Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

Are we in the Wild West???



If you´ve ever heard of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you would know they are dead....since 1908. Apparently, if you read the article, they died here in the South west of Bolivia.

After crossing the Argentina/Bolivia border with a little of a wait. We hoped on our bus, and man did it feel good to be back in Bolivian bus stations with stray dogs, women yelling destinations, and ¨aged¨ buses. We met a Kiwi couple (Kiwi is slang for from New Zealand) and we were all on the bus together to reach Tupiza, Bolivia.

http://www.gonomad.com/features/0507/butch_cassidy_trail_in_bolivia.html

While on the bus, and once arrived, you have a look around and I realized how much it looked ilke the southwest of the states, dry desert like. Beautiful in my opinion, but maybe not everybody´s cup o´tea. We spent the next day, Beth and I, on a walk. We didn´t exactly follow Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kíd´s route, but same general area and same pueblo they were trying to rob. We walked out following a path and a disneyland like map that was a substitute for our topographical map of the desert we walked alone into. We walked a couple of miles before reaching the land-fill for the town, quite a scenery. Although the rest of the scenery was quite impressive, multi-colored rock backdrop. We walked around the desert and found some really cool formations. We also stumbled upon a creek and laid in the clay colored mud and relaxed. We were accompanied by the shaggiest loking dog that walked the whole 9 miles with us inteh hot hot sun. We reached town exhausted and couldn´t wait to wash off the layers of dirt......ahhhh felt like camping at home, how I´d missed it. We were also quite confused because we thought that Sunday was Easter Sunday and were telling all the people we met the same, cometo find out....it was Palm Sunday, a week off. I think i´ve been gone quite a long time, forgettin´the days???

The next day we spent with Rosie and Andrew, a couple from New Zealand (who got me even more excited to go to my number 1 country!) We all went together in a 4WD Jeep and drove around, seeing beautiful desert scenery. Once atop some of the mountains you could see the different colors that ran horizontally threw the desert. One strip of mountians red, next to a grey mountain range, that switches to orange right int he middle. Hard to describe if you´ve never seen the southwest. There were also tower looking canyons that looked like wax towers of teh sand, creating towers and canyons of massive sizes.

From Tupiza, I took the first train ride since i´ve been down here. The old train route was/is used to transport minerals mined from the desert areas like Tupiza and Uyuni. We took a freezing overnight train to Oruro (where we had been before for Carnaval) and from there made our way back to the infamous La Paz.