Uyuni

After getting shaken down by Bolivian immigration for an additional 50Bs (I love that the abbreviation for the Boliviano is 'Bs') beyond the 100 USD we already paid for our visas (which only Americans and Australians have to get, thanks to the Bush administration's delicate foreign policies), we made plans to leave Uyuni. Uyuni is really only a jumping-off point for gringos to see the salt flats.

Down here, everyone who's remotely white and not from SA is a gringo - this is not necessarily derogatory, BTW. Americans are called 'Yankees', which was a lot funnier in BsAs because it was prounced 'Shankees'. I digress.

Anyway, we wanted to get on to our next stop, the mountain mining town of Potosi. The only option that day was to take a night bus leaving at 7pm and arriving sometime between 1 and 2am. We signed up the French/Italian couple from the salt flats, Celia and Tancredi, to join us on the trip, and we arranged a hotel in Potosi so that we'd have somewhere to get in when we arrived.

We had the rest of the afternoon to bum around, and though there wasn't much to Uyuni, it was a neat afternoon for several reasons. First, for the first time on my trip in SA, I was confronted with a truly different place. Many Americans (I assume many because I was one of them, and I'm so incredibly worldy) don't know that Chile and Argentina are actually very developed - Santiago and Buenos Aires might as well have been European cities, and the rest of their respective countries actually had paved roads and electricity that worked around the clock. And many of the people in Chile and Argentina might as well have been from America or Italy or France, etc, etc. You couldn't tell just by looking at someone where they were from, and people often made the huge mistake of trying to talk to me in rapid castellano.

Not so in Bolivia. I stick out like a sore thumb here. The majority of the population in towns like Uyuni (and later Potosi and Sucre) seem to be of indiginous decent, and many people continue to wear traditional clothing.

Mark and I visited several of the markets, the most interesting of which, by far, was the food market. The highlight was seeing a woman taking off the top of a skinned cow head with a hacksaw. We asked to take her picture but she declined. I did get another picture of a skinned cow head though.

We had dinner at a fairly nice place. When I went in the bathroom I thought to myself that my entire idea of luxury had changed. Opulence is having toilet paper waiting for you, rather than you having to bring your own. Later that night I tried to use a public bathroom, and my entire idea of disgustingness was brought to a new level. Oh yeah, and the drunk guy in front of me waiting for this pristine porcelian convenience couldn't wait to go, so he just went while he was standing there in line.

While I'm telling you all these seemingly bad parts about Bolivia, I'll also add that the busride to Potosi was one of the worst rides yet. It was a smaller bus with no bathrooms and filled with people under wool blankets. It was cold, smelly, and there was a drunk guy hanging over Mark, offering me Puro, an almost 100% alcohol imbibe. He kept saying "Me gusta tu escribe" or something like that, which I translated to mean, "I like that you´re writing". I was writing in my journal. The night sky was beautiful though, more Milky Way, and amazing cliffs that luckily I couldn't see. I started apprciating riding in the dark so that I couldn´t see potentially terrifying road hazards until I realized that the bus driver had a harder time seeing them too...

All these bad things about Bolivia, but I don´t really think they´re bad. They´re new, and interesting, and make me a little uncomfortable. But why else do we go to new places?