Sucre: The White City, The Silver City

After saying goodbye to the Websters, I hopped on a bus to La Paz (again). It was a quick bus ride back and I found a bus leaving for Sucre that gave me just enough time to dash down and pick up some nachos and a margarita from an awesome Mexican place Ellen and I found on our first visit to the city.

All the colonial architecture

The highest navigable lake in the world

The center of La Paz is situated in a valley, and the top of the valley is called El Alto, it's the part that has been expanding quickly in the last few years and in general is much lower income. As we were leaving La Paz, our driving spent a ton of time telling us about a famous architect who built lots of buildings in El Alto. We were on our way to a small town on Lake Titicaca. Bolivia and Peru share Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake.

Crashing the Webster's Bolivian Adventure

After a quite stuffy, hot, sweaty night bus we arrived in La Paz. At about 4am. Without a hostel reservation or any interest in walking around in the cold with our packs. Solution? Carefully select a bench in the bus station, put on all your clothes and fall asleep. Surprisingly, we slept until around 730am, when the bus terminal was finally buzzing with people. Trying to make our appearance as normal as possible (not much you can do when you haven't showered in 4 days, then took a bus and slept on a bench), we grabbed our stuff and walked down to the hotel we were meeting Ellen's dad at. He was arriving super early the next morning, but he decided to include the night before in the reservation. And thankfully they allowed us to check in several hours early. I thought they might turn away these two scraggly smelly backpackers that turned up, but they were super nice!

The biggest salt flats in the world!

The south of Bolivia is most known for the salt flats near Uyuni. They get less than 300mm of water per year now, but over a milennia ago, the depression between mountain ranges was Lake Tunupa. After a long series of drying and flooding, alternate layers of clay and salt have been deposited in an area up to 12,500 sq km. The salt flats are slowly expanding as more salt and clay are deposited by the rivers coming down from the mountan ranges around it. Drilling reveals at least 120m of salt and clay, with suggestions that there were 11 major flood/drying cycles, and its thought that the salt could go down as far as 500m.

Even more flamingos!

At this point, our exact itinerary for the four days blends together in my mind, so I can't guarantee that these pictures are in the proper order. Looking back, I still can't believe that places like this exist. Such amazing mixes of colors and patterns.

We saw a few groups of bikers biking on incredibly tough 'roads' in the middle of the day at altitude. Wow.

Volcanoes, salt and flamingos Bolivian style

Instead of starting our tour in Uyuni and ending in Uyuni, we started our tour in Tupiza with La Torre Tours. Our group consisted of our guide, Vicente, cook, Augustina, and a lovely couple, Alex and Sas, from Switzerland/Austria. They were multi-lingual and would rotate the language they were talking in every couple sentences. So cool. So jealous. We loaded up our land cruiser around 8am, and we were off!

One of our first views climbing away from Tupiza