Bolivian Travels

With the Harding interns here for the summer, opportunities opened up to do a little bit of traveling around Bolivia. We accompanied them to Santa Cruz for the ladies conference, and also on a survery trip of La Paz/ El Alto. Josh took the opportunity of the trip to La Paz to take the interns to a very beautiful and out of the way place in Bolivia called Uyuni, famous for the fact that it has some of the largest salt flats in the world. It is an interesting trip because you can take the train, one of the only remaining functioning train tracks in Bolivia. In addition to all these travels, Josh took some of the interns with him on a day trip to some Incan ruins close to Cochabamba called Inca Rakay. All in all - it made for an interesting summer! Here are some pictures from our (mostly Josh's) travels.


The ruins of Inca Rakay. Archeologists think this may have been some kind of watch post close to the end of Incan territory. They are fairly remote and not very well visited or maintained, but interesting nonetheless. You should have seen the car when they got back! It was covered in about an inch of dust, partly due to the fact that they got lost on the way there and went about 40 minutes out of their way.


On the train to Uyuni. They took the executive train, and Josh was actually pleasantly surprised with its cleaniness and service. He met several interesting people on their train ride as well, a family from Virginia and an Eastern Orthodox Bolivian man who told Josh he needed to do some more studying, as the Eastern Orthodox church is the only true church : )


Josh on the salt flats. The girls and I opted to skip out on the Uyuni leg of the trip, seeing as this time of year it is frigidly cold. They "harvest" the salt and industrialize it, but the good news is that it "replaces" itself. Don't ask me how - I'm not a scientist.


A view from an "island" in the middle of the salt flats.


Josh licking (well, according to him, pretending to lick!) a table made from salt. There is actually a hotel where everything is made from salt.


Josh said he felt like they were one step away from a blockade through the whole trip. They took the train to Uyuni, only to have the tracks blockaded behind them, so they had to take a bus to La Paz (Josh said it felt like they were driving on a goat track the whole way!) We arrived in La Paz only to have the whole city shut down for a civil strike. There is a debate right now whether or not to change the political capital of Bolivia to Sucre instead of La Paz. So the city of La Paz called the strike in support of keeping the capital in La Paz. Thousands of people made an 8 mile walk up to the altiplano to show their support of the strike. One of the church members escorted Josh and the guys in the group on the march. It was a definitely a cultural experience! They actually managed to hitch a ride in a dump truck with about 40 other people for half the way. Here is a picture of Josh in the back of the dump truck.