Salar de Uyuni, Potosi, y Sucre!

A lot has happened since I last posted. There hasn't been many wifi spots since I have been in Bolivia but now that I am in Sucre I should be able to post a little more often. I am staying in Sucre Bolivia studying Spanish right now so I probably won't post too often because I won't have many new pictures.

I am staying with a Bolivian family... the Grandmother's name is Martha, the Mother is Shirley, and there is a daughter named Maria. They are all incredibly nice and feed me really good food (and too much of it).

After La Paz I took a night bus for 11 hours or so to Uyuni and booked a tour with some random guy on the street for a tour of Salar de Uyuni (the biggest Salt Flat in the world).

Besides the really awful food, the freezing cold hostel with no insulation and no heat, waking up at 5am, inhaling dust for 10 hours because the cars vents were broken, and listening to the guide laugh at his own stupid jokes... AVI Tours was really awesome!!! Seriously though, the sights that I saw were unforgettable and it was all totally worth it.



There was a guy in our group that did freestyle walking (Parque?) that made for some really cool pictures:



We also tried to mess with perspective a bit but kinda failed. This is me standing on Dave's hand:



We walked around on Isla del Pescado which had some really cool rock formations and cacti that were over 1,000 years old.



We stayed in a hostel that was made completely of salt the first day. Pretty cool I thought.



We also got to hang out at a thermal pool on the second day. I lost my swimsuit and my towel sometime in La Paz or Cuzco so I didn't swim (it was soooo cold out) but I soaked my feet for awhile which felt awesome. All the water around this pool was almost completely frozen.



After Uyuni we took another night bus to Potosi and didn't get in until about 2:30am. We booked a tour of the Potosi mines the next morning. I am a little claustrophobic so I was a bit worried about it but it turned out to be really cool. We even set off dynamite inside the mine (even though we could barely hear it because we were so far away). We also set dynamite off outside which was a lot cooler because we got to see the explosion! :)

We went to the mines on a Saturday so there weren't hardly any miners... I don't know how this guy fit through some of the tunnels in the mine because I thought they were pretty tight and this guy is huge. He has been working in the mine since he was 10 years old (for 30 years). I found it interesting they smoke cigarettes in the mine because it is healthier to breath in the smoke than the toxins that are in the air (and obviously this guy is super healthy, no?).



Hard to get many pictures on the inside of the mine obviously...



Me being a tourist and pretending to mine...



After the mines we took a bus to Sucre and I have been here since. Sucre is a really cool city with a lot of colonial buildings... they call it "Ciudad Blanca" because pretty much all the buildings are... you guessed it! White!!

I haven't loaded the pics of Sucre onto my computer yet (and to be honest haven't taken many yet) but I will do that next time.

Thanks for commenting on my blog... I never know if people are reading/viewing or not (maybe there is somewhere that says the # of views??). I always like to know that I am not just wasting my time posting on this blog.

I have been really busy with school, activities after school (learned a little salsa last night... woot!), and hanging out with the host family and students from the school so I don't have much time to come online. Hopefully I can make a post about Sucre in a week or so.

Hope everyone is doing good! Keep in touch!