat them because they are said to bring bad luck. We also saw many different kinds of monkeys including squirrel monkeys and cappuccino monkeys. We even got to feed the yellow squirrel monkeys with bananas. Our tour guide made us promise not to tell this to anyone though :) On the way to our accommodation we also got to swim with pink dolphins. Again we had to jump into the murky water which was full with Caimans and Piranhas. All the girls were brave enough to do this but our Greek friend Dimitrios sat in the boat being afraid of getting parasites. :) After arriving at our accommodation we went to the sunset bar (which also served cold beer) to enjoy the lovely sunset.



Caypibaras



Squirrel monkey



Cappuccino monkey



Cayman (they don't eat humans, even though Victor has been bitten by caymans many times :) )



Sunset bar

The next day we woke up at 5 am to see the sunrise. After having too much deepfried dough (!) for breakfast we left for Anaconda hunting. We were wearing rubber boots and had sticks in our hands to poke the anacondas with. After walking in a swamp we realised that our rubber boots had holes in them and our feet were completely wet :) Victor had a really interesting technique for finding anacondas. He was smelling the mud to locate them because apparently anacondas have a very distinct stink. We managed to find two anacondas, unfortunately they weren't as big as Lili hoped they would be (they can be up to 9 meters long). In the afternoon we went fishing for Piranhas. We had to use cow meat as the bait. Lili was the only one who catched a piranha and got to eat it ( a red one, there were five different colours of Piranhas in that part of Amazonas where we were). The californian girl Jamie catched four catfish (we think they were all the same fish though :)) and named all of them Dimitrios and fed one to an eagle! :)



Our spandex group going anaconda hunting



Lili holding snake skin



Anaconda inside a tree

 

Lili and the red piranha



It had really sharp teeth

The next day's program was to go swimming with the dolphins again. This time we were the only ones who were brave enough to get into the water. While waiting for the dolphins to come and play with us, Lili got bitten by a little piranha and she started bleeding! When we got back to Rurre, we had dinner with the girls and later met up with Victor for drinks in Moskkito bar (this was the first alcoholic beverage we had on our trip and we got really tipsy just after one drink). We met this american guy Jamie had been talking about before. He was according to Jamie the most annoying guy ever, even worse than Dimitrios:) He was really full of himself and pretended to be a yoga master with his own yoga program (but when Katja asked him what kind of yoga it was, he couldn't even give a straight answer). He aso claimed to have been travelling for two years now even though he counted his time working on a cruise ship as travelling. :) He had his own travel webpage which he was really proud of and his life plan was to sell his travel videos to some tv channel. We later googled his webpage and were laughing our asses off when watching his travel videos :)



Having drinks in Moskkito bar with the girls and Victor

 The next posting will be from Lake Titicaca which was our next destination after Amazonas.

1200 kilometers in four days at the altitude of 4000 meters

Our next plan was to take a four day trip in Lipez near the Argentinian and Chilean borders. We chose a four day jeep ride trip in the mountains leaving from Tupiza and ending at Salar de Uyuni. Our companion in this trip was three guys from Uruguay who only wanted to communicate with us in Spanish. So we spent four days (24 hours a day) only communicating with hand gestures and our mediocre Spanish skills :) Our favourite thing to do with them was playing cards (their deck of cards consists only of 48 cards!).

We became very familiar with coca leaves on this trip because of the altitude sickness we both suffered from. Coca leaves are supposed to relieve the symptoms of altitude sickness. We later found out that drinking coca tea also reduces fatigue and hunger. No wonder we couldn't sleep at all in three nights and weren't hungry at all! The feeling of altitude sickness was horrible and indescribable, we had a headache for four days and felt nauseous, dizzy and ready to vomit occasionally. The first night was the worst of all the nights, nobody in our group could sleep and it was freezing cold the whole night. We were sleeping approximate at 5000 meters altitude in a local village that didn't even have electricity. (The temperature can get as low as -20 degrees in Lipez during night, we don't actually know how cold it was there then but we were freezing even though we slept under five blankets!). We were so accustomed to use the natural toilet that we didn't even realize that our first accomodation actually had a real toilet until the next morning :) We spent the second night also in a local village. The third night's accommodation was a salt hotel where everything was made of salt! Even the floor was made of salt crystals.

Hotel de Sal

Katja learned to speak a lot of Spanish on this trip. Our guide Pedro and cook Ana did not speak any English at all so when they were asking how Katja was feeling (because of the altitude sickness) she would just answer either muy mal (very bad) or mejor (better) or occasionally mujer (a woman) :) Well I guess evebody gets confused sometimes especially when you're feeling sick :)

We saw a lot during this trip, everything from colourful lagoons to pink flamingos and active volcanoes.



Mountains we saw on our first day, the weird formation is due to heavy rain and wind

Llamas

Katja at 4855 meters altitude

It's not snow! This is a mineral that is used e.g. in shampoos

Laguna colorada at 4270 m.

Lili in the hot springs

View near the Chilean border

Geysirs

Lili at our lunch spot sitting on lava rocks

Arbol de piedra ( tree of stone)

These mountains have seven different colours

Laguna blanca and flamingos



Salar de Uyuni

Isla del Pescado



Sunrise at the salt flats

Mountains and Salar de Uyuni



Lili "sitting" on a stone



Still not snow!



Kids are healthy when they are playing :)

Tupiza, the city where we booked and started our tour, didn't have an atm so our hostel told us we could pay our tour on the last day when we came to Uyuni because there is an atm there and we didn't have enough Bolivianos to pay the tour in Tupiza. (The four day tour including all meals, accommodation and transport cost us approximately only 25 € per day!). Well we arrived at Uyuni on a Sunday and the city's only atm wasn't working. We asked a lady when it would start working and she said it would probably work on Monday. Our plan B was to find a place where we could take out cash advance with our credit cards. Well the same lady told us that there is only one machine in the whole city and it doesn't work on Sundays! We didn't have a plan C! So we went back to our tour guide and told him our situation. Luckily after waiting for a long time and discussing our alternatives, he took us to a hostel that could give us cash. You should have seen our faces when the lady in the hostel took out an ancient machine and wiped Katja's visa to get a copy of the card details. She even made a phone call to confirm that the card was valid. It all felt like going back a few decades in time (like many other things in Bolivia as well). This was for almost two weeks ago and they still haven't charged Katja's visa for this.

We took a night bus to La Paz the same evening and the next posting will be from Amazonas!

Crossing the Bolivian border

There are no words to describe our journey from Argentina to Bolivia! We flew from Buenos Aires to Jujuy (correct pronounciation of the name of the city is Huhuy, which we thought was really funny). Our first real "accident" happened in this city, we were walking around in the city with our heavy backpacks on when Lili stumpled in the uneven pavement and fell to the ground with her backpack still on. She couldn't even manage to get up by herself and four Argentinians ran to help her and pulled her up. At that point Katja was very concerned that the helpful Argentinians would steal Lili's purse :)

Our plan was to take a night bus from Jujuy to La Quiaca and cross the border there. We had been informed that the bus would take about seven hours and that we would arrive at La Quiaca at around 7 am. Well the bus was a bit early and we arrived there already at 5 am. The "city" was dead! All hotels and hostels were closed and it was freezing cold at the altitude of 3442 meters above sea level! Our plan B was to walk to the border and take an early train to Tupiza. Well the plan B didn't work out that well either. The border was closed and didn't open until 7.30 am. We spent our time there talking to the border security guy who informed us that there are no trains to Tupiza from Villazon (we later found out that this was not true). Apparently something had broken or fallen and he hadn't seen the trains since then. :) This same guy also told us that we can just cross the border without the immigration procedures, but we really wanted our exit and entry stamps to avoid future problems.



Freezing at the border at 6 am looking like homeless people

 We finally crossed the border to Villazon at 7.30 am. From there (still freezing our asses off) we took the first ride we saw to Tupiza. Our ride was a local family's minivan and we drove the three hour journey to Tupiza with the mum sitting in the front seat, the son driving and the grandmum sitting behind us in the backseat. The roads were incredibly interesting and bumpy, we drove on sand, rocks, asphalt and occasionally in the ditch. The grandmum in the backseat was really willing to chat with us and beacause of our mediocre spanish skills she asked us what languages we speak. When we told her that we speak four languages she just concluded that she doesn't speak finnish or swedish :) When Lili told the old lady that Katja doesn't speak spanish she just blurted "Oh  but she still understands". This was not the first time this happened, in Buenos Aires a man in a park assumed the same thing after our small talk with him.

We are now in Peru but we will post more stories about Bolivia in the near future :)

I LOVE YOU!

Dessa ord har vi blivit valdigt bekanta med har i Buenos Aires. Varenda en dag har nagon julistanut sin karlek for oss. :)

Vi har spenderat 8 dagar har i Buenos Aires. Maten har kan vi inte beromma, fastan Lili ocksa at en Argentinsk biff! I detta land kanner de inte till kryddor inte ens svartpeppar (!) sa i princip smakar maten inget, om man inte gor som argentinare och haller en deci med salt pa det. :)  Annors tycker vi om staden med dens olika neighbourhoods. Det har skulle vara en bra shoppingstad om man kan shoppa, vi har gatt runt och kidutta oss sjalva med allt vad vi inte kan kopa med oss har. I detta land har vi ocksa blivit battre forstadda, till och med Katja borjar beharska spanskan snart :) 

                                                                       

                                                                                                               Evitas grav

 

Recoleta gravgard

                                                                     Casa Rosada

Vi har inte tyckt att detta ar en farlig stad, med da vi skulle besokade kanda fargranna husen i La Boca blev vi stoppade av polisen i en korsning da vi stod och tittade pa kartan. De varnade oss om att vi inte kan ga till vanster eftersom det ar sa farliga omraden dar. Samtidigt visade de oss vagen till fargranna husen och nastan insisterade att skjutsa oss dit. I detta skede blev vi dock lite misstankta eftersom polisen kan vara valdigt korrupterad har, och bestamda oss for att anda ga. Omradet som polisen varnade oss om hade dock en Argentinare ocksa varnat oss om, det ar ett omrade med tomma hus som fattiga Peruaner ockuperar.

 

La Boca

 Vi har gjort tva daytrips harifran, en till Colonia del Sacramento i Uruguay och en till Tigre. Bada ar valdigt sma sota stader, och vi njot av solskenet i bada staderna. Men om det inte skulle ha varit bra vader skulle de ha varit ganska sa trakiga stallen.  Colonia paminde oss mycket om Sveaborg, den ar ocksa Unescos world heritage site. 

 

Lili i Tigre

Idag flyger vi till Jujuy, som ar i norra Argentina. darifran tar vi oss till Bolivien. vi har hort valdigt intressanta saker om Bolivien, en gammal gubbe som vi traffade i parken sa att Bolivien ar farlig, andra har sagt att man inte kan organisera nagot fore man ar dar och priserna bestams enligt naamakerroin. Engelska talas inte alls. Da vi bokade vart hostell i La Paz, fick vi ett mail med instruktioner till hostellet fran bussstationen. I samma mail skrev de att om taxichaufforen sager att hostellet ar fullt, eller brunnit ner, sa ljuger han. :) vi vantar valdigt ivrigt pa att se hurdant Bolivien pa riktigt ar och att hur mycket de tanker huija oss dar.

 Lilis fodelsedagskaka (en kakbit skulle ha rackt till 4 manskor :) )