When we were floating around on Journey, I spent quite a bit of time and energy on our FB page and this blog.  I really cared how many “likes” we got and I really wanted folks to follow our story.  Now that we are land-based again, I care much less because we are boring worker-bees again :)  But lately, we have had lots of interest in our story, welcoming a whole crop of new “likes” and blog followers.  I hope that you’ve had a moment to visit our About Us page and know that we are taking a little break from cruising to re-fill the kitty.

Winter in Maryland keeps us away from the boat, so we don’t have any sailing stories for ya right now.  But cruising has definitely given us the travel bug and this Christmas, we planned a trip to visit family in Bolivia.  Cruisers and cruising wanna-bes tend to love travel, so I hope you will allow this non-sailing post about our 2 week adventure in land-locked Bolivia.

The stars aligned and made it possible for me, JR, my BFF, her hubby, and another set of close friends to travel together to Bolivia to visit our respective families this Christmas.  It’s a big, expensive trip, so the fact that the 6 of us were able to carve out time to travel together is pretty rad.  We left around the 20th of December, headed to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, then onto the smaller town our parents are from, Tarija, Bolivia.

After a few short days in Santa Cruz, we jumped on a plane and took a short trip to Tarija where we welcomed by lots of family and my daddy!  We spent Christmas there before hopping in a van to tour the Salt Flats near Uyuni, Bolivia.

After Christmas, the original 6 of us rented a van and drove to Uyuni, Bolivia, the home of the world’s largest salt flats.  It was an 8 hour drive and it seemed like it was straight up since it is right around 12,000 feet above sea level.  We toured the salt flats for 2 days with a great guide named Ivan :)  We started at the train cemetery, entered the salt flats at Colchani, saw the bubbling water that lives under the salt, visited some llamas, took in the view (wow), played with pictures (Ivan was great at this) and ended our day in a salt hostel.  A hostel!  We are officially travelers.  For dinner at the hostel, some of the crew even ate the local favorite, llama chops!

The second day started with a beautiful sunrise, then we visited the island Incahuasi which reminded me so much of the beautiful, little, scrubby islands of the Bahamas.  After that we chiseled for some salt crystals, and drove up to the Tunupa volcano for beautiful views and mummies, of course.  It was an insane trip.  One of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.  If you have the opportunity, go.

After our tour of the Salar, 4 outta 6 of us traveled back to Tarija to spend New Year’s and a few more days with our families.  Uyuni was a lovely detour.  We were fortunate to have a local family member book the trip for us before we got there.  We had ZERO luck finding Uyuni tour information on-line.  We know now that if we didn’t have a connection, it would have been very easy to get to Uyuni and book the trip once there.  It seems that’s how most folks do it.  Anyway, go :)

Here are a few more pics of our last few days with the family in Tarija.  It was wonderful and we look forward to going back.