BOXING DAY BOUNCING TO TUPIZA

WEATHER: Hot and 23C

HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Stopping at the Tropic of Capricorn

BUMMER OF THE DAY: Getting told there was no internet for the next 9 nights

BUYS OF THE DAY:

WORD OF THE DAY: Welcome back to civilization

Well we woke to the sun high in the sky!  That would be right, the day we leave and the sun is out.  Oh well at least we will be able to have the windows open in the truck with good weather, assuming it isn’t too cold.  We are coming down in altitude today, so hopefully things will start to warm up and we can shake our winter woolies.  I’m feeling a little better today.  Life could be a lot worse and I have little to complain about – so once again it is a pick myself up, dust myself off and toughen up Princess and today is a new day. 

We were told this morning that we wouldn’t have internet for the next 9 days as we are going to be camping.  WTF!!!!!  This is bad bad news.  I can live without internet, I can alright….,. but I would have liked to have had some notice so I could send out some last minute emails and get some ‘office’ duties done, being out of action for 9 days.  That’s a long time in internat/Facebook-land.  Okay so wifi I can live without but surely the town has to have internet…….  Once I have done the bits then I can easily live without internet for 9 days.  Fingers crossed and lets see what we get when we get in this afternoon. 

It was an early start as it is a travel day.  Travel days normally constitute a day in the truck over 7 hours in my book.  I have certainly had longer days in Africa and we are travelling around a whole continent so if you aren’t expecting these days then you are up a gum tree.  As long as my IPod is charged, I am a happy camper.  We had to double back the way we came the other day for 3 hours, back through Potosi before heading out towards a place called Tupiza for the night before leaving Bolivia and entering into a new country of the trip, Argentina.  This isn’t a new one for me, as I have been here before, twice, but I haven’t done the west before, so it is still new territory for me. 

The scenery heading back was beautiful.  The mountains were the colours of pink, yellows and oranges and something I didn’t notice on the way in (maybe I was sleeping) was the amount of cacti on the mountain sides.  There were literally hundreds of them, all scattered, all sizes and shapes.  Hundreds, they looked so cool.  Some of them were also flowering, so they were pretty as well if you can believe that description of a cactus.

After refueling the truck in Potosi, lunch was at 1pm at a service station in the middle of nowhere arriving into Tupiza at 4.45pm.  It looked a cute little town surrounded by massive red colored mountains.  It reminded me of Ayers Rock, probably more the colour of the rocks than anything else, but there did seem to be a lot of pizza shops, with a name like Tupiza, you would expect that.  Tupiza is a city in at an elevation of about 3160 m. The population is 23,100 (2006 official estimate). Tupiza and its environs are characterized by dramatic red escarpments which jut ruggedly skyward from the coarse, gray terrain; green agricultural land adjacent to the Río Tupiza provides welcome respite from the otherwise arid, thorny surroundings. The area quebradas are susceptible to flash flood runoff from sudden cloudbursts.

Legend has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their end at the hands of the Bolivian army near Tupiza, concluding their notorious string of bank robbery raids. Various local outfitters provide horseback or jeep tours to the rumored site.

This stop was literally a place to break the journey, checking in at 5pm we were going to be leaving again at 6am in the morning.  You should have heard the cheer when we were told that the hotel had upgraded recently and they now had Wi-Fi!!!  There were 12 happy little faces (Mick is computer illiterate) that we had one last chance before heading into the 15^th century and places without internet.  Mark took us for a swing around the town, which took about 15 minutes, pointed out a few places to eat tonight and back to the hotel to jump on some Wi-Fi for an hour or so before we went to dinner.  Kate hadn’t eaten anything for 24 hours so it was her call for dinner and we headed to an Italian restaurant.  I couldn’t be in Tupiza and not have a ‘pizza’ so I had an almost Aussie pizza, it was just missing the egg and Kate finally got her gnocchi that she has been trying to order for the last couple of weeks.  The food was great, but Tupiza is not known for its speedy service and this I can definitely attest to, it took forever to try and get the bill, so we had just worked out from the menu what we had and got the cash when she came to the table bearing the damage.    

So this is goodbye to Bolivia, I have enjoyed my time here.  There are quite a few people happy to get out of here, as they have been sick the whole week we have been in the country, but the people seemed friendly, not pushy or threatening (except the mine), it was cheap and the countryside was beautiful.  

Tomorrow, Argentina.