As planned earlier, we started our journey towards the mountains and Uyuni in the morning. First transport method in today's selection was the local airline, Boliviana de Aviacion and their old Boeing 737. The flight was relatively empty and the flight attendants were not really busy, so I used the opportunity before departure and requested if they could ask the captain can I travel in the cockpit, handing my pilot license. The helpful and nice flight attendant went to ask the captain, but unfortunately there was already an instructor pilot in the cockpit occupying the third extra seat.. So no luck this time, but would have been if the seat was free. :)

The short flight landed to the capital Sucre in half an hour, saving us a day long bus trip on the bad quality mountain roads. We explored the white capital for a while, carrying our annoyingly heavy bags around. Sucre is already relatively high in the mountains, so temperature was much more confortable around 25C, which made carrying the bags much more tolerable. I found myself a shop selling local handicrafts and got a nice handmade sweater for like 15 euros. Have to shop a bit more clothes later in La Paz, and maybe a hammock too.

After reaching Sucre Timo and Kim decided that they were not actually interested enough in seeing the Uyuni salt desert to sit half the day in bus again. The guys were just not completely recovered of our two days bus trip earlier yet, so they decided that they would stay a night in Sucre, see the city (and probably the American tourist girls Kim met in the previous hostel....) and then fly to our next destination La Paz. So, the boys stayed while we others continued down towards Uyuni, and we would meet again in La Paz on Saturday morning.

From Sucre there was two options to continue to the next waypoint, the mining city Potosi. Three hours by bus or two hours by taxi, without any actual price difference so the taxi was a pretty clear selection. Somehow we just managed to find the slowest taxi driver I have ever seen, he actually used three and half hours to travel the 200km trip over mountains. Maybe next time we try to select a car that has more than two horsepower and a bit more active driver.. Well, at least price was not bad, some 20 euros for 200 kilometers by taxi.

Due to that slow taxi we arrived Potosi kinda late, only having maybe two hours in the city. That was just enough to get us bus tickets for the last part of the journey to Uyuni and half a chicken to eat in the bus, but touring the silver mines of Potosi had to be skipped. An underground tour to the mines would have been interesting, not to mention the fact that they actually sell dynamite as "souvenir" near the mines, $1 a piece. Could have picked up a couple to use later on in the desert but didn't have time now. :)

Now we are high in the mountains, over four kilometers altitude already and the air is really thin compared to sea level. That is starting to show as slight signs of altitude sickness. Just being tired, easily out of breath and a bit light-minded, nothing more than that though... And it should disappear in a day or so when our bodies adapt to the high altitude. Our fresh drug addict Lukasz is medicating himself in his own way, munching coca leaves continuously just as all the locals. They are said to help and are completely legal and widely used in Bolivia.

In Uyuni we have a really nice hotel booked, Jardin de Uyuni. The hotel was basically almost similarly priced than the cheapest options in the town, but looked much better to me in reviews and pictures so had to invest a bit more to it. Also Uyuni being high on mountains is cold at night and only the better hotels have actually working heating, so didn't want to risk with freezing all the night. Looking forward to their extensive real hotel breakfast in the morning, will be munching everything. :)

After arriving to Uyuni guy from the company with whom we booked a Salar de Uyuni tour tomorrow picked us up at the bus station and dropped us at the hotel. Tomorrow morning it will be departure at 10 to one of the emptiest and most hostile but still beautiful places in the world, the huge salt desert of Salar de Uyuni.

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Today was a lazy day in Santa Cruz. After the two days bus trip nobody exactly felt like leaving Santa Cruz immediately, so we decided to stay two nights here. Nobody also was able to decide what to do in here, so after midday we still had no decisions done.

Me, Iryna, Timo and Kim finally started walking through the city, having an idea of getting a rental 4x4 car and driving to check out some of the nearby national parks and other sights. After walking through the downtown and having some food it was already two in the afternoon, so getting a car wouldn't have been that useful. Night would fall around seven anyway.

There was a botanical garden nearby, which was said to have a lot of interesting plants and wildlife, so that was the destination for the rest of the day then. Two-three hours of forest walking, back to the hostel and that's it for today.

Bananas are cheap, by the way... There was a guy driving around the residential block selling fruits from his trunk. Two kilos of bananas cost five bolivianos, equaling around 50 euro cents.. And they are tasty. :)

Tomorrow morning we will be continuing our way towards Uyuni salt desert, by flying to Sucre and then continuing down with either taxi or rental car. The 30 minutes flight is going to save us a 15 hour bus drive, and the ~30€ price was not too bad for that..

And Ari, yea, the internet access in here is kind of random, so expect some pauses in updating the blog. There was not even cellphone coverage in the middle of nowhere, and definitely no WiFi on that crappy old bus. :)

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Uhh.. That was a long journey. I promise I won't complain about long-haul flights for a while..

The journey begun relatively easy. Four hour bus to Caceres was comfortable and air conditioned and we were sleeping almost all the way. Upon arrival to Caceres we took a taxi to the local police station to get our passports stamped for exiting Brazil, and then another taxi to the border. The taxi driver then took us about 70 kilometers from Caceres to the Bolivian border city, San Mathias.

Finding the entry stamps to Bolivia was a bit more difficult process, the migration office at the bus station was closed and we had to find another one in the city. Nobody exactly expected money changer to be located in a clothes store either, so the friendly old taxi driver was great help to us. We actually paid him pretty much over the originally agreed price, as the guy had to go through a lot of extra trouble to help us out.

When we finally had fresh Bolivian stamps in our passports and some Bolivian money in the pockets we were already couple of minutes past the departure time of the last bus. Luckily here in South America the schedules are not so exact, ticketing office lady just called to the bus station and asked the bus to wait for us. Now here begun the fun part of the trip. The bus was not exactly an air conditioned comfortable bus with fully reclining seats like the Brazilian ones. No, it was maybe from the sixties and barely in one piece.. And the trip would take 25 hours.

The first hours were actually relatively easy on the hot bus. We just looked at Pantanal scenary and relaxed while our shitty bus crawled kilometer after kilometer on the unpaved dirt road, and after sunset we just watched a couple of movies before sleeping. At three in the morning the bus stopped: There were trucks stuck in mud in front of us and the road was blocked. So, there we were happily stuck in middle of nowhere for hours, before the situation finally started to clear around nine in the morning. It needed some Finnish power to clear it, an old Finnish-made Valmet tractor from the seventies to pull the big trucks off the mud.

Finally the unpaved road ended and our bus started progressing faster and less shaking towards Santa Cruz where we arrived in a couple of hours more. We walked to a local hostel which seems to be a nice place, ordered cold Caipirinhas and are looking forward to their "eat all you can" Barbeque evening today after only eating cookies on bus for two days. :)

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Uhh.. Time to begin the most boring and longest part of the trip: Bus from Cuiaba, Brazilia to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It's now seven in the morning and we are already in the bus, scheduled to arrive Santa Cruz tomorrow morning.

First a four hour bus to Caceres, then a taxi or bus to the border, border crossing and a LONG bus journey through Bolivian jungles on bad roads. Lovely. :P

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There are only two actual attractions in Cuiaba, the national parks of Pantanal and Chapada dos Guimarães highlands. Today the later one was our destination, mainly for waterfalls.We drove to Chapada dos Guimarães in the morning, saw one pretty lame waterfall, had food in the city and a swim in another, much better waterfall. Not a bad day afterall. :)

Here is a video of Transpantanal road yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nVTFCqspc&hd=1

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The day was well spent making our cars totally dirty on the Transpantaneira "highway". The so called highway is a muddy dirt road that passes through the Pantanal wetlands south of the city of Pocone.

The wetlands are full of wildlife, during the day we spotted countless crocodiles, bird species and Cabybaras, the largest rodents in the world. The crocodiles were fun, silently laying in shallow water and still ready to move extremely fast. It was a bit bothering to see how they kept their eyes fixed on us while we slowly approached them for photos. Ever feeled like being looked like a beef? :P

Timo and Kim were driving the other car, me, girls and Lukas the other one. In the afternoon Timo started thinking it would be better to return home before sunset, as the bad road would not be fun to drive in darkness. Kim and Timo turned back, while we continued for another two hours down the road. The guys missed the best crocotiles etc, so we just had to take a picture for them when finally exiting the dirt road still in nice sunlight. :)

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Some beers and food done, night badly slept due to our hosts continuing with afterparty in their kitchen.. And me winning a sleeping place in the very same kitchen. :P

Now to Pantanal.. Let's see how muddy the roads are.

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We just arrived to Cuiaba in western Brazil, on the edge of the Pantanal wetland after an almost three hour ATR-72 flight. Upon arrival we picked up cars, more or less successfully. I had booked myself a pickup car from Hertz, and their only pickup was parked in the most remote corner of the yard behind 20 other cars. So, I just saved them the hassle and took a normal station wagon, an ugly Fiat. Timo was a bit less lucky, his Alamo car rental required a couple of phone calls etc before actually getting in contact with them and receiving his car. :)

During the day we visited a bird park in Foz do Iguacu after departing our apartment. I managed to leave my camera charger at the apartment, but the apartment owner was super-friendly and brought it over border to the airport for us. :)

Here in Cuiaba we are staying at local couchsurfer people, who came already to the airport to welcome us to their city. Now settling in the apartment and considering of going to have a beer somewhere outside with the locals.

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In the morning it was raining heavily. Extremely heavily, as a children's swimming pool at our yard got half full in an hour. That would be like 30-40mm rainfall in an hour..

In that weather it was no use to go out, so I had good time to finish fixing my laptop and edit the photos which I couldn't have edited earlier due to the laptop problem. They are now online, as you can see.

The rain stopped around midday and after that we just spent the day walking some 15-20 kilometers around the city. Two things noticed that are worth mentioning: First, the soil is red. Everything is red from water to mud, from stones to cars. I guess there is iron in the soil or something.. Secondly, Argentinians like their dogs. There are multiple dogs in every house, and I mean EVERY house. There are probably way more dogs living in the city than humans.

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Quest completed: My laptop has a new 240GB SSD drive and Windows 10 installed. Now downloading Photoshop and other required applications to get back to uploading photos. This definitely was the hardest hard drive ever to get though, it required six passport stamps from three countries and almost a day to obtain.

There was not much chance to find any computer parts in this small countryside village of Puerto Iguazu, so we had to look a bit further. Local people perform all their electronics shopping in the tax-free city of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, just a couple of kilometers away on the other side of the Iguazu river. In addition to tax-free goods the city is also a black market center, where you can basically buy anything from cocaine to assault rifles.

There are a couple of ways to get to Ciudad del Este from Puerto Iguazu: either taking a ferry which crosses the river directly from Argentina to Paraguay, or then taking a taxi or bus through Brazil to Paraguay. We choose the ferry, just for the experience. The ferry trip was relatively quick and there was no queues at either borders. We had to wait a while on the Paraguay border though, when the border guard tried to figure out if Ukrainians or Norwegians should have a visa to enter the country. Too bad it didn't feel appropriate to take a picture when the guy was looking a picture of their border agency web page from his mobile phone, sent to him by someone else after a phone call. Official border documents about who is let in.. :)

We found a bus to Ciudad del Este, went through some twenty electronics shops with annoying sales clerks and finally found a big electronics shop selling us the much-missed drive for decent price of half a million local guaranas which equaled 94 USD.

The shops were already closing at that time, so we just took a taxi back to Argentina which crossed through Brazil, so we had to get our passports stamped four times during that journey. Well, it was still faster and easier than the ferry, as the ferry harbour was a bit further from Ciudad del Este.

Then just some dinner in Puerto Iguazu and the rest of the evening was happily spent installing Windows and other applications. Pictures coming soon. :)

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