FroggyRidesAgain: Bolivia to Peru

After several very long bus journeys I am even more amazed by the sheer scale of this continent. Holland is about 40K square kilometers compared with say French Guiana at the top which is 80K. If you look at this map you might get an idea tehn of what I mean.

To help avoid confusion bewteen the two I have made this handy comparison chart.

	South America	Holland
Very Large	Yes	No
Lots of mountains	Yes	No
Lots of desert	Yes	No
Tropical areas	Yes	No
Very high altitudes	Yes	No
Average height	Short	Shortish
Pacific and Atlantic oceans	Yes	No
Very high temperatures	Yes	No
Very low temperatures	Yes	Sometimes
Afternnon siesta	Yes	No
Glaciers	Yes	No
English widely spoken	No	Yes
Fast trains	No	Yes

Hope this makes things clear.

From San Pedro in Chile I took three buses to go to La Paz in Bolivia, the capital. Again going through specaculat desert. In the piccy below note the red truck. The hill is quite steep. Near the beginning of this road I noticed two cyclists setiing off. Hope they knew what they were in for, or maybe better they didn't!

The petrol trucks are quite slow up the hills, so generally the buses overtake them. Why worry about blind corners or things like that.

Wow!

Pretty cold and very bright - again at high altitude, maybe 4000m.

Trucks going from Bolivia to Chile stretch back for miles waiting for customs.

La Paz

This guy fixed the focussing on m y camera for $90. Absolutely brilliant.

La Paz is very up and down and at 4000m or something like that, so going up stairs you get pretty breathless.

Lots of ladies in traditional dress.

The bus station, where I arrived at about 10pm after loads of delays on the bus - at nght time in a new city a bit scary. And La Paz does have a bit of a dangerous reputation.

Roads are mad - nearly got run over several times. Making up for the lack of oxygen are clouds of petrol and diesel fumes, carbon monoxide... and other life enhancing gases. Cough, cough.

Lots of markets-

Here you can see dead llama babies and foetuses in the which market. These are placed in the foundations of new buildings as an offering to the earth goddess.

View from a tall hotel . see he mountain in the background.

Abseiling from the top of the the hotel.

Not such a nice sign - I mentioned the reputation

Off to Death Road - I was a bit nervous about this. Top Gear filmed here. Lots of people have died on this road, over 100 in one incident alone. You can mountain bike from the top down 3500m. Last cyclist to die was a Japanese girl who was fiddling with her Iphone (maybe trying to get a signal) and just went over the edge. One or two cyclists die each year.

This is where Jeremy Clarkson drove the car near the edge with rocks dropping down into oblivion.

Nobody on our trip dies, but that does not mean that there were no accidents!

Two minutes after patching two people up, one leg and elbows, the other shoulder, this guy went off right in front of me. If he had hit the rock 1m away it would have been a different story. "Please guys" said the guide, "Only 15 minutes to the end, no more!".