Live from Mars; La Paz, Salar de Uyuni, Tupiza, Bolvia

    Bolivia; land of superlatives.  It is the highest, lowest, wettest, driest and poorest country on the continent.  Because of it's high concentration of indigenous people who still have a great reverance for the land, Bolivia is known as the Tibet of South America. (Although we all know that whenever a place is known as the something of something, its never the anything of anything.)  The Bolivian government, under the leadership of it's first indigenous president, has recently passed a law granting human rights to nature, among these being the right to live, to remain unpolluted and have thier DNA unmodified. It is the land where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had their last showdown and for the last two weeks it has been our home.

     Our bus ride from lake Titicaca to La Paz was sidetracked for about an hour when protesters blocked the main road into the town. We finally reached the edge of town as a gentle snow fall dusted the outlying neighboorhoods. This was a bit unsettling because we don't really have snow gear.  Fortunately, the snow went away as quick as it came.  We later learned that the city is known for the abundance of microclimates that it contains because of its greatly vaying altitudes.  As the bus crested a small rise we were given our first glimpse of La Paz.

Good Luck!

     Bolivia's capitol city is beautiful and bizarre. Built inside a deep canyon, the main drag runs down the center making the city very easy to navigate.  Buildings cling to the canyon walls like giant wasp nests giving a quite unsettling feeling that they all may slide down on you in a great avalanche of adobe, plaster and cerveza billboards.  We spent most of our time crawling around the labyrinth of tiny streets in the city's northern sector around the witch's market.  If you are in the market for a mummified llama fetus, this is the place to go. Locals bury them under new homes to bring good luck.

     We left La Paz on a night bus. The next morning, after the coldest, bumpiest bus ride of my life, we awoke in the small town of Uyuni at the edge of the world's largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni.  The town is a remnant from the golden age of Bolivian mining (well at least a bronze age) that has been brought back to life by the influx of tourists taking trips into the Salar.  Within two shakes of a llama's tail we'd booked a guide and were packed into a 4x4 with our new friends, Facundo and Marcelo from Argentina and Ming and Xhen from China (Hi guys!)

     The three day trip into the Salar was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.  The blinding white salt flats extend for hundreds of miles in every direction.  The salt is all that remains of a prehistoric inland sea that was originally part of the Pacific ocean.  As the Pacific plate slammed into the South American plate and the Andes mountains were formed, the sea was pushed up thousands of feet above sea level.  Eventually techtonic activity caused huge fissures to form which drained the water back into the Pacific and left a layer of salt 100 meters deep in places.  The Salar about as close as you can get on dry land to a Euclidean plane; pure white and achingly flat as far as the eye can see.  The flats are also covered with tiny ridges in the shape of hexagons that are formed by water seeping up from under the salt.  (I'll leave it to the physics majors to explain why they are hexagonal).  Its almost like living in Edwin Abbott's Flatland.

On an "Island" in the Salar

Drivin' that train...

She has me in the palm of her hand.

Hulk SMASH!

Does this really need a caption?  We're riding a giant banana

Flamingos!

     The second and third days of the trip found us driving through an unearthly landscape of giant volcanos, multicolored, flamingo filled lakes, bubbling mud pits and steaming geysers.Los Alerces national park truly feels like Mars. The abundance of volcanoes brings with it an abundance of minerals from lithium and borax to iron and uranium.  These minerals seep into the ground water producing lakes of every color of the rainbow.  Lago Colorado is bright red from a mixture of iron and borax while Lago Verde is, unsurprisingly, a vivid green color due to its high copper content.  Flamingos flock to these poisonous lakes to lay their eggs on the alkali island in the center simply because no other animals will go near them.

     In the early 1900's surrealist painter Salvador Dali must have thought he'd wandered into his own wet dream when he found the alien landscapes that make up this part of the world.  He came here for years to paint and to be inspired by the strange and desolate shapes carved by wind and time.  Indeed, many of the panoramas we saw on the trip found their way into some of his most famous paintings (The Perception of Memory, The Persistence of Time, Narciss ).  A particularly beautiful and strange part of the desert even bares his name.

Weird things happen in the Salvador Dali Desert

Tree rock

     After leaving Uyuni, Molly and I took a train to the small town of Tupiza about an hour and a half from the Argentine boarder. After a week and a half of traveling every day we needed some rest. For me, the train ride was almost like a trip back in time because this part of Bolivia lookes exactly like the American southwest. (Go St. John's!!!!!!!!)  It was here that Butch and Sundance finally met their makers and they must have felt right at home among the red rocks and cactus patches.
   
      Our time in Tupiza was lovely and slow. For more than a week before we arrived in Tupiza, every day involved some type of traveling, either by bus, train or 4x4, so we decided to kick back and chill a little.We got in touch with our inner cowboys by taking a horseback ride into the canyons around town. We hiked in the Tupiza hills and we even had our first international gig. While we were sitting in the central plaza playing guitar, a woman approached us and told us that there would be a street festival that Saturday. She asked how long we were staying in town and she invited us to play. Needless to say, we accepted. It was a huge success. The crowd was wonderful and very enthusiastic. They even sang along when we played Manu Chao. We played two quick sets and got called up for an encore!  It was a truly magical experience.