Tupiza, the Bolivian Wild West

We left Sucre on Monday morning and headed back 4 hours to Potosi where we spent 2 days, getting to see more of the town this time, instead of just the bus station the last time we passed through. I´m not sure why exactly, but we chose this occasion to walk from the bus station to the town centre (instead of trying to catch a local bus or a taxi) to look for accomodation, and looking back it really was a rather masochistic thing to do, because as mentioned before, Potosi is at 4060m altitude (and pretty chilly), and the town centre is up a huge hill from the bus station. We must have looked a sorry sight, trundling alond uphill out of breath, like we were doing the Inca trail all over again.

Potosi´s streets and buildings look quite similar to the old buildings of La Paz, old buildings from a richer time, with small wrought iron balconies that are painted blues and yellows and pinks, but the town is less busy. We skipped the tour of the silver mine (altough now the silver is depleted and is it mined cooperatively for minerals) that is on offer, and visited a museum, the Casa Real de la Moneda, which is in a restored building that was constructed in 1753 to control the minting of colonial coins, and now houses religious art, ancient coins, and wooden minting machines. Our guide who spoke belly good english, would launch into a well-practised speech about each of rooms we went into, and afterwards would ask "¿Questions?" and not wait even a millisecond for a response before saying "good, follow me plees". After a few rooms we were starting to see a trend, and a few people in the group (including us, museum-loving south africans) were starting to find this rather amusing. Besides this, the tour was pretty interesting, especially the huge wooden cogs, steam engines and minting machines, as well as the stories of pirates, sunken ships of silver, and treasure hunting that followed, and the fact that in the 1700´s Potosi was making money for the whole world, and now, the world is making Bolivia´s money (the various notes and coins come from a few different countries currently, something like Chile, Cuba and Spain...). "Cést la vie" said our belly good english (and apparently French) speaking guide.

We caught an overnight bus on Tuesday to Tupiza...and we now have a new record for worst bus ride of the trip. The 8 hour trip there was all on dirt road, my chair was broken and the back rest could not stay in one position, and therefore alternated between tilting right back and caterpaulting me forward over each bump in the road (and on this road, there were many, many, many), the base of the seat was also coming away from the back and tilted to the side, which meant that I kept sliding down, and onto Steven. The broken window next to us rattled at deafening volumes and let in large amounts of freezing air. And there were 2 crying kids sleeping (not nearly enough of the time) on the bus floor behind us. Traumatising. We were dropped off in Tupiza at 3:45 am, and the bus station was not a building we could go into to wait out sunrise, but merely a strip of ticket offices, and we wandered the streets for a while before finding the hostel we had in mind, well and truly locked up, we knocked anyway, and a friendly man let us in to the most welcome room and set of beds, this trip.

We´ve spent this week relaxing in this tiny, dusty town, surrounded by red, silver and rusty mountains, and went for a fantastic horse ride yesterday (¡we even got cowboy hats!)through spectacular scenery and cactus´s, even having a bit of a race (yiiiiihiiii).