Good-bye Bolivia, Hello Argentina! - Tupiza to Tilcara

Our last stop in Bolivia was Tupiza. This place is supposed to be great for wild west scenery. There is also some connection to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I never quite figured it out. The best way to see the scenery is by horse or jeep. In the end we didn't do the one activity Tupiza really has to offer. The tours were more expensive that we had anticipated (when you are coming to the end of a country it's an art to try and spend just the right amount of money before the border) and I had a cold and didn't fancy riding a bike around (the cheaper option). 

The one thing we did do was walk up to the look out, complete with Jesus statue (almost every town in South America has one of these). There were pretty good views up the top and some giddy school girls asked to have their photo taken with me (usually they want Alex but not today!). I always wonder what happens to these photos, am I on some school girl's facebook page?

View over Tupiza - it was a dusty town

The walk up to these miradors is usually lined with scenes from Jesus's crusifiction. Jesus has blacked up on this one - complete with "Jesus is black" caption.  

In the end we weren't overly impressed with Tupiza. The internet was terrible, even in internet cafes, and the town just generally seemed quite dead. It was a tough time trying to find somewhere good to eat. It's a bit sad that this is how we ended our time in Bolivia.

We only had about two and a half weeks in Bolivia in the end, a bit of a rush through. I wish we'd been able to get a bit more off the gringo trail and see some different parts. Bolivia was colourful and crazy. I'm not going to miss the annoyingly combined showers with toilets (resulting in a very wet room) but I am going to miss the cheap private rooms (we didn't stay in one dorm during our time in Bolivia!) and the amazing market smoothies. 

We took another shorter than expected bus to the border town of Villazon. We still had a decent amount of Bolivianos left and I wasn't sure if we would be able to change them so we wandered around the town and bought some toiletries (they'll be cheaper than in Argentina) and stopped to have lunch (we don't usually have lunch on border run days, only snacks). Everything was going great, we ended up changing Bolivianos into Argentine Pesos and strolled across the bridge into Argentina. 

We were pleased to find short lines at immigration (I had read about people having 2 hours waits). We stamped out of Bolivia, no problem. Alex stamped into Argentina, no problem. I tried to stamp into Argentina, problem. Turns out Australians (as well as Canadians and Americans) need to pay a reciprocal fee on the internet before getting to Argentina. I could not pay this at the border. So I was in no man's land for an hour (and Alex was technically in Argentina) while we ran back into Bolivia to find an internet cafe. This was exhausting with our big bags and I was horrified to find I had to pay $100 USD to get in (you better be worth it Argentina.) Although later I spoke with some Americans and found out they had to pay $160 so it could be worse. I still loathe reciprocal fees though, it's not my fault my government is a dick. 

Back at the border there were still no lines so we sailed smoothly into Argentina. We walked into town and got a bus to Tilcara, a small town in the north of Argentina. We found a hostel that was decently priced (we were worried about how expensive Argentina was going to be) and changed our money at an unfavorable rate in the hostel. There's not much choice though at 7pm in a 6 000 person town. 

We had read about dinner not starting until about 8 or 9 pm and that many restaurants won't even open before then so we stayed in the hostel until about 9 pm to go find some food. We found a great little restaurant where we had delicious pasta (all that Italian immigration at work) and of course a bottle of wine. We ended up being the last one's in the restaurant and clearly the staff were waiting for us to leave so they could go home. This made us a bit confused as to what time really is the best time for dinner.

After dinner we went to bed, setting an alarm for the next day as the hostel had an early check-out by backpacker standards (10 am) and we needed to fit breakfast in first. I woke up the next day before my alarm went off, I'd had a thought: what if we'd changed time zones and we hadn't even known! Turns out I was right, which meant we actually didn't show up at the restaurant until about 10 pm the night before. This also led to a rather rushed morning as we'd stayed in bed almost an hour longer than we had meant to. With this and the visa issue at the border we were worried that we had gotten too lazy to research properly! Maybe not much of a surprise after so long on the road.

We didn't do that much in Tilcara. Of course we went up another mirador, this time with a cross instead of a Jesus. Then we went back down into town to find lunch. We settled on street calzones. We were really struggling with what times Argentinians eat their meals and had trouble finding a cafe open at lunch time. We spent the rest of our time in Tilcara waiting for our late bus in the bus station. 

It might sound (and look) like Tilcara and Tupiza are pretty similar but we felt the change between Bolivia and Argentina almost instantly after crossing the border. Never have we felt such a change between countries, except maybe Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Bolivia was great but after 8 months in Latin America the promise of that European feel that Argentina offers has made us quite excited.