Still Smiling!

Just a short message to you all saying that silence can be good thing.

We are right now in Buenos Aires, and what a great place to be!
We are enjoying the modern city life, the great food and wine, and the wonderful spring climate...30 degrees.

The plan is to leave for The Iguazu Waterfall this weekend. Next week we will fly to El Cafayete. Main reason: The Moreno Glaicer and The Chaltén.

We have decided to get the best out of the last couple of weeks of vacation, meaning we will spend less time in front of the pc.... That means that this will be the last message on the blog until we are back in dk.

It looks like we will arrive in dk the 14. th of December.

We are looking forward to see you all again!
The best to all of you.

Hugs and Kisses
Henrik and Barbara

P.S. As we will spend less time at the Internet cafés - we will probably get sloppy answering any emails from you guys until we are back in dk.

Sucre - in between dinos and weavers

Patience.
Originally uploaded by Henrik & Barbara.

Red is for the blood shed from the many heroes that fought for the Bolivian independence. Yellow is for the country’s richness in minerals. Green is for the nature.
As Sucre is the official capital in Bolivia it makes sense that this was the place where we figured out why the Bolivian flag is bearing its colours.

We figured it out, wandering around the Casa Libertad, a colonial building dedicated to Bolivia’s struggle for independence and where until today – the government constitutes every year.
The place ooze with details from the Bolivian history, from antique maps showing the borders of Bolivia as they used to be (with coastline!), blood stained flags from the battlefields, the many wander sticks of the different presidents, ashes of the most famous female warrior, weapons, a copy of the independence contract and portraits of all the 66 different presidents that Bolivia have had in their relatively short period of democracy – a fact that actually have given Bolivia a place in the Guinness book of records: The country with the greatest amount of presidents in shortest time! Nr. 66, Evo Morales is the first indigenous president ever, making him a quite special finale so far. Other interesting president facts, was that Bolivia’s first president was from Venezuala, and that Bolivia for a short period had a female president. Women in Bolivia did have courage! One of the most spectacular Bolivian warriors was a woman. She participated in more than 20 important battles.
A good friend of ours told the story of many women, old people and children that defended the Cochabamba region, whilst their men had been called out to fight battles further away. The women did not just sit with their hands in their laps.

Here we also discovered why all the Indians are wearing knee short wide skirts: Fashion! The Spanish queen used to wear it during the colonization and it sticks until this day.

The region around Sucre is famous for its weavings. ASUR (a local NGO) have since the mid 80íes successfully been working with the local communities with the aim to preserve the local tradition of weaving. They have established a combination of a museum, work shop and shop. It’s an adorable place where we got a good understanding of the work and the art. The level of detail is stunning and we ended up buying a piece of their weaving for the wall - a genuine piece of art.

Sucre “The white city of South America” was an interesting experience, - also from an architectonical point of view: The centre of the city only consists of white buildings, and local law requires a yearly cleaning of the buildings to keep them white.

We also went to the Carl Orko. A huge area full of dinosaurs! Well…the dinosaurs are full sized plastic sculptures – but never the less, with a good imagination you could easily picture them alive…. Well… maybe we have seen Jurassic park too many times.
Carl Orko is the world’s biggest known collection of dinosaur footprints. Within an area of 1.5 km x 150m, more than 5000 prints from at least 150 different dinosaurs can be seen.
Unfortunately, we were not allowed to come really close to the foot prints – but standing 100 meters from the huge wall with rows of giant million year old footprints can be a pretty amazing view anyway!
Until this day; the owners continue to discover new foot prints. Last month they found 600 “new” foot prints.

After Sucre we went on to Santa Cruz.

Potosí - “The highest city in the World”.

A view to Cerro Rico through the arc of La Torre de la Compañia
Originally uploaded by Henrik & Barbara.

At 4100 meters above sea level, that is what they call Potosí here in Bolivia. Maybe there is a small town in Tibet that can compete with this honour, but it is certainly not a city of the size as Potosí.

So, why build a huge city in 4100 meters where nothing can grow and where you won’t find a single tree near the city, meaning that almost everything has to be transported from remote locations? - The answer is silver!
Potosí was one of the richest cities in the world when the silver mining was at its peak, with more than 6000 active mines. The mines are still active today, but the production is reduced to almost nothing compared to the past. The history of the mining is brutal. An estimate of 8 million people has died in the mines because of the poor working conditions. The working conditions today haven’t changed much and counts children and woman in the staff as well.

Potosí is an interesting city, which shows evidence of the rich colonial era with the Royal Mint and the many churches.
The Royal Mint used to be the biggest of its kind in South America and it is a huge building (7500 square meters) that now contains an impressive museum with colonial and indigenous religious paintings, besides the equipment used to melt the silver and produce the coins.
The indigenous paintings are interesting because they combine the catholic symbolism and the original indigenous symbols, as the sun, moon, stars and Mother Earth ‘Pacha Mama’ together with the catholic virgin. The Spaniards chose to accept this combination – a small price for them to convert the indigenous people to Christianity.

The guidebooks describes Potosí as a city in sorrow, because of the cruel history. But instead of finding a mourning city, we found a very lively city with young happy and energetic people all over the centre of the city. An energy that were very surprising, maybe because of the expectations we had. We loved walking down the streets, surrounded by this positive energy.

Another kind of energy that surprised us, was when we went into a restaurant which was described as an upmarket French-Bolivian restaurant. Apparently the restaurant changes character to a Peña at Saturdays afternoons. A Peña is a kind of folk music bar, and in this case it meant a place-where-you-get-totally-drunk-until-you-fall-asleep-place…We enjoyed the local live pan-music and ate in a maybe-we-don’t-belong-here-speed, and left the locals (all male) with their Singani and beers alone…

From Potosí, we continued east and down towards the official capital ‘Sucre’.

Bus experience

Hundreds of kilometers and hours away from everything.
Originally uploaded by Henrik & Barbara.

The old grasshopper was ready to consume us. That was the thought going through our minds, when we found our bus at the station in Uyuni: A small (20 seat) green and yellow thing with curly antennas looking like feelers and red lights making it out for the eyes…

We were heading for Potosi and 6 hours suddenly felt like a long ride as we squeezed into the out-of-order-almost-and-therefore-almost-horizontal-leaned seats leaving absolutely no room for our European legs. The real charm was the fact that the whole trip is on dirt road!

The driver was not in a hurry. He took his time stopping whenever a local was standing in the side of the road asking for a ride. Soon the aisle was crowded with people sitting on the floor.
The road too was crowded – with llamas...in huge flocks they were scattered around near the small water pools we passed on the way. They couldn’t really bother less about the bus, and a big hunk from the driver was necessary to keep us going.
Despite the water pools, the landscape seemed hostile and ungrateful. Not much vegetation and we wondered were all the Bolivians are living, not passing any houses for ages.

Our real favourite moment though is bound to be when the bus broke down… or to put it more precisely: the crank shaft fell of. The drivers went out to take a look, with all the passengers still locked in. After ten minutes, the driver locked us out and we knew this could take a while…
Impressed by the drivers mechanical skills we sat down and watched the show, in the middle of nowhere with the sun burning. It was first when they started to use a hammer, Henrik got worried, but actually that was when they succeeded in fitting the shaft back again.

The rest of the trip went smoothly and we ended up being only 1,5 hours late...

The colours of Bolivia

The colours of the Bolivian highland
Originally uploaded by Henrik & Barbara.

(Continued from day 3)

5 o’clock in the morning we got up, to see the sun rise at the geysers named ‘Sol de Mañana’. Without knowing what to expect, we were quite surprised that we arrived at a landscape equal to Mars (again!). This time it was even more unearthly
than at the volcano Tunupa, with numerous geysers shooting high-pressure jet of steam out from the earth, surrounded by countless boiling pools of mud and sulphur in several colours intensified by the beauty of the sun rise. The only downside was the intense smell of rotten eggs, caused by the sulphur coming from the underground… :-)

Continuing south towards the Chilean border in almost 5000 meters above sea level we passed a desert landscape with colourful volcanoes and some spectacular rock formations half covered in volcano dust called the “Dali rocks” inspired by one of Salvador Dali’s paintings.

The last scheduled stop before the Chilean border was at the volcano Licancabur and Laguna Verde (The green lake). This volcano marks the border between Chile and Bolivia, and has been used as playground for NASA’s Mars-vehicles… (This was our last meeting with Mars on the trip).
At the foot of the volcano lays the green lake, which has a deep green colour from the algae in the water.
At the Chilean border we parted with the Swede, without tears…because it left more space in the jeep for our 390 km. journey back to Uyuni - on dirt road.

Having expected just a long boring ride back to Uyuni, we were positively surprised by the encounter of a Bolivian ostrich the ‘Ñandú’ who must have inspired the Road Runner cartoon, from the dust stirred up behind it as it galloped away from the car “BEEP, BEEP!”
We also encountered the Bolivian hare ‘Vizcacha’ jumping acrobatically in another bunch of gigantic lava rocks, where only the imagination could set limits for the variety of animals and figures that the rocks formed. We saw both a lion eating its prey and a huge pelican guarding the place…besides the livelier vizcacha.

The driver thought we had time for another extra, so he squeezed in a stop at the deep ‘Cañon de Cascadas’ ( Canyon of the waterfalls). It looked most of all like one of Gaudis creations combined with the imagination of Mother Nature with the twisting and sparkling river in the bottom of the canyon.

The last (unscheduled) stop was in San Cristobàl which is a 5 year old indigenous village which has been constructed by a mining company that forced all the inhabitants to move from their original town at the newly discovered mining site. It seems quite brutal to force a whole community to move from the home, but after 5 years the mining company and the authorities are still doing a lot to help the locals by improving the infrastructure and by promoting tourism in the area, so maybe it will work out for the locals benefit.

Arriving back in Uyuni tired, after no good sleep in four days dirty, after four days with only one shower and loads of dusty dirt roads, we had the feeling that Bolivia must be the place on earth that demonstrates the most spectacular nature within such a small area. Definitely one of our best experiences so far here in South America.

And a nice side effect: We learned that we actually know Spanish by now. After having acted as Spanish-English interpreters for four days, we feel confident in the language… Sometimes it is under those circumstances that you become conscious of you limits and abilities.

(The end.)

Thousands of Flamingos

Is the white one "the black sheep" of the family?
Originally uploaded by Henrik & Barbara.

(Continued from day 2)

The half day drive to the Reserva Eduardo Avaroa took us through some wide mountainous landscapes. First stop was at an area covered with large-scale volcanic rock formations. The formations had many different shapes and only the imagination can limit the strange things you see in the rocks. We played around and ended with Barbara in a huge snake’s mouth! The playground also served as a great lookout point to the vaguely smoking Volcano Ollague which is the only active volcano in Bolivia (5865 m. high).

The bumpy ride continued on to a couple of the brackish lakes in the region: Laguna Cañapa and later Laguna Heidona. Both are located surrounded by reddish mountains and have a rich flamingo-life.
Sitting down at the edge of the lakes, embraced by the mountains and the silence you slowly absorb the beautiful look of thousands of flamingos looking for a snack in the blue-white still water. Magic for sure.

Three of the worlds five different kind of flamingos live here: Chilense, Andino and James. How you see which one is which, is by the colour of their tail, their legs and their beaks. From a distance it can be really difficult though to differ one from another.

The volcanoes surely left a lot of foot prints in this region and we made another stop to explore some of them. Again this was big dimension volcanic rocks. This time the rocks were all aligned with a special plant clinched on the sides of them. The plant is a kind of moss, but very hard. As a replacement to ordinary wood, this plant used to be dried and used as fuel for the trains etc. The plant grows several meters tall and gets hundreds years old. The bright green colour made a grand contrast to the reddish volcanic rocks.

In 4700 meters above sea level the landscape turned into a desert. Few yellowish plants scattered around, the reddish dirt, the almost purple mountains were stretched to all sides and once in a while a small flock of vicuñas crossed the road.

Time for the second biggest landmark on the trip: Arbol de Piedra. (The salt lake is bound to be the first). Arbol de Piedra meaning Stone Tree is an eight meter tall rock which balances on a narrow stem. The rock has for many years been carved by the sand and the wind which have ended up given it a form like an abstract Dali-tree. Beautiful – in a weird way.

Last stop that day was Laguna Colorada located at 4000 m. Colorada means colorful and so it was! Most bizarre was the almost blood red water, due to a high level of beta-carotene. Starring out on the blood red water made you realize that everything is possible! Nothing should be assumed.

Laguna Colorada is also the worlds biggest single nesting site for flamingos, meaning that up to 70.000 flamingos are in the lake at one time during the nesting season! Right now it is not the nesting season though, so we only counted around 30-40.000 flamingos nip in the water, flying in small groups, crossing beaks (kiss?) and enjoying the sun.
The white ones we saw, was the babies... Not fed up on beta-carotene yet.

The Laguna Colorada is near the official entrance to the Reserva Eduardo Avaroa where we were going to spend our last day. The sun was going down though so we stopped for the night in a chilled dorm.

(To be continued.)