Excursion to the Altiplano - the high valleys

As I mentioned in my previous post, monday was a mandatory, yet unexpected day off. Me and two coworkers (Sam and Jeff F.) took full advantage of this, and decided to go on a road trip, leaving early in the morning for a day trip out to the Altiplano - the high valleys. There is a national park there called "Lauca", and is located in the Andes mountains. (It feels so exotic to finally be in the Andes! - I've always wanted to see this!)

One problem - it is at an altitude of 15,000 ft. (i.e. 4500 m.)! This might not sound like all that much higher for us Wyoming-ites, but trust me, coming directly from sea level (where the hotel is), it is quite a change! We all suffered from altitude sickness for most of the day. Luckily, I never got nauseous, but my head sure felt awful loopy and slow! Needless to say we didn't do very much walking around, because we were all gasping for air with the smallest hill :).



(note: before I went, I did do some online research to see if it is ok for pregnant ladies to experience such rapid changes of altitude, and couldn't find anything that said it is bad, unless you are in an oxygen deprived area for several days/weeks, or are in bad shape to begin with)








Early part of our road trip - a dessert valley with clouds - yet not a green thing to be found




It's me!

Going up a little higher in altitude, all of a sudden, in the middle of nowhere, we started seeing these cactus! Quite a sight!

You can see how spread apart they are, and are growing in the middle of the dessert.

And, going up a little more in altitude, the first shrubs and bushes were growing, and we started to see our first animals - this guy is a guanaco, a member of the camel family, and living wild and freely in these areas! So cool! We saw quite a bunch of them!

An old house, with in the back ground the volcano!

And me :)

Another house

The border with Bolivia! It felt so exotic to take this picture! ....

And then to turn around to take this picture!!

And - BOOM! The sights of the altiplano - the pictures don't even do it justice - it was absolutely stunning!

Pink flamingoes at the lake! Who would have thought these guys live at 15,000 ft (4500 m) ?

Snow capped volcano - some of the volcanoes actually had plumes coming out of them.

We also saw hurds and hurds of alpaca's!

Alpaca's grazing. Since there are so many alpaca's here, things made from their wool is very common here. I've already bought some nice soft scarves, a hat, a banket, and the cutest little baby sweater ever :) (again - I love shopping for baby things!! - cannot wait to meet this little person!)

This one is for Ben - the entrance sign to the national park Lauca. It is our tradition, we take one for every national park we visit in the US as well :)

On the way back, we stopped in this little mountain town called "Putre". We walked around town, and ate some lunch there:

The church

We found this one little restaurant that was open, and it was filled with local people, eating something that smelled pretty tasty, so we thought we'd give the place a try. I really was craving french fries, and was looking forward to scoping out the menu for them, but, instead when we walked in, we were asked if we wanted to eat: "yes" was our answer. But, no menu ever came - I guess they only had one option, the menu of the day - what all the locals were eating. About 5 minutes later, the guy came out with our first course: some pickled beets and lettuce. After that, we got the soup from a bone that you see in the picture - it was made with the most interesting spices, and tasted unlike anything i've ever had before. In it was a potato, and some weird kind of corn, and a chunk of bone with meat on it. Turns out this meat was actually Alpaca!! First time I've ever eaten alpaca before! It was pretty tasty, but it had lots and lots of fat on it :(

After that soup came yet another plate, this one filled with sort of a poor mans' paella (rice dish)- with the weirdest looking sweet water clams and other creatures in it. Again - good thing I am not a picky eater, because this was probably the farthest thing away from my trusty french fries, and I ate it all :) So much fun to eat true local food!

"Our specialty is Alpaca"


Me in the town square