Beginning Bolivia

       Crossing the border into Bolivia, we felt the country greet us with a riotus, “WELCOME BACK TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD!” The streets were inundated with ice cream, peanut, and jugo de naranja carts pushed by colorfully dressed Quechua women in brown bowler hats and the competing shouts of minivan owners soliciting passengers to our night’s destination, Tupiza. Over the next 4 hours we took the ‘2 hour drive’ to Tupiza, bumping along on back roads next to a local doctor who shared his take on local customs, politics, and recent national change. Upon arrival, he escorted us to a seguro y económico hostel, positively cementing our nascent impressions of Bolivia.

       After a sound night’s sleep at 10,500 feet, we began our first full in-country day by putting down our camera lenses in order to defog our cultural ones. The morning involved a marginally successful attempt at jogging at altitude, which ended at the local school where we watched uniform-donned kids hop out of the back of truck beds to join the ranks of their friends crowding around the building gates. For lunch, we followed our noses to the community’s market, where our eyes widened at stalls filled with flowers, papayas, bananas, tubers, bags of popped corn/rice/wheat, goat cheese rounds, 50 lb bags of pasta, spices, llama meat, and the chatting—4 and a 1/2 foot tall—female proprietors. Upstairs we found women stirring bathtubs of simmering soups, sautéing pans of veggies, chopping chicken, serving tripe (recommended by our doctor friend), and piling plates with rice and quinoa. We eagerly joined the milling masses pointing to their chow of choice and happily settled at the group table next to indigenously dressed women and men in taking their hour (or 3 hour, as seems to be the custom) lunch break. Our evening bookended the day with a short walk up Jesus’ Heart—a nearby hill named for the promontory cross marking the summit—where we overlooked the adobe brick city as the sun set across the valley. It was a laidback city day, beginning our acclimatization to the unseemly elevation as well as the cultural norms of this new foreign territory. Other successes of the day included: getting our laundry done, calling home, and securing seats on a Land Cruiser for the 4-day tour of El Salar de Uyuni.

       By 7 the following morning, our backpacks were bungeed to the top of the vehicle and we were buckling our seatbelts (not literally) for the whirlwind excursion of a lifetime. With Ushin behind the wheel, our cocinera (cook) Cecilia beside him and 3 French students sitting next to us, we embarked upwards into the Bolivian alitplanos. The next 4 days were filled with daily 4-6 hour drives over winding, steep roads with dozens of stops in one outlandish environment after the next. In an effort to avoid thesaurus.com-ing the words ‘incredible,’ ‘awesome,’ and ‘unbelievable’ 2,000 times, I’m going to upload many of our INCREDIBLE, AWESOME, and UNBELIEVABLE pictures and include as explanatory and succinct captions as possible.

Las Sillares: the name comes from silla, or chair, because the 200 ft rock formations resemble seats. 

Llama action. We learned there are 4 llama-esque animals in South America: llamas, guanacos, vicuñas, and alpacas (of which we've seen all but alpacas). Llamas are the largest, they're domesticated and their coats range from dark brown to pure white. 

These guys are vicuñas. They're all wild, more slender than the llamas and guanacos, and are all this golden color.

Our cocinera, Cecilia, with her butt-length braids coming out of her bowler hat. Also, compare her height in the doorway compared to Megan.

This dead baby llama was found at our lunch stop along the road. Our guide, Ushin, strapped it to the top of our Land Cruiser and brought it here to our hostel. About a minute after I took this picture, Cecilia hoisted the llama over her shoulders and brought it to the hostel owner's dog. 

Night 1: Sunset view. Those mountains look hill-like, but they're about 15,000 ft tall.

These beautiful mossy grasslands follow the glacial creeks off the mountains.

Flamingos! 3 species live in these lakes: James, Chilean, and Andean. They get their pink color from microorganisms and minerals in the lakes. 

Looks like the side of a building, but this is actually natural layers of rock. 

Geysers! I wish pictures could capture the accompanying sulfuric smells, the blasting wind, and the warm steam the covered your body when you walked through the cloud. 

Bubbling geyser mud.

Arból de piedra. Created by volcanic rock and then eroded over millennia in the desert.

More flamingoes... they wade around in the lakes all day dragging their beaks through the mud.

Check out the mountain's reflection!

5 am sunrise on the salt flats. The flats used to be a saline lake that dried out. Now, the salt flats extend 100 meters into the earth alternating 10-30cm layers of salt bricks with layers of water. Here, a puddle of water covers the flats (left over from the rainy season) creating a perfect reflection of the horizon.

       Also, on the BIG NEWS front, I’m 20! Don’t worry, the decade change was celebrated in style with lasagna, chocolate, and a candled heart-shaped cake. Maybe more notable than the unexpected culinary delights were the Megan-inspired reflections of the significance of this new age-era. After contemplating the end of my teenage shenanigans, I came to the conclusion that being The Big 2-0 doesn’t delineate the beginning of life-altering influences and decisions, but instead inches forward over the line of me (and my fellow bi-genarians) taking the initiative to choose which influences we decide to embody. It comes back to the words that have been intimated to me since I was a 5-year old stepping on my mom’s toes, “Be conscientious.” So, keeping that in mind, we’ll continue onward into a new country with a revitalized mindset of awareness, conscious actions, and self-fulfilling our desired futures.