Sorata - Hiking

We arrived savely in Sorata, a town in the mountains (Cordillera Real) and we organized a guide that will take us to the high mountains around. Actually, we will not be alone, a mula (Maulesel) will help us carrying our stuff and especially the food for 4-5 days.
Yesterday we also visited the "bus drivers championship" which took place in Sorata. They were playing football in the afternoon and got drunk in the evening ;-) therefore, just few buses went between Sorata and La Paz.

Since we gonna be in the mountains, we will not be able to update the blog for about a week, we may have time around the 24th again!

La Paz and Choro Treck

Heading to La Paz from Arica is a 8-9 hour journey, but due to an accident with several deads and the road constructions in between, it took us 11 h to get there... so instead of arriving at daylight, we arrived around 20.00 in the dark. The good thing is the splendid view over the illuminated la paz, the bad thing is that at night it's less secure... Luckily we had booked a hostal so we grabbed a cab that drove us directly to the hostal Republica.

As usual, we spent the first day in a new city with sight-seeing and organizing the next days. La Paz has actually a bad reputation, since we like this city a lot, it's pretty special and has very interesting corners and we feel safer than e.g. in Quito. In the evening, we had our first bolivian menue (actually we went to an indian restaurant) which was great (and a lot).

Our next day was a "la paz on foot tour" (only for the two of us), where we walked from the altiplato "El Alto" down into the city centre. We visited markets, carneval shops (there is plenty of them) a museum of music instruments and finally, we ended up at the south part of La Paz which is completely different from the rest since here, the rich people live (it looks like a western european city). Great tour but tireing!

La Paz

Illimani

Mummi in the music instrument museum

Close to La Paz is the archeological site of Tiahuanaco, a pre inca civilisation. we booked a "dummy tourist tour" but it was a great trip finally. We got picked up by our tourguide and collected the rest of the group: 4 brasilians, 2 chilenians and two from the UK. Tiahuanaco is worth a visit since it's a great place but the presentation of the artefacts is not too good. But Victor from Brazil entertained all in the bus (with his funny spanish, his stories and his funny ideas).
The way back was hilarious, talking about a lot of non-sense things, and we decided to have dinner all together (the 4 brasilians and the two of us). So we wanted to meat at 20.00 in an Argentinian Grill restaurant (due to the heavy traffic we arrived at 20.45) where we had great meat and delicious wine. After the dinner we went close to our hostal to a party hostal called the wild rover where we had some beers and some more fun :-) before we went to bed (good preparation for the 3 day hike we booked).

Sun Gate

 

At El Arriero

After a short night, we packed our stuff for the 3 day choro track, starting at la cumbre at around 4900m and trailing donw an old path to Chairo on 1400m altitude. At the beginning, it's freezing cold an no vegetation at all, then some gras land appears, little bushes, followed by small trees, clowd forrest and subtropical forrest at the very end. We were accompanied by our guide and a cook that prepared the delicious lunches and dinners and it was a great trip. There is hardly any other tourists in this area at the moment and our guide Daniel was very good!

El Choro Treck

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Broken Bridge

One of the highlights was a about 90 year old Japanese that owns a remote hostal / camping ground. he's collecting postals and he has a vast set of pictures of all over the world. We spent some time with him, looking at swiss postcards and a picture-book of the Bodensee (very funny).

Not to funny were all the insects in the lower area (horse flys / Bremsen) that are ubiquitous :-( at some places, the chickens try to catch the horse flys but they mostly mis (we guess since they dont see enought ) but we survived and had a great trip!

El Japanese

50 % of all our meat

In the evening, our mood was for food, so we went to the el Arriero (Arg. Grill) again! This time, we ordered a 400g sirloin steak (entrecote) and 300g of filet .... very tasty! it comes with salad and fries (and for a strange reason with rice pudding), but you have to fokus on the important things... on the meat :-)

so, what's next? Tomorrow, we head to Sorata, a small town in the mountains, for hiking. There are several options and we'll see what we do exactly there!

Stopover in Arica (North Chile)

 After quite a while, we update our blog again, so what has happened?

Climbing the Chachani causes hunger, so we decided to spend our last evening in Arequipa in the ZigZag, a restaurant that serves meat on hot stone :-) very tasty and big (but it can get bigger as we'll see in the next blog).
Next morning, we left direction south. After passing some mountains, we drove through the desert to Tacna, a town close to the chilenian border, in the middle of nowhere, where you are not alowed to import fuits / nuts / etc. In Tacna we grabbed a small collectivo (a car with 5 1/2 seats) and passed the border to Chile (no furits alowed, they scan the backpacks!) and arrived in Chile, in Arica where we stayed in a hostel run by a Kiwi (Ross).

Through the desert to Tacna

One thing we noticed the evening we arrived is, that in Arica many people are fat... look at the picture and you know why ;-)

Big Burger

We spent the next day planning a trip to Parinacota, a small village at the border to Bolivia, in the lauca national park. Our initial plan was to stay 2-3 nights up there, in 4300m altitude to go hiking and enjoy the scenery. But it came a little different. We also visited the beach of Arica but after less than 2 hours, we left because of the strong winds and we packed for next morning.

Lauca National parc

The bus ride from Arica to the national park is beautiful but a bit bumpy due to the construction sites on the road and we arrived after lunch at chucuio, 4 km away from Parinacota. We followed the path through a lanscape of lagunillas, green patches in the deserted and rocky area, to Parinacota. Once there, we found a lady (the one on the picture) that runs a "hostal/Restaurant" up there and she gave us the keys and showed the room and the showers.

Parinacota with the church

We spent the afternoon sitting in the sun and watching Parinacota (not very busy, we met 3 people and apparently about 15 families live there still.) Since it's getting freezing cold up there (below 0 ) we moved into the "hostal/restaurant" and expected the lady to turn up again... but she didn't... Since it was getting colder and colder in the room (no heating) we put on gloves, hats, thermic trousers and everything what we had and since we were hungry, we opened the kitchen.... 
there we found leftovers (it looked like lama racks) and other old pans with kinds of food, a deep freezer with different kind of meat which we didn't inspect closer, a steal-saw which seemed to be used to cut meat, semi-decayed food and, luckily, tea-bags, pasta and chicken soup (instant). So we started to cook our dinner (which was actually not too bad but freezing cold). Furthermore, it was now dark and we wondered, why a window was broken in room 6 in the "hostal" and there was absolutely NO lights and nobody outside (dead silence, perfect setting for a horror movie)... well, one light was outside... when we went to bed (4 blankets and our sleeping bags) we noticed that the only light in the village was directly outside of our window :-) great nigth!
Next morning, we decided to shorten our stay and we would walk back throught a scenic landscape to the main road to catch on of the busses from La Paz with direction Arica. Luckily, we were able to have a "first class place" nex to the driver so we could see all overtaking manoeuvres... well, finally we were happy to be back in Arica on Sunday afternoon.

Our next task was to find food in the evening, but this was not very successful since ALL restaurants were closed except for: ... Mc Donalds :-(

Next day, we headed to visit Arica and the Rock close to the city centre (which hosts also a small museum) and we relaxed in the pedestrian area in town (we had a great lunch in a small shopping centre) and we had a tiny coffee after the lunch as well ;-)

In the evening, we went to the market to buy some supplies to prepare our own food (550g beef filet, 4 big potateos, onion and peppers) and a bottle of red wine :-) great stuff.
next morning, we left Arica with direction La Paz, but this is in the next blog...