A monument to Che Guevara rests in La Higuera, a small village of South-western Bolivia
Having recalled another rider telling me how great a ride is ‘La ruta del Che’, I decided to pass by on my return to Sucre from Santa Cruz de la Sierra. ‘La ruta del Che’ is a tourist trail following Che Guevara’s movements in the year leading up to his execution. Although not a political person, I do enjoy history and found much of what I saw quite intriguing. The trail comes to an end in ‘La Higuera’, about 45 minutes ride out of the much larger ‘Vallegrande’. What I didn’t expect was the trailing 10 hours or so off-road ride to arrive home in Sucre, which thankfully greeted me just as the sun was setting soon after 6pm.
Needless to say I was pretty worn out!
Tags: bolivia, hdr, la ruta del che, photography, travel
Taking a short stop on my way to Samaipata from Sucre which consisted of mere Oreos. This was a tough ride due to the bad road condition and I was also stopping to make repairs to my clutch cable. Now my bike is in dire need of a service as well, I think I’ll come back via Camiri which will hopefully have less potholes.
Tags: hdr, motorcycle, photography, travel
Currently I am living in Sucre Bolivia and last Friday I awoke from my siesta to some very loud explosions. Explosions aren’t exactly rare here but the frequency of these caught my attention. Lo and behold there is a riot happening right outside my front door! I have a collection of non-hdr pics here but I managed to create these two pseudo-hdr images from my collection of raw files.
P.S. – Tear gas is very unpleasant.
First of all, the city where I am living broke out into a riot, I have lots of non-hdr photos on my travel blog here, certainly not something you see everyday.
Also I am now logging my location on Google Maps, click ‘Where is HDRGuru’ on the above panel or sidebar to find out the latest info.
Cheers,
HDRGuru.
Tags: updates
I still have a ton of photos from the Salar which require post processing. Here’s a single-shot HDR I did quickly this morning. Although great results can be created from single-shot HDR photography I almost always fail at it! My images end up noisy and lack in detail. Anyway, the above image was taken as we were heading out to camp on the Salar after lunch.
Tags: 1000d, australia, canon hdr, eos, hdr, salar de uyuni, tourism
I’ve created a new travel blog to document my motorcycle adventures, it can be found here. I do my best to keep both blogs up to date though SAJourneyman.com has many posts to catch up on, also I have been rather busy lately throwing it all together. Also for the meantime some of the posts will be the same on both sites.
- HDRGuru
Taken within the mountains between Potosi and Uyuni in Bolivia, there is something different around every corner making this one of the most beautiful roads I have ever ridden on. We arrived in Uyuni just as the sun was setting and treated ourselves to a nice hotel and some great pizza for dinner.
Edit: Thanks to the editors @ HDRSpotting for selecting one of my Salar images for their editors pick section!
After having owned my Bolivian motorcycle for three weeks I was eager to head to ‘Salar de Uyuni’, the worlds largest salt flats. Not wanting to ride solo, I contacted a riding community on the web and met my friend Bjorn who wanted to ride with me. Salar de Uyuni is located next to the Andes, within Bolivia and bordering Chile. According to Wikipedia it is 10,582 square kilometres in size and believed to have been a large lake many years ago.
Three days and eight hundred kilometres later I had taken the following HDR photos.
Mid-afternoon posing with my motorcycle
Here I am posing with my Brazilian made Honda NX Falcon 400. This bike is a fantastic choice for traveling South America, a great mix between off-road/on-road, reliability and power delivery.
Sunrise over Salar de Uyuni
We rode 120 kilometres into the Salar and camped very uncomfortably in sub-zero temperatures. Unfortunately whilst setting up our tents we missed the sun setting, it had disappeared very rapidly behind the mountains and volcanoes however due to difficulty sleeping in the cold I was able to photograph the sun rise in the morning.
Here are two more photos of the Salar at sunrise:
Facing away from the sun
Relaxing in the cold
The following photos are not in HDR but I felt that they should be included for relevance:
Sunset sky
Once we realised the sun had already set we were able to take some photos with one of the most amazing skies I have ever seen.
Bjorn shooting the stars
Bjorn is a professional photographer, here he is doing a night time-lapse.
Heading home the following day
Heading off in the morning. Riding at 120kms per hour in these low temperatures caused excruciating amounts of pain in my fingers and toes but they’re okay now 
In all and although I’m still sore from the long distance off-road motorcycling I consider our trip to have been a success and look forward to my next one, which will be either ‘La ruta de Che’ or deep into the Amazon.
Another photo from Potosi, looking up at over 4000m altitude. The altitude means it’s cold and very hard to breathe but up here almost everything is beautiful including (but not limited to) the skies.
Looking down onto Potosi from a high altitude, chilly and very windy road. The mountain in the background is ‘Cerro Rico’, an old silver mine.
According to the internet Cerro Rico has claimed the lives of 8 million people since the 1500s and even today the average living age of a miner here is approximately 40 years as the miners develop health issues due to dust. Many children work in the mines here on a rate of about $4 for an 18 hour day. Cerro Rico is also known as ‘The mountain that eats men’. Ironically this is in the same country as ‘The Bolivian road of death’ which recently featured on the Top Gear Bolivian special.
There is an excellent documentary about the children working the mines of which the trailer can be found here.
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