Butch Cassidy, higher still in Bolivia.

Bolivia is in my (Bill's) mind a place of some interesting curiosities: highest capital city in the world, a poor land-locked country, and the place where the legendary bandit Butch Cassidy met his demise.

Mortal combat on the salt flat.

We didn't see any remnants of Butch but we saw things that were at least as interesting. The main attraction for us was the Salar de Uyuni, a massive salt flat at 12,000 ft elevation within the "altiplano". The altiplano is a huge area of land straddling Peru, Bolivia and a small bit of Chile with an average height of around 12,000 feet.

Fun with the panorama feature on the iPhone.

Salar de Uyuni is around 100 times larger than the US's legendary Bonneville salt flats where competitions for land speed records have been going on for a century. Salar doesn't have such races even though it would probably be an ideal place for it, higher altitude means less air resistance. Salar is host though to many tourists like us.

Salt and sky forever. 

It is hard to explain why visiting a geographic feature that is so uniform ends up being so interesting but it is.

We flew to La Paz "El Alto" airport, at 13,323 feet it is the highest international airport in the world. China has a few domestic airports that are higher. We were up about 2000 feet from the already oxygen starved heights of Cusco. Luckily we were already somewhat acclimatized from spending some time at altitude in Peru, even still we were sucking wind with every step.

The small jet we fly out of La Paz, notice Huayan Potosi mountain stretching up to nearly 20,000 feet in the background. 

Bolivia is one of the South American countries that practices reciprocity for foreigners... basically whatever your home country charges for entry they charge as well. In practice I understand this policy, but when you're standing there at the customs counter and the guy asks for $160 US per person for a visa... respect for their principle goes out the window and you end up pretty annoyed... and I guess that is the point. They could make it much worse by forcing you to get the visa before arrival, and also making you wait years like the US does for foreigners of many counties... We're lucky, pay some cash and walk on through. They made a big deal of having one copy of our exiting flight itinerary for each of us but eventually they relent and take our cash.

Latte art!

We end up hanging out at the airport for around 8 hrs, both of us are feeling pretty sluggish in the altitude and so we find a cafe and plant ourselves until our flight at 7 PM.

Being at an airport that is so high is interesting for me as a pilot, for a lot of reasons taking off and landing at high altitude is challenging. In the thin air engines don't make as much power, wings don't make as much lift so more speed is required to fly... more speed that is from those anemic engines. All this means that runways at these altitudes are very, very long. Coincidentally the 13,123 foot runway is around the same length as the 13,323 altitude. This is longer than any commercial airport near sea level. Dulles, JFK, and LAX are all a few thousand feet shorter. Even with this very long runway, you will not see any very large aircraft like 747s at La Paz for anything other than flight test purposes, 13,000 feet of runway just isn't enough.

Shallow climb angle coming out of La Paz

The take off from El Alto is eerily quiet, most take offs you have to labor a bit to talk to the person next to you, during this take off you could almost hear a whisper because the engines just aren't making much power. Then, the time spent on the ground gaining speed, what pilots call the take off roll, is extraordinarily long, and the subsequent climb is anemic.

After landing at Uyuni we get a pick up from our hotel and check out the town a bit. It is pretty much what you would expect from a small tourist driven town at 13,000 feet in the desert: dusty and run down looking.

Dusty Uyuni, our home for one night.

On the plus side there is a street vendor selling pizzas cooked in a mobile pizza oven. Pretty spectacular!

Street pizza, fresh out of the oven!

After spending one night we started the standard three-day tour of the Bolivian side of the altiplano in two Toyota Land Cruisers along with initially 10, then later 8 tourists. For suspense I'll say that some didn't make it!

The Toyota Land Cruiser with 250,000 miles, our ride for three days across the Bolivian altiplano.

Bolivia is full of hard luck stories, there were very active mines but the economics and the world war shut them down in 1942, the train cemetery is the very visible reminder of that past.

Derelict locomotives lying around for more than 70 years. 

The tracks are there but the trains don't leave.

After stopping at the obligatory town for some forced handicraft shopping we finally get out to the salt flats. It is incredibly big and bright from the reflection off the white salt.

Cycling on the salt, good fun... tiring fun at 12,000 feet!

After driving for a bit we are given the opportunity to ride bikes across the salt flats for a few miles. It's surprisingly entertaining, but hard going, the bikes are exposed to this salt environment constantly and it shows, the gears don't shift, there is a lot of drag in the drive train and the brakes only sort of work. Still it's good fun to pedal around, and during the entire ride there is no sensation of getting closer to the edge of the salt flat, it's just enormous.

We ride for a bit and then they've got lunch set up for us on the salt flat. One of the stranger places I've had lunch. The menu is llama.

After lunch we got some interesting pictures from the reflection of a thin layer of water on the salt, the effect is pretty cool:

After lunch we rode for like 45 minutes and still, there is barely the perception of movement across the flat landscape.

We checked out a hotel made entirely from blocks of salt. They make everything out of salt here, the tables, the chairs, and even the mortar between the blocks in a slurry of salt that hardens to bond the blocks together.

Salt to construct everything, notice the chair backs are broken in many places, salt isn't a great construction material...

Even the mortar is salt.

Obligatory perspective photo shoot: The air is so thin and the surroundings have so few ques for depth perception that these odd photos look more real than you would expect:

There is also a sort of island, called Incahuasi, poking out of the salt flats that is covered with cacti and a few other plants that have a penchant for unforgiving environments. Being that cactus is the only wood available many things around the island are made of cactus wood. This is a bit depressing as the cacti grow about 1/2 an inch per year... so those signs, and trash bins represent centuries of work by mother nature. Some of the cacti are more than 1000 years old.

Incahuasi: An "island" in the sea of salt. 

Coral arch on the island, notice the arrow sign made from cactus wood

The other interesting tidbit about this "island" is that it is largely composed of remnants from a coral reef, the Altiplano used to be the bottom of the ocean 200 million years ago.

We get some sunset photos and then we're back on... dry land? Not really... Level ground? No not level at all... the salt flats are actually the most level surface imaginable... Anyway, we exit the salt flats and wind our way up to our hotel. It ends up being pretty nice for the middle of nowhere.

Our hotel the first night. Private rooms and bathrooms and hot showers - luxury in the middle of nowhere. 

The second day is filled with visits to various high altitude lagoons, odd rock formations, and along the way we even see some wildlife. Vicuna roam these high plans freely these days as they are no longer hunted. We see llama also, they are domesticated but also roam free as open range cattle.

"Stone Soldiers" that are the remnants of ocean coral that got lifted along with the altiplano thanks to tectonic plates colliding. 

 We ride south along the border with Chile and there is another train cemetery.

More abandoned trains, these are along the Chilean border.

Despite the tiny amount of annual rain fall there are green things occasionally. This plant is called yareta, it produces a pine sap like liquid that the natives would burn for fire, although it is now protected. It looks soft but its actually quite hard.

Yareta plant

Obligatory jumping on rocks photo. Active volcano spewing steam in the background. 

Vicuna roaming the range.

 We visited five high altitude lagoons, most of them are host to flamingos. They filter out algae with their beaks.

High Altitude Flamingos! 

Rock that happened to get shaped like a tree from wind erosion. It was at one time buried under sand.

What they called geysers are actually just steam vents, we're at 5000 meters or ~16500 feet.

More vents

We spend the night in a rustic hostel of sort in dorm rooms, no running water but there is a fantastic outdoor hot spring with a great view of the sky. We're at 14,500 ft for the second night.

The third day is spent making our way to the Chilean border. We get a few great pictures on the way and after a bit of paperwork we're on a harrowing ride down a windy but paved road descending into the thick air of San Pedro de Acatama, Chile (at 8,000ft).

The last lagoon we check out turns out to be very mirror like and makes for some nice pictures.

Pano of the last lagoon we see

Finally we head across the border into Chile, on the first paved road we seen in days!

Bolivia was a great place to visit, amazing diversity, nice people, Spanish that is pretty straight forward to understand. Highly recommended. here are some video highlights:

Finally here is a picture of the group that made it:

The 8 that made it! No Andre, we have no idea who that masked man is...

There were supposed to be 10, but two Swedes didn't make it due to illness, altitude and GI... and one of them looked like death at the start... lesson learned: don't start a trip like this into high altitude unless you are feeling good!

Next up: Chile

Peru is high!

Peru is high, and not just because everyone chews coca leaves and drinks coca tea.

Bill and I had both been to Peru in 2009 and 2008, respectively. We were surprised to see how much had changed. Most of the changes seem to be good for wealthy tourists, but bad for budget tourists and Peruvians, but more on that later...

Us at Machu Picchu on a beautiful day, with Huayna Picchu mountain behind it. 

We flew from Panama City at sea level to Cuzco, which is at 11,000ft (yikes). We felt like we were moving through quicksand. If you've never gone from sea level to high altitude, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Best to slowly acclimatize. After traipsing (very slowly) around town to buy a variety of tickets we needed, we made the smart decision to bus directly to Ollantaytambo at 9,100ft for a few days to help us acclimatize a bit better.

Side note: we are still having a bit of sticker shock. Having come from Southeast Asia where things are cheap, we are still adjusting to the higher prices in South America. It is definitely not as easy to stay in our budget here.

We spent our first day in Ollantaytambo seeing the Incan ruins in and around town. Like most Inca sites we visited (there is SO much more than just Machu Picchu), Ollantaytambo's ruins involved terraces, temples, buildings for grain storage, waterworks, and extremely accurate masonry. Certain, special parts of the complex are lit up on the summer and winter solstices because the Incas knew their astronomy well. It is also suggested that one large section of Ollantaytambo seen from afar has the shape of a llama. Across the valley, there are more ruins centered around a "face" in the mountain. Also, it is believed that the whole valley takes the shape of a condor, and the city of Ollantaytambo itself was built in the shape of a corn cob. Our guide book had some nice illustrations of this, but it would be tough to see if you weren't looking for it.

Looking up at the terraces at Ollantaytambo. 

Bill next to some fine Inca masonry. They didn't use mortar, just cut the rocks to fit together exactly. This style is very earthquake proof. 

Some of the terraces at the Inca ruins at Ollantaytambo

The Temple of the Sun at Ollantaytambo. Who knows how they carved those rocks so precisely.

The view across the valley from the Temple of the Sun. It is difficult to tell unless you know what you're looking for, but to the left of the buildings on the mountain across the valley is the "man in the mountain". 

The more one learns about the Incas, the more you respect their architecture, their ingenuity, their hard work, and their knowledge of agriculture, medicine, astronomy, and hydrology. The Inca empire rose in the 1200s and collapsed when they were finally conquered by the Spanish in 1572. Even though they didn't have wheeled vehicles, draft animals, knowledge of iron and steel, or a system of writing, they still created an impressive, expansive empire, which was centered around the capital, Cusco.

One of the things we saw most was terraced hillsides. Since the Inca empire centered largely around the Andes mountains, they had to deal with high altitudes, and not much flat land.  Terraced hillsides allowed for the farming capacity needed to feed the empire's 10 million people. We visited an Inca site called Moray outside of Cusco whose purpose we're still not 100% sure of. Moray is a series of concentric circled terraces that get progressively lower. It is suggested that it was used as an "Agricultural Research Station" because the temperature at the top edge can be as much as 30 degrees lower than the temperature at the bottom. The Incas may have used this system of terraces to test seeds for use at higher altitudes. The circles also have excellent drainage such that the bottom is never flooded in spite of the heavy rains that the region gets sometimes. This theory seems plausible since you can now find hundreds of corn varieties and thousands of potato varieties in the Andes.

Moray, which is said to have been an Incan agriculture research station.  

As for the precise masonry, it becomes even more impressive when you find out that they didn't use iron or steel. We were told that they used harder rocks to cut the stones they built with. Those harder rocks happened to be 80% iron. But the edges were perfect, and they didn't use any type of mortar.

Our 2nd day in Ollantaytambo, we woke up at 4:15 to take the first train to Aguas Calientes, and then we boarded a bus which does about 25 switchbacks up a mountain to the entrance of Machu Picchu. We got an English-speaking tour guide, who walked us through the giant complex, explaining the various temples, the function of the terraces, the sacred parts of the complex (the ones that are lit first by the sun on the solstices), the waterworks, and much more. We had purchased timed tickets to climb Machu Picchu mountain, so we had to then hustle over to start our hike. The hike took about four hours total, and went from 8,000ft to 10,000ft. We are a bit out of shape from lounging on the beach the last several weeks in Panama and Colombia (especially me since I don't kitesurf), and the altitude made it that much harder. So we took lots of breaks, but eventually made it to the top. Even though it was cloudy by that point, the 360 degree view was stunning. Not only could you see Machu Picchu in the distance, you could see whole mountain ranges, deep river valleys, and everything in between. It was tough to capture in a picture.

Machu Picchu and its surroundings are just stunning. We got lucky with the weather too. 

Some of the terraces at Machu Picchu. The mountain in the back middle is Machu Picchu mountain, which we climbed. 

The Sun Temple in Machu Picchu. The sun shines through the right window on the summer solstice and the left window at the winter solstice. 

Perfect Incan masonry, except when the ground starts to shift over time...

Inside Machu Picchu

The super steep Incan steps up to the top of Machu Picchu mountain. We (well, mostly I) huffed and puffed!

At the top of Machu Picchu Mountain with the Urubamba river in the background. 

Our photos really don't capture the incredible views of the mountains and valleys. That's Machu Picchu in the middle. 

The next day we traveled back to Cusco where we spent a day and a half poking around town and the Inca sites nearby (like Moray - see above) and the salt pools of Maras. I cannot emphasize enough how beautiful riding through Peruvian highlands was. Absolutely stunning! Usually at these altitudes, things are pretty desolate, but it was green, green, green, with backdrops of gorgeous mountains. Unfortunately, we didn't get any great pictures that captured this.

In Cusco, we visited several museums, including a chocolate museum that offered free samples. Yum!

The salt ponds at Maras. 

The Peruvian highlands are absolutely gorgeous!

Finally, we tried the famous Pisco Sour drink, which basically tastes like a margarita, but has a bit of froth on top from an egg white in the mix. All in all, we had a great time in Peru.

Pisco sours to drink and an appetizer of roasted corn (one of the many corn varieties in Peru). 

A bit of a side note/observation/rant:
Generally speaking, I've been pleased as we've traveled to see how (relatively) well people are doing across the countries we've visited. America is certainly not the only great place to live (although I am getting excited to come home in April). This is largely based on comparisons to my previous travels. Infrastructure such as roads and plumbing is generally ok (some places are better than others, of course), more people have access to internet and cell phones, and we've seen less poverty in general. However, in Peru is seems the general population could be doing better given the massive influx of money from tourism.

The pretty obvious case in Peru is that foreign companies have taken over much of the tourist business. There is plenty to see and do in Peru as a tourist. The prime example is visiting Machu Picchu, the famed Incan village high in the Andes. Well, the train to get to Machu Picchu is a 50/50 joint venture owned by Belmond, a British company that specializes in luxury hotels, cruises, and trains, and Peruvian Trains and Railways. This means that the cheapest one-way ticket from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes (the stop for Machu Picchu) is ~$65 for a 1.5 hr ride, each way. The ticket from Cusco is even more. Once you get to Aguas Calientes the bus up to Machu Picchu is another $12 each way (or a 1.5 hr hike), and big surprise, it is run by another for profit company. At this point you haven't even entered the site. But perhaps you're thirsty, well a bottle of water will cost you $3 as will a snickers bar. Want a guide? That will be another $20. Want to climb Machu Picchu Mountain? $15. Bathroom? Take a guess.

There are alternatives... very unattractive ones. You can take a 7 hr bus ride to a village downstream of Aguas Calientes and then walk up the railroad tracks for 3 hrs, then hike up another 1.5 hrs to Machu Picchu... We bucked up for the train and the bus up but hiked down.

All in all, it was a $500 day for us, by far our most expensive travel day yet. Ouch! Luckily, the Peruvians don't have to pay that much to ride the train, but this is an example of how foreigners are benefiting from tourism, and budget travelers and locals are getting left behind. At the end we saw an incredible site but it left us wondering if it was really worth it compared to other things we could have done.

Our suspicions were confirmed on the day we visited some other Inca sites around Cusco (Machu Picchu is just one of MANY Inca sites - they left their impressive marks everywhere). Our tour guide told us that the town of Chinchero will be completely changing in the next several years as an airport is being built to replace the current Cusco airport. Foreign companies are already buying land in Chinchero and building homes and planning for hotels, restaurants, etc. The current inhabitants are potato and corn farmers. We visited a women's collective in Chinchero where we learned how they dye and weave brilliantly colored alpaca wool. It's a bit of a sob story, but these local people will likely be pushed out by the new airport and all of its related businesses.

At the women's collective in Chincero where we learned how they dye and spin wool into beautiful colors. 

We are certainly not blameless in all this, since we are travelers and come from such a consumer-driven society. It's just interesting that in this case, as I'm sure it is in many others, the local people, many are descendants of Incas, whose magnificent creations are on display for visitors, are not benefiting from tourism.

Locals in Ollantaytambo

We saw lots of llamas and alpacas. 

Next up: Bolivia!