There are so many beautiful plants around Coroico. It's a major coffee and coca growing area and our cabana is surrounded by coffee plants. There are also loads of really beautiful (and really noisy) birds. Hopefully we'll manage some bird photos next time.


I really can't get over the fact that these flowers grow wild.

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So we've been hemming and hawing, trying to figure out what we were going to do for one of our last weeks in South America. We'd been thinking it would be nice to find a beach somewhere and just chill out for a week of true vacation. The problem is: Bolivia is landlocked, and other than that it's the perfect country. So we were thinking maybe Northern Chile (but we heard the water was cold and the beaches weren't that great) or maybe Northern Peru (a really long ways away from everything else that we're doing). In the meantime we figured we'd head to a little village just outside of La Paz that some new friends had recommended, Coroico.

Amazing.

Coroico sort of looks like Juneau, with the hug lush mountains, except that it's where the Alti Plano meets the Amazon basin, so it's totally tropical and gorgeous, but still sort of cool and misty. I.e., it's paradise. We're back in La Paz at the moment, but only because we left our backpacks here. We've decided to head back to Coroico in two days and stay for another five. We've got a little Cabana reserved. It's on the side of a mountain with a porch, firepit, full bathroom, and a guitar. Just in the two days that we were there we took loads of photos around our Cabana and on the path up to it.




This is a foggy afternoon's view from our mountain. Hopefully we'll get some good sunny photos next week.

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The Salaar



The salaar and our jeep at sunrise.

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The Lakes
We saw tons of amazing lakes, bright green lakes of magnesium and arsenic with arsenic foam, red lakes full of flamingos and algae, white lakes, green lakes, lakes of all different colors. Every one of them was huge and beautiful and really difficult to photograph. So here`s a small smattering of photos of stuff in the lake areas.


Taking a break from the dusty road in some lovely hot springs.

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So it`s taken us a bit to get everything together to post some photos of our Salaar de Uyuni trip. I would say that for both of us it was one of the most unreal experiences ever. Like a road trip on the moon. We did a four day tour in a Land Cruiser, Andrew, two young British guys, our driver guide Marco, our cook Josephina, and I. We drove through landscape after landscape of incredible rock formations, deserts, lakes of minerals, llamas, birds, tiny villages, ghost colonial towns and so on.

We took loads of photos. This place is worth loads of photos, so I`m posting a bunch.

The Desert


Llamas snacking on the veg just before we enter the desert proper.

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We´ve begun to travel!

Our first stop is Potosí, only a two and a half hour taxi ride away from Sucre but more than 1,000 meters higher. We´re currently at 4,070 meters (13,350 feet). Which is almost three times as high as anywhere either Andrew or I had ever been before Bolivia.

Potosí is old, and it feels old. The streets are super narrow, cobblestoned, with barely a person wide strip of sidewalk on either side. Many of the buildings are somewhat rundown Spanish colonial places with elaborate door mouldings and beautiful details.

The main feature of Potosí is the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) which dominates the skyline, the history, and seamingly the thoughts of Potosí. Cerro Rico is a huge old silver mine. The saying goes that the Spanish took enough silver out of Cerro Rico to build a bridge from Potosí to Spain, and killed enough people in the proccess to build a bridge from Bolivia to Spain and back. It is still in operation today with around 15,000 people working in the co-operative mines in some of the most awful (famously so) working conditions in the world. Before coming to Potosí we watched a German documentary called The Devil´s Miner about two boys, aged 14 and 10, who work in the mines. It´s a devastating story, and being in this city, you are constantly reminded of the fact that thousands of people here live a life that we, as middle class Americans, can not even come close to comprehending.



The city leading up to Cerro Rico.

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In the spirit of trying to post more regularly, here are some last photos from Sucre:


Our last meeting with Mariola. Mariola is from Spain and is living with her boyfriend in Sucre for another month. We´ve been meeting with her a couple times every week to practice our Spanish and her English. Really lovely people.

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We have so many more photos than this, and now that I´m posting, I keep kicking myself for not uploading more. We`ll try to keep adding more of everything.


One tiny section of the market. We´ve purchased veggies from both these ladies.


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Sucre is pretty hilly, but it always pays off to climb up high, if only to get a better view of the sky. For some reason the sky is always amazingly beautiful here.


A view from one of the best hills around. We live right out there on the edge of the city if you follow the first lamp post srait up.

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We´ve got more, and I´ll try to keep them coming regularly from now on.

To start with, the apartment:


This is our adorable kitchen. From right to left: our water source, our oven, our stove, and our fridge.




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