so much to tell , but ill try my best.
chris arrived last monday in la paz, i meet him at the airport, and he had his guitar and a bottle of whisky. we got on a bus to cochabamba , a small city about 8hours away. from there he organised a private tour to a national park that has dinosaur footprints. it was my birthday present. it was so fun coz there were no other tourists there because its too hard to get to, no companies run tours there and theres only spanish tour guides. anyway , we drove there, took 5hours. but the scenery was amazing, there are big rock formations from the fault lines that made all the mountains and a huge valley. ill try to send you some photos.
Once there we got the best guide in town , he also has the best name of anyone ive ever met, Felix Gonzalez. He was really sweet and always ran instead of walking when he had somewhere else to be. so we would finish talking to him then hed run away.
after we arrived we went caving.. we walked along a path through crop fields, and around cool rocks and then we saw dinosaur footprints !! there was a velociraptor and other three toed carnivores...and one looked like 5toes but it was actually two three toed dinosaurs crossing paths .
Then we got to the cave and it was starting to get dark...twas about 4.30pm and a pair of parrots flew past!
The river runs down into the cave so we had to climb on rocks and try not to fall in coz the river becomes a load of waterfalls once in the cave. It was kinda scary and i almost fell in a few times...so did chris.
Then eventually we turned down a little crevace and climbed a ladder to a level where the roof was only about 3feet from the floor. I started felling claustrophobic... but that was nothing compared to the end of it. Anyway we climbed down walls using a rope.. and we crawled through tiny spaces and got covered in dirt. Chris slid down a lot of the places on his butt but i tried to keep my cords clean.
we saw stalagtites and stalagmites and there was a part near the end that was a really open space full of sand and we knelt down and turned off our torches. Our guide told us about a couple who went in the cave ages ago and their torches ran out and they just waited at that sandy part until people found them.
We then started making our way back to the surface , from 70metres underground. The way back was up along the water and the ground was quite slippery. So that was a little bit stressful, but not too bad.
We found the opening of the cave and climbed out. it was barely light out.
the next day we went for a dinosaur footprint adventure. Theres a big area near the road into town that is fenced off, and in this is all the most exciting fossils you could ever see. There were huge quadraped footprints that walked away up the hill. there were tons of three toed footprints...there were hadrosaurs, and baby trex, more velociraptor prints, which were really distinguishable from the other three toed prints because their third claw doesnt hit the ground... just like on jurassic park...Retractable claw.
There was a path of big prints and carnavore prints, and Felix told us that it may have been that the predator was running at the large dinosaur and jumped and attacked the big one...because both paths of prints stop abruptly. There was also Pterosaur prints that are possibly the pterosaur landing because the first set are deep and then it hops forward. Incrediblé.
Theres to many to tell about all of them. it was probably one of the best days ever.
After we had seen all the print in that area we went for a walk to a canyon.. we walked along the dry riverbed.. and saw all sorts of different rock types and then the ground dropped away and there is an area that is called the Natural Theatre.
We carried on for a while in awe of all the great views and then we came to a huge canyon. There are Macaws that are endemic to Bolivia and are now endangered , Red Fronted Macaw. We heard a few then they flew out from the side of the cliff where they nest. They have red blue yellow green and red on them.
We sat and watched for a while before making our way back to the hotel. The driver wanted to leave early enough to ensure we wernt driving at night but he made us stressed out by rushing. We had a quick game of frisby with Felix then packed up our things and hit the road... the way back was bumpy bumpy. The driver hit a chicken and then i didnt like him anymore. His name was Mario.
we got straight on a night bus to Sucre. we were two minutes late and the bus was pulling out onto the road...we ran with all our things and the bus driver was yelling all sorts of things in spanish. slept a little woke up in Sucre, went for breakfast/lunch at a vegetarian resturant. really good food.. we had quinua and veggies, and potato spinach mix, and cake and rice puff slice and it was all deliscous. Birthdays are fun. We explored the plaza for a while and then got on our bus to Uyuni. We stopped 4hours later in Potosí for two hours which gave us time to walk up the hill to the plaza, and find some more great food..chris also had time to get really altitude sick because Potosí is one of the highest cities in the world, and he , is Sealevel boy. We got back to the busstation just in time and made ourselves as comphy as we could for our long nighttrip to uyuni. the seats were all broken and i got frustrated. we stopped at a horrible busstop that had no Baño (toilet). So that was good. The bus broke down at 2 in the morning. we sat for a while , while they sorted that out then we arrived in Üyuni at 5am. It was cold. It was freezing cold. We found our hotel and slept for 3hours , got up and met the girls, went to organise the Salar tour and then left at 11am in a jeep cramped full of all our gear and 9people.
i might stop my update here because there is still the entire salar tour to describe and i dont think im up for it.
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