Rounding Out South America - Southern Bolivia, Argentina, and Uruguay

Our apologies for the large gap between posts! Do not fear, we are in fact still alive.

After surviving Death Road in La Paz, we took a 10-hour bus ride overnight south to Uyuni to go see the salt flats, aka Salar de Uyuni. Unfortunately I ended up being sick the day of our tour and it was super cold in Uyuni so I was extra freezing all day. On the way to the salt flats we stopped at the train graveyard. We're still not entirely sure why this is a tourist attraction, but there's a bunch of old train cars in the middle of nowhere Bolivia sitting on rail lines that are no longer used... Moving on. Next we stopped in a small town right outside the salt flats for lunch and we went on a quick walk through of how they make table salt from the salt in the flats. There is no iodine in the salt from the flats so it must be added in. Back when they first started producing table salt in the region, people were getting gout until they realized the need to add iodine. The salt flat is the largest in the world at 12,000 sq km. You feel like you're in a white desert when you get there - you can see for miles and there's no vegetation or life. There is a hotel there, however, made entirely of salt.  The walls are made of salt 'CMU' blocks held together by salt mortar. Quite fascinating for our construction minds. After seeing the hotel we drove out to an "island" of 20 - 30 foot tall cacti where there is actual land (this makes sense when you look at the pictures of the flats) and climbed to the top for a good view of the area. Then we watched the sun set before heading back into Uyuni.

Hotel made of salt

View out from one of the "islands"

Sunset at the salt flats

Next stop was Sucre, which is the capital of Bolivia. It is a cute town with very Spanish-influenced architecture. There wasn't a ton to do there and you can walk the city in three (3) hours but I quite liked it. There was a big market in the middle of the town that had food stands galore with very tasty authentic food. It was also extremely cheap as I spent $11 in total one day - food and accommodation included. There is a dinosaur footprint archaeological site just outside the town that we went to visit. A concrete company discovered them as they were breaking away layers of rock on a mountainside to use for the sand in cement. But Jenna, why are the footprints on the vertical face? Surely the dinosaurs could not climb up a 90 degree grade. And how were they able to stay there for so long?? Great questions - I'm glad you asked. Way back millions of years ago, these dinosaurs walked across a muddy area and left these footprints. The mud dried then the wind blew and stirred everything up and when the dust settled, the footprints became protected. Multiple seasons of wet-then-dry created a bunch of layers over over the footprints. Then, when the Andes Mountains were being formed from the movement of the earth at the fault line, it turned these layers of land vertical. When the concrete company came in, they were removing the rock face layer by layer and eventually got all the way down to the one with the footprints! It was very surreal to think about how incredibly long ago the footprints were made. This site we were at has the largest number of dinosaur footprints found in the world at around 5,500.

Sucre streets

Dinosaur footprints wall

Largest footprint (~1.8 meters) at the park up close

After Sucre Doug forewent Argentinian wine country and flew straight to Buenos Aires. I, however, like my wine so bus ride after bus ride I eventually made it to Cafayate which is a very small town just south of Salta. Now, Mendoza is the main wine-producing city/area but that is much farther west and south so I decided to save some time by going to Cafayate. I rented a bike for a day, rode it out to the mountains in the area to do a hike that had a bunch of waterfalls and then rode it around to a few wineries to sample some vino. Malbec is the main red wine of the region and Torrontes is the white. Everything was delicious. I had lunch at Piatelli Bodega (winery) and felt rich for a few hours (for a swanky place, everything was actually relatively cheap). Then hopped back on a bus for a long trip to Buenos Aires.

Waterfall from the hike I went on.

My lunch view at Bodega Piatelli :)

BA has a very European feel to it. The people there call themselves porteños, or people of the port. It's very Spanish- and Italian-influenced. La Boca is the Italian neighborhood and although it's not known to be the safest part of town, it definitely has the most colorful buildings. There is a main avenue that goes down the middle of the city call Avenida 9 de Julio - a common theme throughout South America is to name streets after important dates. Can you imagine,"uh yeah, take a left on July 4 and a right on June 6." It's odd.  Anyway, this avenue was the widest in the world at the time it was built (later eclipsed by a road in Rio) and literally will take 3 stop lights to walk across if you don't haul ass. There's a big ecological park with dirt running paths by the port, but no beaches in the city, unfortunately. We did a city walking tour and learned a lot of info on the more recent political history of the city and country. Argentina was the first country to have a woman as president! It also has recently been through some very tough economical times (circa 2011 it went bankrupt) and its political history from the world wars and onward has been quite unstable. One of the nights we got a nice steak dinner, a must in Argentina. The empanadas and ice cream in the city were delicious and plentiful as well.

The obelisk of BA - no relation to the Washington Monument

Avenida 9 de Julio - massively wide

Presidential building

In the middle of the week that we stayed in BA, we took a quick trip up to Iguazu Falls. By quick, I mean either an 18 hour overnight bus ride both ways or a 2-hour flight. I was frugal and went with the bus while Doug splurged a bit and went with the flights. Those back to back nights of busing rounded out my streak of overnight buses at 7 out of 11 nights spent on a bus. Iguazu Falls is located straight north of BA at the Brazil-Argentina border. The falls were simply gorgeous. And the force of the water coming down from the waterfalls is mind blowing. Doug did a boat cruise that takes you into the mist of the falling water. Unfortunately, the Illini flag was lost at this juncture so no pics in Argentina with it.

Devil's Throat

Brazil to the left, Argentina to the right.  Devil's Throat is the group of waterfalls on the left.

Once we returned to BA, we spent a couple days just perusing the city and enjoyed spending a few days where we didn't need to accomplish anything since we had already done the sightseeing. Our flight to Europe was out of Montevideo which is in Uruguay just across the bay from BA so we took a big charter boat across. We were in Uruguay for less than 24 hours but the town seemed quaint and the surrounding areas on the way to the airport had some very nice houses. From everything I've heard, there's not a whole lot to do in the country of Uruguay. Although I would have loved to have gone to Mendoza, Bariloche, and Patagonia in Argentina and then Antarctica, we ran out of time by about 8 weeks (haha) and unless you're skiing in Patagonia, that trip is best taken in December and January. Quite honestly though, I was ready for a change in scenery. All the buses and bug bites and people's inability to walk down a sidewalk and move out of the way for people going in the opposite direction we're getting to me. Naturally our flight out of there was an overnight one.

Main plaza in Montevideo

Adios SA!