Near the town of Samaipata, where I went in hiding for a few days to escape carnaval in either Santa Cruz or Sucre, is a small town about 3 hours from Santa Cruz and is famous for ecotourism and probably the enormous amount of foreigners who live there.

El Fuerte is an old Inca ruin near the town which was a fort, town and tradepoint in the old empire.

The formal capital of Bolivia! And a pretty beautiful city.

Typical Bolivian music. Our guide and driver gave us the run-down of this and many more on the 8 hour drive back. Imagina this music, the landscapes, the bouncing car and a guy blabbering off in Castillano for the whole feeling.

Klik hier om de embedded video te bekijken.

The biggest salt field in the world. Notice the volcano in the back on one photo is about 100 km far away. Amazing wide views.

Uyuni is a small town in the west of Bolivia, basically in the middle of nowhere. It used to be the central point for trains in Bolivia. The town knew many immigrants from Europe and America who where working in maintainance of the trains and the system; most of the locomotives came from countries like England, Germany and later the US. In the train cemetary there are still some old trains lying around ( photos in a later update ).

In the nineties the Bolivian government decided – cough – was forced to privatise the train system which almost meant an overnight end to the town of Uyuni. Many people moved away to find work in other places. Luckily the town survived only because tourism picked up for the nearby salar. Nowadays the town fully lives on tourism.

Without tourism the town would be another ghosttown hit by the here devastating nightmare of neoliberalism.