As we ride or horses through the landscape of red and black mountains of rock i feel like a real cowboy, as they gave us chaps, to save graham lower legs, and cool cowboy hats to protect us from the sun. The rocks look like lightning bolts thrown down into the earth and have almost a peach colour. We are told they form like that due to the erosion of the soft stone.
They have huge cactus here as well, and they grow 3 cm per year so really big ones are over 300 years old. Bolivia and Topiza looks a lot poorer than Brazil and Argentina but yet they have everything available you need and as we really feel ilke staying in a nice place we go to the most expensive hotel in town at 14 euros a night.
on the way here over night we meet another couple who are forced to take a detour in their travels to Bolivia instead of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile due to the snow closing the border. Fran and Dave are Aussies who have been working for the last two years in the desert in Australia to save for travelling, and we get on great straight away.
Topiza has a real desert climate where it gets really cold at night and during the day we are wearing t-shirts while horse riding, at 2950 meters were pretty high and going for a 10 km walk is killer i can tell you.
