Pictures...

Hey peoples...

I have to do the whole post on the Salar tour, and that's going to take a while... so I thought I'd just post a couple of pictures to give you an idea...

Right now I'm in Peru, just crossed the border this morning, after spending a comatose day/night in Copacabana... I slept close to 12hrs... serious!! It was nice to have a big comfortable bed, and not have to have 7 blankets to keep warm... :)

Alright, pictures!



Crossing the border into Bolivia... if you look carefully, there's a Bolivian flag on the background... but we were running so as to catch the train, and the guidebook had said several times "no pictures allowed at border control areas" so we thought it safer to avoid them...



That's Laguna Verde, in the middle of the desert, almost on the border with Chile... altitude? Somewhere around 4100m I think... cold and hard to breathe, but beautiful nonetheless...



Sunrise on the Salt Flats.... it was freaking cold (yep, it was cold during the whole tour!!) but it was really beautiful!!! :)

Alright, that's all for the moment.... I'll get my act together and write about the whole tour day-by-day before I have too much more to write and it gets hard to catch up... Tomorrow we're already going on another 2-day tour, to some islands on Lake Titicaca... :)

Spur-of-the moment...

So I don't need to remind you people that I'm crazy, but I thought I'd start with that anyway... :)

I have a friend from Greece who had been living in Buenos Aires for like a year and a half, but recently went back to Greece for a month and was passing through Buenos Aires again just to catch a bus because he's going to travel through South America and stay in Colombia for a couple of months...

Well, he was only going to be in town for a day, so we met Monday night just to catch up a bit, before he left at 10am Tuesday morning. We started to talk, and eventually, without me knowing exactly how it happened, I was on board to go on the trip with him, at least until I ran out of money... Keep in mind that this is Monday at like 11pm, and the bus leaves at 10am the next day. So I go home, start calling people, start packing, write a letter to my roommates and leave rent for the next month, and try to sleep (although that didn't work very well).

Next morning, 8am I'm out the door, because I still have to try to change money and buy a ticket... to the bus that will take me from Buenos Aires to the town of La Quiaca, on the border with Bolivia, some 29hrs later. No joke.

When I actually get in the bus, his jaw dropped... he just couldn't believe that I was really there. I was. I'm just that crazy... :) and translation is great because it's an online based job, you can do it from anywhere... so it´s all good.

Here I am, 6 days later, after just finishing a tour of the Salar de Uyuni. I'll have to write about that on the next blog, especially because I just realized that I forgot my little journal thing at the last hotel... a salt hotel... meaning, a building completely made of salt bricks... unbelievable!! Pictures later...

Anyway, we're here in Uyuni until tonight, where we take an overnight bus to La Paz, and from there try to get on another bus to Copacabana... nope, not the beach in Rio... it's actually a little town on the shores of Lake Titicaca... and after that, it's all up in the air.

So to sum it all up, I'm crazy, but it's always been a bit embarassing that I've travelled all over and haven't seen much of my own back yard (meaning South America). This was a crazy decision, one that I didn't really think over, even because I didn't have much time, but sometimes opportunities knock and you just have to grab them! That's what I did, and so far, it couldn't have been any better... :)


Yes, I'm crazy... but you already knew that...

So stay tuned for the next episodes of crazy South American trip!