Entering Bolivia

Well, from the falls we travelled across the country to Salta where we stayed for a few days getting our Bolivia Visas and eating at our last parrillas. Ben wasn´t feeling that great when we got to town so we took it easy and he took a Z pack we brought with us. The Bolivian Visa was a bit more involved than we thought! We had to pay $135 each, give a copy of our Argentina Visa, a copy of our hotel reservation (which we didn´t have), and a copy of a credit card! Needless to say it took us a couple days going around town and getting things sorted out for the visa as well as trying to ship some more stuff home. But we got it sorted and took a 24 hour bus to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

For those of you that are on Facebook, you can probably tell that we were not impressed with Santa Cruz that much - Ben was on the computer pretty much the whole time we were there. We arrived on a Thursday and really wanted to make it to the Noel Kempff National Park which only sees 200 tourists a year. There is a reason!! We went to the Natural History Museum on Thursday to try and get information on the park, but the office was closed until Monday. So we went to another registered park advisor on Friday morning only to be told that they are closed until Monday as well. So we were basically stuck in Santa Cruz over the weekend. We went out one night with some people from our hostel after going to a BBQ, a Biocentre park that boasts the largest butterfly enclosure in the world - not sure if that is true or not but it was fairly big I guess - but other than that we really hung around the hostel and watched movies. It was pretty boring. By the time we got back to the offices, we were told that the park was closed and we couldn´t go there. An overall waste of 5 days! So we checked out of our hostel and went to Samipata which is a 3 hour ride away and has some large Inca ruins called El Fuerte. We stayed the night there and went to visit the ruins the next day. They were impressive, but I would have liked to understand a bit more about what they were - apparently there is still some debate over what they were actually used for by the Incas. We stayed that night at a great organic farm that has some really refreshing tea and food, a nice change from staying right next to the night school with no mosquito net!

From Samipata we traveled back thru Santa Cruz where we had to spend the night before loading onto another bus headed for Salar de Uyuni (the largest salt flat in the world)!