Southwestern Bolivia is supposedly home to some of the greatest scenery in the entire world. We signed up for a four-day jeep tour that would take us from Tupiza to Uyuni, via the so-called Southwest Circuit. The following four blog posts will be pretty heavy on photos and light on writing. We saw an unbelievable amount of amazing sights/scenery and didn’t do too much besides talk and bounce around in the jeep for four days.

            We shared the jeep with three other travelers. First, we met Marty, a Scot living in London, who’s taking seven months off to travel the Americas. He went from Alaska to Panama overland then caught a boat to Colombia and is doing a big clockwise loop of South America. He also did a 9-month Asia trip a few years back, so we had a lot to talk about. We also enjoyed his company because he’s really talkative and pretty funny. Another couple, Oscar and Jess were also traveling with us. They’re newlyweds who are traveling from Australia (where they live) to Colombia (where Oscar is from and Jess has never been yet), via Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Oscar is a wildlife vet, so he provided a lot of interesting commentary and information along the way. Leading us was our driver, Felix, who had a fondness of calling me what sounded like “Ma-tay-us” and Marty, “Mar-teeeeeen.” We also had a cook, Marisol, who worked pretty hard to feed us and surprised me with the quality of the food.

            The first day was not too interesting, but it was scenic. Our first stop on the first day was the Quebrada de Palala, a valley with interestingly-eroded sides. We’ve seen similar-looking formations in different mountainous areas, but never anything so grand in scale (see photo above)

            For the next few hours, we drove through and stopped for lunch in the Valley of the Moon, so called for its unique landscape. Of course, you’d have to ignore all the small grasses and colors to imagine it as the moon. We ate llama tamales and sandwiches for lunch, which were pretty good.

 stopped here for lunch

            We did stop at a small village briefly, just to see what antiplano village life is like. It was just mud huts, although the church was by far the largest and nicest looking building. We saw a guy making adobe bricks as well.

            Although the photo below looks like piles of ash from campfires or something, those big black marks are really piles of llama, alpaca, or vicuna poo. Although they’re really large animals, they just poop what looks like tiny little black pellets. Not only that, but they always poop in the same place, which is why there are enormous piles of the stuff scattered around the tundra.

view from the village where we spent the night