Bolivia I

                 Finally we arrived to Bolivia. First stop - Copacabana, it was nice small town, on the lake Titicaca shore, definitely nicer than Puno, Peru. We spent a day in Copacabana and next day moved to Isla del Sol, island in the middle of lake Titicaca. It was a beautiful island with delightful views of snow caped mountain range and stunning dark blue lake water. We even went swimming in the lake (it was cold, but worth it). It crossed my mind that the lake is at 3850m altitude, but it didn´t feel like it, only clouds were lower than usually.
               
                Next day we took the bus to La Paz, Bolivia - big city with around 630 000 inhabitants. We had difficult time finding the hostel - everything was very expensive in comparison to Ecuador and Peru. Finally, I found one decent hostel with reasonable prices for private rooms. It was the Israeli hostel. There were a lot of young people.  One day we passed the guy praying on the stairs. Hostel itself was nice, had beautiful paintings on the walls, even had unlimited hot water in the shower (which was rear). Fun fact: hostel had rules listed in 3 languages: English, Spanish and Hebrew. There were 8 rules in English and Spanish and 11 rules in Hebrew.
                Anyway, La Paz at first glance was huge market place, it didn´t leave us very good impression. There were a lot of old buses, so fumes in the center were impossible, we thought about buying a mask. At first, we thought to go to the jungle in the north, but we couldn´t get airline tickets.  So, we left for Uyuni Salar tour in the south.

                Trip to Uyuni (town where tours to Salar originated) was rough. We took a bus to Oruro and from there - a train to Uyuni. No buses nor trains go in the morning, only at night. Some people like traveling at night, us - no.  Traveling at night you save on accommodation, but hostels in Bolivia are very cheap.  So it is not worth spending our good night sleep in the uncomfortable night buses. Sometimes you are forced to travel at night, as we had to do it to Uyuni. We arrived at 3AM, it was -3 degrees Celsius, and difficult to find a hostel.  We were able to find a shitty one. And the town itself was not nice, very dusty, people were very rude, didn´t give a shit about anything.
                Next day we booked a tour and day after we gathered to the tour agency´s office, where our tour started and continued with "interesting"adventures. As we, all tourists, gathered on time, we couldn´t find our agent. When she arrived (0.5 hour late), we couldn´t find drivers. When they arrived (more 0.5 hour late), agent could´t figure it out who was going with who ( :) it was hysterical!). So we left more than one hour later than planned.
                In our salar tour group we had one couple -Felipe from Brazil and Rossanna from Columbia (both study at university in Brazil). They were wearing little clothes and slippers (it was cold most of the time!). Somebody stole there luggage in Brazil. They were very pleasant companions, singing almost all the time. Other 2 seats in our jeep belonged to 2 french girls, both named Charlotte. They both studied in Canada, they were very nice companions too.We kept changing places with them.
                 The first stop was the train cemetery, it had a lot of train skeletons. The second stop was lunch and the third one was the salt lake. The views were amazing: everything around was white, converging with bright blue sky.

                  Fourth stop was hotel, made from salt, which had a museum inside. That was when we started having issues with the driver - he disappeared for 20 minutes (in the middle of nowhere!). Fifth stop was the fish island, where huge cactuses grow. It takes a year for a cactus to grow 1 cm.. The highest cactus was 10 meters high, so it was 1000 years old. And our driver continued disappearing, this time - 30 minutes.
                  Last stop that day was our hotel, made from salt also, even beds were from salt. Tour guides gave us dinner, Jotvinge couldn´t eat anything, she got sick at the end of the day (maybe because of the rough ride). Second day she was better.
                  Second day we woke up at 7AM, did not get breakfast till 8AM (it was promised at 7am). After long searching, I found the driver - he was drunk. Jotvinge screamed at him, so he got very angry and upset with her (as if it was her fault that he got drunk). We tried to get a phone to call our agency, to change the driver, but there was no reception. I tried asking him to let me drive, but he refused. Our group decided to talk to him again and calmed him down. After all the options, we decided to go with our driver. He promised me not to drink anymore and apologized to Jotvinge. He was driving well while drunk first half of the day, but at the second half he started falling asleep while driving.We almost hit the huge stone, we saw it and started screaming.  After that he started speeding like crazy, we thought we were not going to make it through till the end of the trip. Other than that we saw a lot of beautiful lakes, many elegant pink flamingos, also vicunas, and lamas. We stopped to see an active volcano, we saw "arbol de Piedra" - stones, formed into tree-like shape. There were no trees and very little grass (it was pretty high altitude). It is difficult to imagine what those vicunas and lamas eat there.
                    At the end of the second day, we traveled to see red lake. It looked fabulous at sunset, amazing red color. People say that the lake is red because of some special red bacteria in the lake. Young flamingos eat that bacteria. Depending on how much they eat the bacteria, how pink they become.
                     When we arrived to the second hotel, we received nice dinner and a bottle of wine.  After dinner we joined with other group. We met some Swiss and Spanish people on our way. We had a lot of fun that evening. One guy helped me photograph the stars, I got decent pictures finally. At night was -20 degrees and I would say -5 degrees in our hotel room (was no heat at all!). So that night was terribly cold.

                    We were supposed to get up at 5:30am, but hotel staff woke us up at 4:45AM with breakfast ready. First thing what we did was went to check if the driver was stable. This time we saw him preparing the jeep for our journey (started a fire under the hood -literally). What happened was that day before we had some problems with radiator leaking, so driver was adding water to the radiator (bold move when it is so cold), so at night it froze up. After an hour we were up and running. The first stop was geysers, we felt like in the storm there, but the geysers themselves were warm. The second stop was the thermal baths at shore of the lake. After all the cold, it was heaven to go to the hot water.  The last stop was laguna Verde (green lake). Lake is not green anymore for a few years.  It is beautiful blue. From there we could see two mountains: one facing Argentina, another - Chile.
                       Twenty minutes later ,we reached Chilean border, where the bus was waiting for us....