leaving putre

After packing up we went out to dinner, then caught the ride we arranged to “Putre Alto”, the highway intersection where our bus is supposed to pick us up.

We arrive there around 8 pm and wait under a street lamp. The night before we were dropped off by the bus around 8:45, we figure things at customs should go faster today, so we show up early, in defiance of all the lessons we have learned about Bolivian time. After 5 minutes I am already bored of waiting and make a rock pile. (We have seen many rock piles, I still don’t know what they mean though)

In the distance, we can see the lights of trucks creeping down the mountain, coming from Chile. We can tell by the length and light placement whether there is a bus coming or not. We begin a discussion on truck length and wheel-count. How many wheels do trucks have? What exactly is an 18-wheeler? Are there 18-wheelers in Chile? Where do the wheels have to be and how many sets does it need to be an 18-wheeler? Do they have double or triple sets of tires? I begin counting the wheels on all the trucks going by (there was not a single 18-wheeler), there are a lot, they are all getting in their border-crossing before customs closes at 9:30 pm. Many of them flash their lights, meaning they would be willing to pick us up, so we are assured of hitchhiking possibilities. After an hour, we are starting to think that our bus was actually on time/early, and that we missed it. I have not yet given up hope, since everything in Bolivia was late, it’s safe to assume that our bus is late, not early. We begin debating the pros and cons of hitching.

At 9:15 we give up and agree to hitch on the first thing that stops and get as far as we can. We are freezing and tired. But! There’s a miracle! The next thing that comes is our bus! And it actually stops for us too.

Unfortunately, this is another one of those buses without heating, and there is only one blanket left, so we have to share it. It takes me hours to warm up.

Word of advice: never take a Bolivian overnight bus if you can help it. Other than that, Bolivia  is great.

more putre

Putre is located in the Lauca National Park, which according to my guidebook is a “don’t miss”, most spectacular national park in Chile, blah blah. We have one day.

At the tourist office they give us a tip for a 5 hour walk where we can see some ancient, pre-Incan cave paintings. It sounds interesting, but I am still a bit sick, my voice is still gone (I have been croaking for days) and not sure about the whole thing. We go anyway, figuring we can always turn around. She tells us it is easy to get lost as there are several forks in the road, and gives us an extremely poor black-and-white satellite map.

Of course, we get lost. At each fork in the path we are unsure…the map is no big help. We walk directly into a military training exercise and sort of stand in the middle of it, discussing which way to go. (There is a military base in Putre - you know, close to the Bolivian border and all).

The whole area is sandy, with a few bushes, and the military has driven all over in their jeeps, meaning it all looks like it could be a “road” like the one on our map.

We are asked to move because we are in the way of some pictures a military dude is taking. He keeps shouting numbers, and one group of soldiers is setting up a tent, but most of them don’t seem to be doing anything.

We ask one group if they have heard of the “Sendero de las Pinturas” (trail of the paintings), but they just look at each other and laugh. One in-command guy (I can tell that he must be an officer because he is nonchalantly yet authoritatively chewing on a piece of straw) has a look at our “map” and tells us where we are….much further than we thought. He says to go back to the big eucalyptus tree and behind it is the road we are looking for.

When we arrive at the eucalyptus tree, there is a road passing in front of it, and one behind it, so we take the one behind it, since that’s what he told us. However, we still have our doubts, and when we run into a lady on a horse she says we are going the wrong way. “Do you see that eucalyptus tree? Next to it is the path you want.”

We cut across fields of oregano (?!?!) instead of doubling back, and manage to intersect the correct path. At first the scenery continues in the same vein: boring, sandy, rocky, oregano... But then we walk right along a spectacular ravine, cross it, and continue along the other side on a very narrow path with great views and an excitingly dangerous drop-off.

We almost miss the paintings, even though they are on a gigantic rock. They have been vandalized by generations of idiots.

 

On our way back, we keep running into soldiers, they are everywhere. They shout things like “I love you” at us as soon as we get far away from them. Cowards. Back in Putre, we chill in the sun and knock off our clothes, causing a mini dust cloud…from the knees down I am the chalky color of the trail.

Putre fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#26.0

putre

Next stop: Putre

In the afternoon we took a bus from La Paz to Chile, to Putre. We had worked out our whole trip all the way to Iquique with a Bolivian bus company because they are so much cheaper than the Chilean ones. We had arranged to be dropped off in Putre, close to the border, then picked up from there the next day with the same bus.

We were supposed to arrive in Putre at 6 pm, but at that time we were still at the border. We spent 2 hours at Customs, due to some guy on our bus who had a suitcase full of porcelain. Also, once again the bus company had lied to us about having heating…

The bus driver dropped us off at the side of the highway around 9 pm. He said, “Putre’s down there” and drove off. OK, great. We were thinking, “what the hell?” There were no signs of civilization, it was dark, all we could see were one or two street lights in the distance, which we assumed to be Putre. No one had told us that the bus doesn’t actually stop IN Putre.

We began walking down the highway, although we had the impression that Putre was in the other direction. It was cold and we had no idea how far we would have to walk. Walking at this altitude (3500m), with a giant backpack, is not easy.

It looked like a long walk, we suspected that the road looped all around the valley and back to Putre, which is at the bottom. Later, we figured out that it is 6 or 7 kilometers. Luckily, I had my hand-powered flashlight along (thanks, Dale!) to ensure that we would be seen by drivers and not run over. Not that there were any drivers. Putre is in a National Park in the middle of nowhere and no cars were passing. At least the moon was very bright that night. Bright enough for us to see the snow-covered volcano in the distance and the deep gorge to our left.

We got a ride in a mini-van, the second car that passed. A rabbit ran into the headlights and our driver chased it for a while which sort of creeped me out. He asked where we need to go, which place we are staying at, and I told him. He dropped us off at a different place, saying it’s good. The room is over our budget, but when we see it, we take it anyway. After Bolivia, it’s very nice. Everything is brand new, the hotel must have just been built. We have our own bathroom and breakfast is included.

la paz

Next stop: La Paz

I really liked La Paz, but unfortunately, we only had two days there. And even that was cut

short as our bus from Copacabana was road-blocked for a couple hours due to protests by fishermen. There was a local festival with dancing and intricate costumes going on, so we checked that out. And on our bus there was a very funny Peruvian hippie with a crooked didgeridoo who kept the whole bus entertained.

The roadblock left us with one evening and a day in La Paz. We didn’t get to do much, we went out to dinner (I had tempura, yum). The next day we just wandered around a bit and did postcard and bus-supplies shopping. We also bought coca leaves to chew on. Chewing coca is not as exciting as it sounds: tasted like grass and filled my mouth with leaf bits, ugh. And the effect was not very noticeable, like that of drinking too much coffee. But I felt cool anyway. We tried to chew as much as possible before we had to dump our baggy at the Chilean border. (you can’t bring any organic products into Chile - Chile is sort of island-like due to the mountain chain, and super strict about avoiding bacteria and viruses and stuff.)

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, at almost 4000m, It is located in a valley surrounded by mountains, kind of like a giant bowl. The city has expanded to creep us the sides of the hills, from above it looks insane. I couldn’t get any decent pictures from the bus window so I've posted some I found online. We were going to go to a lookout point, but at the hostel they told us that is too dangerous to go there at 9 in the morning and we should forget it.

I imagine that La Paz is hellish in the summer.

There were tons of shoeshine boys and they all wear masks…no one really knows why, there are various theories;…to protect themselves from the social embarrassment of shining shoes, to protect themselves from the fumes, to protect themselves from being recognized by the cops…In any case, they are also camera-shy, so I only got fotos of them from farther away.

La Paz fotos are here: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#23.1

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This week there will be a post almost every day as I have already written them all. I am going to Santiago this week for a seminar with other experiment volunteers and have scheduled the posts to go online automatically.....cuz I'm so tech-savvy, ooh!