Bolivia- sand dunes, flamingos, and a giant sloth

May 19-24, 2016

Just one week after getting home from my big travel adventure, I set out for one last hurrah before putting my passport away for a while. I got the chance to do field work in Bolivia for the lab I worked with all through undergrad, so I'll be here for 10 field days and then 5 on my own exploring a little. Or rather 'we' will be exploring, since my friend Taryn was able to come as my field assistant. She was the one who visited me in Colombia.

So we set out from Sea-Tac at 5am, and 24 hours and 3 airplanes later found ourselves at 13,300 feet in La Paz, Bolivia.

2:30am oxygen deprived faces, but still smiling!

It was a weird feeling being at elevation with no time to acclimate, I definitely was kinda dizzy feeling with a touch of headache. We had a short layover there before another two planes got us to Tarija, almost at the border with Argentina.

Out the window, beautiful mountains

There we met the rest of the group from universities in Ohio, and got to our first hotel. Taryn and I went for a walk in the afternoon and found pretty scenery and a teeter totter.

We had a tour of a museum in an old monastery, which was filled with lots of interesting things from the 16th century and later. My favorite room was the library, chock full of beautiful old books.  They had 15 from the 1500s, some from the 1600s, and most from the 1700s and after when the monastery became a school.

One night there, then we set out for Quebrada Honda, our field site. The Bolivian landscape here is wide open, dry, barren, and beautiful.

We paused at the crossroads to the site and the nearby town where Darin (our fearless leader) had to go to get some permissions.

It was the perfect time for a Bolivian selfie.

It ended up that the mayor was in an all-town meeting, so we all drove into town since there was going to be some waiting.

Yunchapa was a cute little place with a lovely park. Taryn and I found the baño next to the town hall, and as we were leaving got the 'where are you from' questions from a couple guys and ended up chatting with them for an hour. We learned about the animals around, typical foods, some geography. And I'm realizing now we didn't once get asked if we were single, which was a pleasant change.

We ended up needing more paperwork and signatures before they would let us work there, Bolivian politics are hard to navigate apparently, so we ended up staying the night.

We got rooms at the hotel run by the mayor's dad, and once bundled up properly slept pretty well. Being at such high elevation it gets really chilly after the sun goes down, so we all did sleeping bags under blankets while wearing hats and fleeces.

The next morning we packed everything back up to return to Tarija. Along the way we did a little bit of sightseeing with Jacinto, the local geologist helping us out.

We stopped at a teensy town in the middle of nowhere, next to the sand dunes and lake we were headed for. The church was cute, and a couple of us climbed the bell tower.

The stairs were barely shoulder width, and not meant for tall people.

Getting up to the bell tower. I definitely bumped my head a couple times coming down.

Taryn, Angeline, and Darin

Jacinto did some explaining about things, you can see how removed from anywhere we were.

We visited the sand dunes there, and they took my breath away.

Blue sky, white dunes, scrubby bushes around. It was a beautiful landscape.

Left to right: me, Beverly, Andy, Darin, Jacinto, Taryn, Angeline, and Dan

Then we drove next door to Laguna Grande, where I got to check flamingos off of Wildlife Bingo.

Flamingo selfie! They're really small in the background

When the flocks took off and flew together it was really pretty, a mass of fluttering black and pink

Duck nest on the dried up lake bed, the water is really low right now

Back in Tarija we had a lazy day waiting for people and paperwork, and took a tour of the natural history museum. It had a great selection of big fossils from the area.

The one type of ancient elephant out of the three that made it to South America. Mammoths and mastodons didn't get that far south. I don't remember its name though..

Glyptodont skeleton

Glyptodont with the shell attached

Ancient capybara skull

Glyptodont tail with old and modern armadillo animals

There was also a giant sloth which we had lots of  fun with.

Also a collection of rocks and invertebrate fossils from across Bolivia.

rhodochrosite makes the pretty pink

big beautiful amythyst

pyritized ammonite (filled with pyrite and then the shell dissolved so it looks like it's made of gold)

bracheopod

We're on our way back out to the field now, armed with more papers and signatures.  My next post in a week or so should be filled with photos of field work!