Crossing in to Argentina

Borders are peculiar things, a mix of the same two wolds on both sides but within the span of a bridge everything is noticeably different. The currency is usually the first thing one notices, the numbers in store windows don’t make sense. The brands change, everything you knew about what was the best [...]

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Southwest Bolivia, featuring the Salar de Uyuni

Our last stop in Bolivia was perhaps the most tourist of all: the Uyuni Salt Flats. Anyone who has seen a photo of salt flats has to be struck by their beauty: they create a bizarre and captivating landscape. The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world. You [...]

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Me? I’m taking the train.

Traveling southern Bolivia can be tough, roads are often poorly maintained and regularly impassible due to flooding rains. So heading to Tupiza afforded us another train ride, and an overnighter at that. Rolling out of Oruro the route quickly became stunning as the dry ground around us dropped away and the tracks headed [...]

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Torotoro: small town festivities and dinosaurs

The city of Torotoro is about five hours outside of Cochabamba. Other than Jeep trails, there is pretty much only one way in and one way out, so we were finally in the Bolivian campo. Normally the town is fairly sleepy, and during wet season often cut off from Cochabamba. Mostly they [...]

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Cochabamba

Cochabamba was a nice surprise. We hadn’t planned on staying there long – the reason for our visit was that it is the jumping off town for Torotoro National Park – but we ended up staying almost a week. A group of Couch Surfers were kind enough to open their apartment to us. [...]

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Isla del Sol

Our second adventure in Bolivia was a trip up to Laguna Titicaca and Isla del Sol. Some say Titicaca is the world’s highest navigable lake, others say it’s not…all I know is that it’s huge and beautiful. Isla del Sol is referred to as the birthplace of the Inca Empire because the first [...]

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Road of DEATH

Once in Bolivia, our to-do list was pretty brief but included a lot of good stops. If we wanted to get to Patagonia by December, we had only about two months to explore Bolivia.
First on our list was a La Paz institution: “The World’s Most Dangerous Road”. We heard about this ride and [...]

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La Paz

La Paz is a curious city.  Coming up on it, you wouldn’t even know it is there.  You’re driving across the altiplano (‘high plane’ – seriously high, seriously flat) and urban sprawl starts to take over.  It becomes denser and denser as it becomes El Alto – technically a different city but now connected to [...]

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Into Bolivia

“Today will be the furthest south we have ever been in our lives.”  That was to be the motto of our trip through Bolivia (and indeed Argentina), but first we had to get there.
The trip started out innocently enough: night bus from Cusco to La Paz, Bolivia.  We were exctited to finally be leaving Peru.  [...]

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Country No 3!

Well, it´s been almost a year and a half here in South America and we have finally entered our third country!  We got into La Paz, Bolivia a few days ago and have been hanging out, taking care of some business and dealing with a bit of a turned stomach.
I know I am extremely behind [...]

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