Moon Valley

Bolivia, Day 2: Valle de la Luna

After a noisy night sleeping above the city streets and missing the comfort of our own bed, we awoke to another gorgeous sunny day in La Paz. Before we arrived in Bolivia, we had been following the La Paz weather which was rain, rain, and more rain... amazingly the last 2 days have been nothing but dry, clear, and sunny in the 60's -- literally perfect weather.

We started the day with a simple breakfast in our hotel of puffy Bolivian cereal (quinoa I think), local fruits, fresh baked bread, orange juice, and coca tea. Coca tea is brewed with the leaf of the coca plant, the plant notoriously used to manufacture cocaine -- but the leaf is consumed as a cure-all for altitude sickness, headaches, and many ailments. It was pretty tasty actually! After eating and chatting with an enthusiastic German traveler that had just spent the last 8 weeks traveling solo in the Andes, we headed down to the San Francisco Cathedral to catch a "micro" bus (basically a packed-to-capacity mini-van) to Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley) to do some hiking. On our walk down the steep narrow sidewalks of La Paz, it became apparent to the both of us that it was Palm Sunday, as the locals were buzzing about going to church and buying and selling intricately weaved palm leaves made into religious tchotchkes. We enjoyed watching the colorful locals in their traditional dress congregating and selling their holiday goods and foods. The micro bus fare was only 30 cents for a half hour ride to travel several miles away -- we still can't figure out how that even covers the cost of gas!

Valle de la Luna lies south of La Paz just beyond the suburbs and is a nice escape down below 10,500 feet to do some light hiking. It's a stretch of eerie cactus-strewn badlands scarred by deep canyons and strange formations of clay and rock carved by seasonal rains into pinnacles resembling church organ pipes. We walked the main loop in the park and took lots of photos, rested intermittently to give Eliana’s aching knee a break, and Marc finally got his GPS working here after fiddling with the Garmin menus for a while. Coincidentally, once he got the GPS operational, a geocache called "Espinoso" popped up on the map only 0.2 miles away!

After the first 2 attempts to access the cache location ended with peering down some serious vertical drop-offs, we finally figured out the location -- only the cache was nowhere to be found. Oh, well - good attempt anyway and we found some interesting trails in our quest. After hiking, we continued the adventure on to the village of Mallasa, where we had an overpriced lunch at a Swiss restaurant (Hotel Oberlander) with a nice view of the mountains. After filling our bellies with cheese fondu, we hopped on another microbus back to La Paz and made our way back to the hotel where we took a delicious late afternoon nap. Tonight we are feeling sunburned, headachy, and tired, but are already planning our day trip tomorrow to the ruins of Tiwanaku.

Addendum: Eliana got completely sick at night, puked her guts out, had a sore knee and a horrible headache until the next morning. Musta been the cheese fondue. Guacala!