Bolivia and Chile High Desert

 

We went on a vacation to Bolivia and Chile with S&A expeditions the last week of October this year. We flew into La Paz Bolivia, arriving at about 3:00 a.m. and were met at the airport by our guide and driver who took us to our hotel for a little sleep before a tour of the city in the afternoon

This is an unidentified wildflower outside our hotel in La Paz Bolivia

La Paz has a little park a lot like our Badlands here in Nevada.  This is our guide and Brenda posing for photos . This park was on our walking tour of the city and it's  a hoodoo area with a lot of erosion. Just like you see in Nevada or parts of Oregon or even Anza borrego down in California it had cactus and clay spiers

 the valley of the Moon

La Paz doesn't have street cars or city buses. They have gondolas overhead because the city is so dense and on so many hills that buses wouldn't be able to run through the streets. Some of the mountains around around La Paz are over 20,000 ft high

An example of how dense the housing is there

In that Park that looks like Nevada it has hoodoos and on this hoodoo there's there was a little cactus garden

That hoodoo you see is the one with a cactus garden on top

This is a variety of ephedra, Mormon tea like we have here it's a little bit different there but the same

One of the flowering cactus and the garden

This is a city park with houses encroaching upon the edges of it

Another view of the city from the gondola

Some of the mountains surrounding La Paz are around 20,000 ft high. La Paz itself is at 12,000 ft at the airport look more like 11,000 ft in the main city

Pigeons are found everywhere

Guards in front of one of the government buildings

A lady in a carnival outfit practicing for the upcoming carnival season

A bunch of people doing the same thing

Narrow streets with shops. Cobblestones.  This was a Sunday so that it weren't many people there

A guitar shop on that same avenue

After the tour of La Paz we caught an airplane down to Uyuni, the salt flats,  and this is a sunset picture there

The sunset showing the patterns in the salt

From our hotel on the edge of the salt flat, our guides took us out into the middle of the salt. 42 mi of salt driving to an island sticking out of the salt that has cactus and we hiked up on the mountain. Made a loop and came back down. Had a lunch out on the flat.

The island consists of tufa formations. You know formed by Hot springs under the water when there was a lake there

The view from the top of the island

Black-Hooded Sierra finches  coming around where we had our lunch

Salt block picnic tables

The location for the start of a Dakar rally

The original salt hotel out on La playa.

The view from there back to our hotel on the edge of the playa.

There were springs out on the salt flat where bubbled up from there. We could look back and see the hotel still 

Vicunias were often seen on the side of the road. They have the most expensive wool of any animal.

After some time in Uyuni we headed out to a railroad museum where they had these metal sculptures of movie replicas.

Brenda inspecting the salt blocks

The domed roof over our bed made from blocks of salt.

The area of the playa right next to our hotel where it gets a lot of vehicular traffic and potholes develop .

This is a stack of salt blocks at a factory that converts them into table salt

Llamas on the side of the road. Llamas are domestic animals that they let roam across the countryside and you could see herds of 50 or 100.

An Andean goose



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