Tour of south Bolivia... the first day!

I'm going back in time to blog the last 5 days or so, as ive had no Internet connection since arriving in Bolivia, mainly because Ive spent the last 4 days in the middle of nowhere.

The boarder crossing to Bolivia went smoothly enough, even if it was a bit chaotic, and involves walking around 1km with the backpack from where the Argentine bus drops you off, to where the Bolivia bus leaves.

We spent 2 nights in Tupiza, mainly chosen because it is the nearest town to the Argentine border and you can take the 4 days tours of the salt flats from Tupiza. After relaxing on Thursday, we departed on Friday morning for our trip in a jeep for 4 days. 4 of us, our driver and our chef, both of whom were only Spanish speaking.

The roads in Bolivia aren't really roads, more just dirt tracks, and we very quickly got out of the town and onto a rather rough and bumpy mountain road. We were already at around 3000m in Tupiza and the schedule for the day was taking us to well over 4000m.

First photo stop after an nervous hour up the mountain.

The majority of the day was spent in the jeep and there were certainly a lot of driving. We stopped off at a couple of very remote villages for a lunch break and some more photos and around 6pm arrived at our accommodation. Our driver referred to it as a hotel, but id say this was something of an exaggeration.

Id describe the night in the hotel as similar to camping inside of four walls in a freezing cold desert. We were sleeping in a building, but one with no windows, heating or electricity after 9pm. We had been given fairly good sleeping bags as part of the tour, and we came dressed for cold temperatures, but that was still not sufficient to prepare us for the minus 10 degrees night in the desert. I was wearing roughly 3 jumpers, 2 pairs of leggings, 2 pairs of pyjamas and 4 pairs of socks, and was still freezing cold.

On the positive side, I didn't seem to suffer from the altitude much. There were signs of some light-headiness but generally seemed to be fine spending the night at 4200m.

Windy photo point

The highest point reached on the first day