We had unfinished business in La Paz; we also had a flight to Cusco in four days, that we’d booked weeks ago. So though we were kind of ready to go to Peru early, that wasn’t happening. So we went back to La Paz to spend a few more days. We’d hoped to rent our 18th floor condo off AirBnb again, but sadly it wasn’t available for the entire time we needed it. And, for the days it was available,…
Flights to and from Uyuni pretty much only come in the “very early” variety, so very early we flew out, back to La Paz. We had a brief stay there, just long enough to get lunch, before we took a bus trip west of the city, to the town of Copacabana, at Lake Titicaca. The fun thing about this bus trip is that, about halfway there, you have to get out and cross a small portion of the lake by…
One of the main reasons we wanted to visit Bolivia was to see the Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats. But trying to plan this visit from La Paz was starting to get daunting. The traditional way to see the flats is to take a 3-4 day tour in a 4×4 through the flats, staying in primitive hotels along the way. The reviews of the multitude of tour companies were all mixed. And whereas 80% of the time the trips…
We’d brought Diamox with us on our trip to use if we needed help dealing with altitude sickness. Since Erika had been pretty well bowled over by the altitude in Sucre, she was worried about going to the much higher elevation of La Paz. So the night before we left, she took a Diamox. Big mistake, it turns out. Erika woke up far more spacey and nauseated than when she wasn’t on the Diamox. Not great since we had a…
We flew a small turboprop–just ten rows on the airplane–from Santa Cruz to the higher elevations of Sucre, Bolivia. As we were standing around in the tiny airport waiting for our bags, Erika complained that she could feel the altitude already. I doubted this–we’d just gotten there–but before we left the airport, I could too. Most of Bolivia ranges from ‘high altitude’ to ‘obscenely high altitude.’ At about 9200 feet, Sucre lies more on the ‘high altitude’ end of the…
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love” — Ernest Hemingway “Is everything okay in there?” Everything was not okay in there. He stared downward in frustration and rising anger, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Insanity, indeed. “I’ll be out in a second,” he yelled back to her. The water would slowly drain, but that’s all that would go away. The toilet was well plugged, and no amount of plunging or…
