Bolivia on singinwhale

Isla del Sol

Mon, 29 May 2023 17:55:22 +0000

From La Paz I drove north to Copacabana to take a boat to Isla del Sol which is supposedly where the first Inka king was born. I did not make it there the same day so I stayed for the night on the shores of lake Titicaca.

It was a bit overcast but you could see the high (>6000m) mountains of the Andes in the distance.

The next day I had to take a barge over the bay to get to Copacabana. Anyone taking this way to Peru also has to go via the barges. On both shores there is a huge amount of ferries waiting for passengers so the bandwidth on the bay is very high and there is no waiting lines.

La Paz

Wed, 24 May 2023 18:21:26 +0000

Before arriving to La Paz I had to stay another night somewhere. I found a nice mountain pass with a small maintenance road to an antenna tower. It was a little windy but in the slipstream of the car I was able to cook some dinner without the wind blowing out the gas stove.

El Alto

On my way to La Paz I had to go through El Alto. El Alto has a larger population than La Paz itself. While La Paz is in the valley, El Alto is on the plane around the valleys edges and is much more of a sprawl than La Paz. The quality of the buildings is also significantly lower. From La Paz there is multiple cable car lines going up to El Alto.

The Ditch

Tue, 23 May 2023 23:22:00 +0000

The drive from Sucre to La Paz takes 9 hours (even though it is a fairly well maintained toll road). It is a beautiful ride but after 5 hours I started looking for a place to sleep for the night.

On the iOverlander App I found an entry for a camping spot that seemed good and on OpenStreetMaps there was a road that went there. I found the entrance to the road and it did go for some 500m to an old graveyard but sadly it seemed like the map was outdated after that for there were fences crossing the section where the road should have been and behind the fence there was already plenty of grass. So the map must have been outdated for some 10 years already. This was not the first time OSM had been wrong though so I was not entirely surprised.
So I turned around and wanted to look for a new place but the way back went in a right turn around the graveyard and in my turn and with only my headlights to go by I must have missed the ditch that was there. In any case, I ended up plowing my car more or less straight into said ditch.

Sucre

Mon, 22 May 2023 20:29:11 +0000

Potosi

On our way to Sucre, Bismarck and I drove through Potosi - a mining town where his brother lived. Bismarck told me that Potosi used to be the richest town in the world and bigger than London in its heyday. That was because there was an insane amount of silver deposits in the mountains and still to this day the silver mine is active. From Potosi they shipped the silver down the river and over the Atlantic back to Spain which is the reason that Argentina, the “Rio Plata” and “La Plata” are named after the precious metal.
We only went to town to get an ice cream however and then we were back on our way to Sucre.

Crossing to Bolivia and driving to Uyuni

Tue, 16 May 2023 20:29:12 +0000

After Humahuaca it wasn’t far to to the Bolivian border anymore. I was already in the altiplano at over 4000 meters and I wouldn’t get below 3000 meters until I went to Sucre later. Along the way I saw huge herds of alpacas and llamas that were grazing on the huge planes.