So I was back in La Paz. Ready to move on to Uyuni to go see the Salt Lake and whatever else a 4 day jeep ride may hold in store. First I had to buy some things in Lap Paz though. Cheap to ship things home and the silver and clothes and hammock prices were really good. So I spent a whole day and about $200 buying cool things.
There are a lot of stores selling the same kind of things. Every now and then there’s a little store selling dried dead baby llamas, to put in the foundation of your house for good luck. Now and then a shoeshine guy wth a facemask will try to shine your sandals. Shopping was nice. Interspersed by som street food hamburgers from time to time.
On Friday I got around to mailing all this stuff back. 18 kilos in the standard mail package - cost 481 Bolivianos, about $55. Not bad. Then I dropped another $106 at DHL to send back my boots, the camera lens I bought in Cusco, and the silver that I bought in La Paz. Insured ‘cause it would suck losing the lens that I paid $200 and the Boots that I paid $220 for.
That evening I met up with Jochen and Christian, the Austrians I met in Coroico and got some mp3 cd’s from Jochen. He was oplaying some good music in Coroico and we had been talking about doing a swap for a while. SO I copied him 3 cd’s and myself 4 cd´s worth and met them at the hostel later.
I was a bit late getting to the hostel and J and C were already there, Marthe and IDa had bought some alcohol and they had all started a bit of drinking. People get loud when they drink so we got kicked out and went to a bar to do some cheap tequila shots… Ida didn’t participate. She was feeling sick, so she and Marthe went hoke while the boys and I headed to Bizarro, the club that had just re-opened a few weeks before.
Neat place, 2 dancefloors downstairs - one with strictly techno and the other with reggae/hiphop/soul/… next to the techno room there was a glass-encased chillout room with sets of closed-type studio headphones chained to the wall, playing cooled-out jazz to let you R-E-L-A-X. The river-rock floor was kind of nice too. Upstairs happened to be a nice jazz band playing. Reminded m a bit of Murphys. A bit. I’ve been away for a while. These guys were definitely not as hard working, they’d play a 30 min set and take a 30 minute break. Ugh. Good night though, we stayed until the place closed at about 4:30am.
The next day the girls were awake early and went out to the internet. I slept until 11 and got my things packed as I wanted to go to Uyuni. As it looked like the girls were not coming back (they still hadn’t mailed their La Paz purchases) I went out to burn my photos to a cd, get some food, and find out about getting to Uyuni. While I was eating Paul whom I met in Coroico walked in, he had just gotten back from Rurrenabaque and was headed to Uyuni on a 3:30 bus. It was 2:20. Wow, tranquilo day had just been transformed into hurry hurry hurry. I got it all taken care of though, went back to the hostel, the ladies still hadn’t gotten back - didn’t look like they’d leave that day. So I left a note, paid for the room and took a cab to the bus station where I got the seat next to Paul.
The bus ride was interrupted by a 2 hour break. Just sitting there in the dark. They’re really good at stopping the buses for whatever reason for 2,3,4 hours and not telling you what the hell is going on. You get used to it. Eventually they came around to collect more money from us as they’d have to take a detour to avoid some road blockades. Whatever. Just get me there. In the morning we arrived in Uyuni. After scraping the ice off the inside of the windows of the bus we were able to look upon this freezing town that was a base for exploring the Salar De Uyuni salt lake and the rest of the scenery of SW Bolivia.
Posted by volker at July 2, 2004 01:37 PM