So Thursday last week saw me getting in a jeep for a four day trip from Tupiza. Tupiza is a nice wee town, very wild west and is where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid came to their demise (or very near). I watched the movie to celebrate being in the area. I had wanted to see that movie for a long time anyway, so it was a nice excuse.
So the five of us (all who had met up on the night bus) jumped into the jeep with excitement and off we went. Our group consisted of Emila and Michael, a lovely Irish couple, and 2 German boys, Mike and Sascha. I was very happy with our wee group. The only thing that could have improved it would have been if anyone had been able to speak decent spanish. Our guide Max, and the cook Elizabeth spoke only Spanish and while we got by, we wished we could have conversed with them more. We went with the tour company Valle Hermosa, who I highly recommend, and we also stayed there as well so we got a small discount on the trip.
The scenery at the beginning was rugged and rocky and as we passed our first llama we all yelled out "LLama". We stopped to eat lunch with the llamas in the field below us. The food for lunch was a great omen of the great food to come, and we were not disappointed! We also got to know Amanda, a cool American chick who spoke fluent Spanish (very helpful) and who was with a group of 3 Parisian boys who weren´t being super friendly so we befriended her instead. They were part of the other jeep with the same company so we stayed together for the whole trip.
All was great until we came to a grinding halt. Expecting our big beast of a jeep to get through anything we got out of the jeep hoping that this would be a 5 minute stop. However, we were firmly stuck and without a spade (another group gifted it to us later) we (well the boys, as the girls were sectioned into the other jeep to keep warm or something) shovelled the mud out with plates (I assume that they washed them before serving us dinner on them!). The three of us girls were having a great time in the back of the other jeep, laughing and feeling minorly guilty that we didn´t have to do anything.
We did finally get out and help once we realised that they were collecting stones for leverage and then Shrubbery! We finally managed to get out of there 3 hours later, after we had resigned ourselves to a freezing night in the jeep. We were extremely glad to see our beds, and after a late dinner, exhausted we fell asleep.
