The final reblog today from our travel blog from 2006 which was originally hosted on Bootsnall blog.

Tupiza

We crossed the border from Argentina into Bolivia and made our way to the train station so we could buy a ticket. We had heard that the roads in Bolivia are quite bad (only about 5% of them are paved or something) so did not want to get a bus. The ticket office did not open until 2pm so we had to wait around for a bit. Once the ticket office opened we decided to treat ourselves and go first class for 2.50 (pounds) each for the 4 hour journey. During the journey we were delighted to get a free cheese roll each and a bottle of coke while we watched a really cool movie about young Shaolin Monks who could do press-ups on one finger and other cool stuff.

We eventually arrived in Tupiza at about 6:30pm and got a room for the bargain price of 50 Bolivianos (about 3.50 pounds). Bolivia is a lot cheaper than everywhere we have been so far and first impressions are really good. I have seen pictures of Bolivian ladies in books wearing bowler hats and weird dresses but I never thought that they actually wore the clothes all the time but I was pleased to find out that the vast majority of them do. Here is sneaky picture I took of one such Bolivian lady. (I pretended I was taking a picture of Kelly but moved the camera.)

Check out this picture too. Even the kids wear cool hats.

While we were in Tupiza we decided to do a 3 hour horse ride. We had spoken to a few people who had done one and they said that the guide asked what experience you had before explaining a few things before setting off on a gentle stroll.

Unfortunatley for us our guide could not speak any English and did not explain anything to us at all. I was able to get it across to him that we had both never been on a horse before but this did not seem to make any difference. At first he got the horses to walk along nicely which was OK but about 30 minutes before the end of the trek he started making weird kissing noises and the horses started to trot for a while which was a bit harder for us. He continued to make kissing noises until the horses cantered and then finally galloped. By this point we were both holding on for dear life. God knows how we didn't fall off. Kelly's hands were blistered from holding on so tight.

Here are a couple of pictures of us before our guide started making kissing noises. The scenery was lovely.

The next day we found out that someone had fallen off their horse while on a similar trek and was in hospital so we were lucky. I think we will get some horse riding lessons before we do any more treks.

Here is the final picture showing Kelly with Tupiza town in the background.