Tupiza, Bolivia
Introduction to Bolivia
May 27, 2008
Some will win
Some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
- Journey
When the bus from Paraguay dropped me off in Villamontes I found my way to what they consider to be the bus terminal and quickly found out that there were no buses to Tupiza as my guidebook had indicated. First, I would have to go to Tarija and from there I could get a bus to Tupiza, and from there I could do a four-day tour of southwest Bolivia to Uyuni. Unfortunately, there were no buses during the day to Tarija and I had to wait around all day in Villamontes until almost 7pm for a bus to take the ten hour trip.
With the whole day to spend in Villamontes I began wandering around the town and found a museum about the Chaco war with lots of random artifacts from the battles such as old guns and knives, maps of the battle plans, even old vehicles riddled with bullet holes. There was also an old church that was closed right nearby. Walking back through town I found a huge market going on with lots of little street stalls and fruit and vegetables. I sat down at one that looked good and had some chicken and rice for four bolivianos and then found a woman grilling sausage on the street and had a sausage sandwich that was quite good. For my bus ride I also bought some homemade cheese and some bread and tomatoes all for about one dollar. There wasn't anything else to do in the town so I mostly sat around and waited until it was time to have a little dinner before the ten hour bus ride.
When I finally loaded my stuff onto the bus and got on I found that it was probably the worst bus that I had been on for that long of a distance. The seats were so small and closely grouped together that I had very little legroom. It was also a journey on an entirely unpaved dirt road so it was fairly bumpy. After I managed to doze off for a little bit and let my guard down the woman in front of me took advantage of the opportunity and reclined her seat so that I really had no room. The bus stopped for dinner at around 9pm and I got to have some empanadas that a woman was rolling out on a table and then directly handing them to the man who was frying them in a pot of oil heating over a sawed in half 55 gallon drum with a wood fire burning inside. They were pretty tasty but definitely rustic.
A short while later we were right back on the bus and I attempted to get some sleep; I managed to doze off for a bit, twisting and turning every so often to stretch out as best I could. At some point I woke up in the middle of the night to get some water from my bag, which was resting on the floor, and found that the floor was somewhat damp. I didn't think anything of it and went right back to sleep. I woke up again a few hours later in the now hot and humid bus, probably at around 2:30am to find that the floor was completely covered in freezing cold water and the entire outside of my bag and the Paraguayan newspaper that was in the bottom were soaked with water and there was a slightly salty and fishy smell in the air. I checked under my seat to find a huge black garbage bag filled with frozen or now defrosting fish. I suppose it was my fault for putting my bag on the floor, as I always do, and I should have assumed that someone would be transporting a giant bag of frozen fish inside the bus.
We arrived in Tarija at the lovely hour of 4am and after wandering around what passes for their bus station I found someone to ask about buses to Tupiza, since all the offices were closed. Luckily for me there were only night buses to Tupiza, even though it is only 8 hours away. I didn't really want to stay in Tarija so the only decent option was to get a hotel room for 8 hours or so, get some sleep, and then wander around the town. I did just that and found the town to be rather nice, with a good little market where I had a great lunch of beef milanesa, rice, and mashed potatoes for 7 bolivianos. It was Sunday so most everything was closed but there was some kind of fair going on with some rides and games by the river that had attracted a crowd of people, although the rides looked to be poorly maintained and of a dubious safety standard. There were also extensive playgrounds, basketball courts, and dirt soccer fields where all the kids were playing. I had some dinner and got back to the bus terminal in time for my 8pm bus to Tupiza.
This bus wasn't quite as bad as the last one, but unfortunately it was my third consecutive overnight bus so I was pretty tired. We stopped at some remote little mountain town for dinner at around 9pm and everyone immediately got off to go to the bathroom, most of the older women walked about thirty feet from the bus and squatted right down in the dirt parking lot while the men went up against the wall right nearby. I managed to sleep on the bus a bit before we finally arrived at about 4am to some frigid temperatures as the trip consisted of an altitude gain of 3,000 feet, from an elevation of 6,000 to 9,000 feet. I wandered the few deserted streets of the town looking for somewhere to stay and finally found the hotel that I was looking for. I rang the bell and the guy answered and told me that unless I wanted to pay for another night I had to wait until 6am to get a room. He said that I could sleep on the couch in the lobby for the remaining hour and a half, which was a pain but I was pretty tired and didn't want to go back out in the cold to look for another hotel. This seemed like an absurd policy and perhaps the only hotel with a check-in time of 6am that I had ever encountered but at this point I was too tired to argue.
After some much needed rest I spent the day walking around Tupiza and had another good meal at the market there. I talked to two different tour operators about the four-day trip to Uyuni and found that the prices were the same so I decided to go with the one that already had four people for the trip leaving on Wednesday. That left me another whole day to do some hiking around Tupiza. I decided to hike up to Cerro Elefante, a mountain that is supposed to resemble an elephant, although that takes a significant amount of imagination. The beginning of the trail was well marked but after that it deteriorated and I ended up following an animal trail, likely a trail made by some of the native medium sized cat species, that took me around the backside of the mountain and forced me to follow some dry river beds and then scale a rocky hillside to reach the top of the hill. When I finally got to the top of the hill I found that I was not on top of the hill I expected but the slightly lower adjacent peak. Even now, I have no idea where the actual trail went but I thought that I saw part of it zigzagging up the slope. I was satisfied with the views from the top of the red rock cliffs bordering the one side of the town and the higher and various colored mountains on the far side; it was excellent desert scenery complete with cactuses of all different sorts.
When I got back to town I decided that it was about time that I actually looked into changing my return flight home as it was scheduled for the end of June from Trinidad and Tobago, not exactly a realistic amount of distance to cover in one month. I found the one computer in town that had Skype and called British Airways to change the date of the ticket, since it was supposed to be free of charge to do so. After some extensive time on hold the woman informed that all flights out of Trinidad, meaning the one that they have per day to Miami, were completely booked for the months of July and August. So I asked her to check availability out of Caracas; no luck. Maracaibo; nothing either. Then I told her that I was traveling around South America and needed to fly back from somewhere in the northern part of South America at the end of July or in August, so if they had anything from Guyana, French Guyana, Suriname, Colombia, or Ecuador that would be fine. After another fifteen minutes on hold she managed to find a flight out of Bogota in the beginning of August. There were some problems with the taxes and I was put on hold again. At this point it had been a thirty-minute phone call and the Internet place was filling with kids playing video games after school and connection was slowing down considerably. When she finally came back on line saying it would be a $70 change fee and $30 extra in taxes and asked how I wanted to pay, Skype dropped the call. I tried to call back but the Internet was too slow. By the time I got to a landline, since I didn't want to lose the flight, the office was closed. The next morning, before my tour to Uyuni left at 9am, I managed to scramble around and find an open and working phone that actually connected in order to finish the transaction, albeit at a cost of about 60 cents a minute. The British Airways agent had nicely put the airfare on hold after we were disconnected so it was much simpler this time around. And with that, the end of my trip was in sight, although there was still plenty of distance to travel and many things to see, first and foremost the Salar de Uyuni and the landscapes of southwest of Bolivia.