A few more memories! Plastic bags Of course we all remember the various creative uses for plastic bags. Children's painting aprons come to mind! In the Sacred Valley, Peru, we noticed red plastic bags attached to poles, sticks or bamboo, sticking out of a building, or stuck upright in a barrel, etc. That's the signal that there's a sheebeen, or beer house on the spot or down the lane. It's not illegal. They make beer called acha using corn and the longer it's left to ferment the stronger it gets. It's also called chicha, but I think that's the lighter version. So the síbín is known as a chicheria! (Expecting to see more of them elsewhere, I didn't ask the driver to stop when we saw them in the Sacred Valley, so I never got a photo). Yellow plastic bags are used in the Cusco area to flag down drivers, when people have wares to sell. Kids stand outside the stalls or shops and wave the bags around. I'm not sure how effective it was. But it keeps th...
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The Last Tour in Bolivia 😢😢 Up i n the Cordillera de los Frailes We had no idea what to expect today, apart from being told to bring our swimming togs! As we set off through the local town of Uyuni, we noted the by now familiar sight of the queue for petrol. I had the opportunity to get a photo while our guide went to collect a tank of oxygen!!! "Just in case!" So, we were going up higher than we had ever been before. We set out along very rough roads in the direction of Tomave, a sleepy village with a 17th century, adobe built church. It took 89 years to complete it. The round window over the door is 'glazed' with quartz! Unfortunately the church was closed. Street in Tomave Tomave street. Don't judge the book by the cover, or so we're told. Tomave central square. It's like something from a film set! The best B&B in town. Moving on from Tomave we drove over very rough terrain, through countryside broken up by st...
Salar de Uyuni Where do I begin? This place is enormous, over 10,000 Km² Millions of years ago this area was part of the Pacific, and after a movement of tectonic plates the sea got trapped here. Throughout the millennia it dried up leaving a surface of salt now between 2 and 20m deep. The largest deposits of lithium in the world are down there! The salt is constantly coming to the surface and you can see it seeping through, always forming pentagonal or hexagonal patterns, with a few exceptional 4 sided figures. I haven't investigated the science, but I'm guessing that it has something to do with the composition of NaCl. We tasted the flat surface, salty. We tasted the new salt - whoa, extremely salty! We stopped at the first salt hotel built here, called Playa Blanca! Rooms here cost $20 per night. Electricity goes off at 8pm, you can guess what other creature comforts are lacking! There was a Dakar style race here, but very few finished it. The flag area is still ve...