Well, not really, but today was my final day with uber-roommate, Mason Twigg. Almost a full month putting up with my snoring. Well, he only slept in our room about half the nights, but........
So my Tucan Travel tour ended yesterday in La Paz, Bolivia. The end of the tour was rough, but overall there were good folks to meet and I saw and did some cool stuff.
Since the last posting we had our New Year's celebration in Petosi, Bolivia. Carla, our leader, found us a nice restaurant/bar for the night. Lots of drinking and party hats and a 12:30am dinner of a whole pig tossed upon a random table. Lame Bob was among the first to head home. Aussie Jess and her broken ankle was among the last....to be carried home. Young kids can't hold their liquor.
After Potosi, we took a long bus ride to Uyuni. I wasn't looking forward to the ride, but it actually ended up being absolutely amazing scenery. Beautiful. Uyuni, on the other hand, is not such a lovely place. It's the staging area town for the Bolivian salt flats. Sadly, the salt flats were a bit flooded...about a foot of water, so we couldn't do everything on the itinerary. Nonetheless, we got some cool photos and it was a pretty bizarre landscape.
I think due to the flooded salt flats, we had to alter our accomodation plans and ended up driving like 5 more hours to a crap town and I was rather upset by the time we got there. It wasn't explained to me why we drove all the way to this spot. As Mason Twigg said later, it took 26 days, but I finally lost it. Yelled at poor Carla on back-to-back nights about issues. When we got to this crap town, there wasn't enough accomodation in the main "hotel" so Mason, me and the two Aussies were pointed in the direction of some other place a couple blocks away. Was BAD, BAD, BAD. Think thin mattresses filled with hay. To make matters worse, the bar next door had live music until 5am and additionally Mason Twigg got horribly sick and I had to venture back to the original hotel to wake up Dr. Matt to look in on him in the middle of the night.
Anyway...bottom line is Mason, Jess and I got not a wink of sleep. The next day the three of us went back to Uyuni while the others did more sightseeing.
The one thing Uyuni has going for it is this fantastic pizza place owned by this fellow from Boston. Guy married a Bolivian and headed to this godforsaken place. Never can tell. Pizza was REALLY good. He owns the hotel too.
So after pizza, we hopped an overnight bus, because the overnight train track was flooded. First six hours of this 12 hour ride were terribly scary. You don't often hear an entire bus scream out at 3am. The "road" to La Paz isn't paved and has no lights. I mean NO LIGHTS!
We finally arrived in La Paz and really just chilled for the last couple days with a couple farewell dinners.
This morning I awoke at 5am and flew to Lima, switched planes and headed to Quito, Ecuador where my Galapagos tour begins.
Just had my opening tour meeting. The group is one American guy (Carlos) my age and three couples in their 70's. Jealous??
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