The journey to Bolivia

After saying goodbye to Argentina, we were looking forward to enter Bolivia. Izick was looking forward to be in places he already been and I was looking to see south America as I remembered from our last trip.

You can`t really say that Argentina or Chile is the real South America people think about. You can feel the difference from the moment you cross the border...



Our first destination was Tupiza. It`s a town 3 hours from the border.
This 3 hour ride was quite an adventure. For some reason there was no bus from the border to Tupiza that morning so we had to be creative.
And as you know we the Israeli are very creative,people can feel when we are around, for the good and the bad.
So we organized a spacial ride in a jeep just for 6 people, Israelis of course. We were 12 people so we split into 2 rounds, we were the second round.
I must say that I had my doubts about the jeep returning on time like it promised. People who had the chance of meeting the andian people (Bolivoans and Peruvians) knows they have some unlikeable qualities, the worth two is, that they are liars and fraud, so it`s hard to take their word.
Surprisingly enough the jeep came on time. Well, at that moment I thought that maybe something had change after 6 years. But, the Bolivian nature reviled his nature eventually. After 10 minutes ride the driver gave us a note the first Israeli group left us (we take care of each other). In the note there was a warning not to take the ride since he left them 1 hour walk from town, since there was some kind of rally (הפגנה).

At the moment we just laugh and hoped for the better. When we got to the alleged rally, we thought they were kidding us. There were couple of old guys sitting next to some trucks, trying to stop the vehicles. It was very amusing, we thought that they should come to Israel to see what is a real rally.

Not like the first group we didn`t gave up and we didn`t let him leave us in the middle of the road without getting our money back. He didn`t like the idea, but when you have a group of united Israelis, one Bolivian can`t overcome them, and he didn`t.
Finally after asking for the locals for some help he find an alternative way to take us straight to the central. One victory for us!!!


After one day of adapting to the altitude we took a day tour in a jeep to see the views of the area.



We took the tour with a Israeli couple, Asaf and Revital, which after that become very good friend of us.
It`s nice traveling with other people, It`s something we missed in New Zealand, but here you can never be alone. And it`s also nice to get complement about our age. Now after an advice from Naama (you will meet here later) we shouldn't revile our true age!

When we left Tupiza we were on our way to the Salar. The Salar is a big salt dessert high up in the altitude of 3500!!!



Actually, the trip is 4 days but only in the last day you get to see the salar, the rest of the days you get to see lagoons,





flamingo,



gaizers





and hot springs.






The main attraction for Israeli people who taking this tour is producing spacial photos in the salar.



The thing is that because the horizon is very far and because of the color of the slat you can create all king of spacial allusion with the camera.









The truth is, we weren`t about to do this kind of photos, especially after Nataly made laugh at us. But, since there was one Israeli girl with us we had to go alone and help her. By doing this we enter the European tourist to this craziness (there was 3 European tourists with us).



It wasn`t easy staging this kind of photos as you can see, and not all of them came out like we hoped they will...