We were lucky enough to have our own private tour guide, Djanira, a contact through a friend of Amelie´s in Canada. Djanira was born and raised in La Paz and showed the sites during all four days of our visit! Above is the incredible view from her house.
Meet Leoncio, one of the 8 pumas who walk through the jungle everyday, led on a rope by a volunteer in Parque Machía. There are hundreds of animals living in the park who were born in captivity and are either here for life being treated much better than in their former home, or being prepared to live in the wild. We volunteered here for two weeks.
I worked with what were called the ¨Small Animals¨ which included Tayras, Tehons, Cuchi Cuchis, Night Monkeys and Turtles. With the exception of the turtles I had never heard of any of these animals before.
Here I am with Petronia, likely the most spoiled animal in the Park. She loves to be held and if you get close enough, will crawl up your leg into your arms. Even though she looks lovely and harmless she bit me several times as I tried to end cuddle time.
Baby Cuchi Cuchi at dinner time! There are four nice cute ones and unfortunately one temporamental one named Frank who makes the whole job very difficult. Poor Frank is suffering from an inferiority complex because he is missing half his tail.
Amélie worked in the monkey Quarantine. This is where new arrivals to the park stay until it is confirmed that they don´t have any sort of parasite to spread to rest of the park. Sick monkeys also live here until they are well enough to be in the monkey park.
Claudio... the most adorable little baby capuchin monkey in the Quarantine.
Sucre is a town out of a fairy tale book, with its orange coloured rooves clustered amongst the rolling green hills.
Although the government and activity of the capital city is in La Paz, from the beginning, the Bolivian constitution holds Sucre as the Capital City. In August 2007 there will be a revision of the constitution to try and either make La Paz the official capital or move the government to Sucre. Obviously there is much conflict throughout the country over this. I´m glad to be in Bolivia now and not in four months...
There were great views of the city from the roof of this church.
Diego!!! Here he is in the Casa de la Libertad where the first constitution was signed and Simon Bolivar lead the country into independence.
In Sucre we sadly said good bye to our German buddies Jonas and Philip AND our Chilean buddy Diego, leaving us Canadian chicas once again on our own.
The four of us arrived in Potosi at 4:30am after a horrific 8 hour bus ride that covered about 300 km before which we almost lost all of our bags on top of the wrong bus. After some solid sleep we explored the gorgeous city seemingly from another era. Potosi was at one point the most important city in the world with an intense wealth from the silver mines that the Spaniards profited on.
Potosi´s silver mine is to this day a very important part of the region employing thousands of miners who work in the most terrible conditions. We went on a tour of the mines and for about two hours got to see first hand what these miners live through everyday. We felt the intense heat, crawled and climbed through frighteningly tight passage ways and enhaled the toxic gases that everyday are killing the workers as young as 10 years old. It was mind blowing to see that in this day and age there are people making a living like this.
Every group of miners (Quecha aboriginials) has there own Tio (god of the earth or the devil according to the Catholic Spaniards). Before starting the day of work they must give offerings to el Tio such as alcohol, coca leaves or cigarettes. It is custom to give el Tio a lit cigarette to smoke. If he smokes it, then a good day of mining is sure to come.
Here in Potosi we met up with our friend Diego who we met way back in Val Paraiso, Chile. Our nice little gang of five then headed off together to Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia.
Salvador Dalirocks Desert. Salvador Dali painted this desert without ever having been there.
Here are Amélie and I with la Laguna Verde behind. All the lakes in the region have crazy bright colours - brown, blue, white, green.
Sol De Mañana Geysers. There are a countless number of geysers here in the ground emitting an intense amount of Sulphur and other gases with a eerily loud hissing noises. Each hole is fully of bubbling hot grey liquid. Each one is like a mini volcano. We were warned not to get too close.
Throughout the tour we were all slowly getting acustomed to the hight altitude of around 4600 m. We were all extra short of breath and had minor head aches most of the time. Our guide introduced us to Coca leaves which miraculously got rid of our head aches.
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For thousands of years most of Southern Bolivia was covered by the sea. Now all that is left are two enormous salt flats, the most famous of which are the Salt flats of Uyuni.
We crossed the border into Bolivia in Villazon where we took the train to Uyuni. On the train we met Phillip and Jonas our new travel companions. Of course they happened to be German...!
In Uyuni the four of us began a private three day guided tour of the incredible region south of Uyuni.
On the road south of Uyuni.
Due to frustrating technical problems I´ve had yet another stand still in my blog entries. I am now going back about 3 weeks to Mendoza Argentina. In Buenos Aires we said good bye to Johannes and headed west to Cordoba, then Alta Gracia where we saw the disapointing Che museum in his families old house, and then to Mendoza where we stayed for a week in awsome Winca´s Hostal! The hostal had great people and even a swimming pool which was key with the 40 degrees weather without a cloud in sight. We had an awsome week in the capital of Argentinas famous wine producing province. We went of a few winery tours, learnt how to taste wine like the pros, ate too much steak, and more. I went white water rafting too with our new friend Daniela from Buenos Aires who was in our dorm room at Winca´s.
It just so happened that we were in Mendoza for the annual grape harvest festival (Festival de la Vindemia). There were two strange parades, one on the friday night and another Saturday morning. The town centre was closed off for the stream of 18 giant floats displaying each of the 18 region´s Wine Queen and their respective Wine Princesses. The Queens and Princesses threw fruit, vegetables, cookies.... even water melons into the crowd. One of the 18 Queens was then elected as the official Wine Queen of the province....
After the wine the second highlight of our week in Mendoza was Paragliding!! Here I am all geared up with my guide Pacho ready to run down the slope and then jump off a cliff 700 m off the ground! What an amazing experience! 
