All the way south

After following some contacts in La Paz, Theo was able to identify an interesting charity project in Sajama, Bolivia.

Mountain climbers know Sajama as the tallest mountain in Bolivia at 6,542 meters or 21,463 feet.  The town of Sajama has a couple of hundred people and is located at the base of the mountain in Bolivia’s Altiplano.

The Altiplano is a very rough environment as it is a high altitude desert (Sajama is around 14,000 feet).  There aren’t many people living there because there is so little vegetation.  The majority of what I saw while driving to Sajama were alpaca (!!!!!) and very small villages of indigineous people.

I didn’t see if they were selling lentils, but I did find it interesting that I was in a region of the world where I could directly meet recipients of US foreign aid. That photo was taken at a roadside market.

Here you can see some of the locals at the market. This place was very well stocked as many other places we’d stop in Bolivia, you’d have a choice between crackers and crackers.

This part of the world is absolutely beautiful.  Driving around Bolivia really made me feel like I was experiencing planet earth, not human civilization.  There were very few cars and trucks on the roads.

The presence of alpaca was significant along the way.

Everything is sandy.  Fortunately alpaca are able to eat the grass that grows in the desert.

I’m going to write about the charity project in a seperate blog entry later, so I’m going to skip over that part and just write about the town of Sajama.

The town is located in the national park of the mountian and consists of a few sand roads of houses and shops with a huge plaza in the middle.  Sajama has many amazing opportunities for nature tourists (or should I say eco-tourists, vomit).

Hotsprings!

Bolivia’s highest mountian

Geisers

Bubbling geisers that shoot up many meters into the sky (not this one though).

Amazing sunsets

Here’s where I stayed in Sajama, Alojamiento “Los Andes”, or hotel Los Andes.  It was very comfortable and humble.  Everything was perfectly clean and it had one of the more interesting bathrooms in my trip.  Just a toliet where you had to use a bucket to flush it yourself.

There were no street lights at night so it was an experience trying to find our hotel after sunset.

Again, Nevado Sajama.  Such a beautiful mountian.

The roads were pretty rough– you had a choice of either corrugated (washboard) sand or loose sand.  Whatever happened to hardpacked sand?

Alpaca queueing up to cross the road.

Sometimes you’d have to wait 5 or 6 minutes to wait for the line of alpaca to cross.  Whats amazing is there wasn’t any sheperd leading the herd.  They just queued up natually.  So cute AND smart.  What great animals.