Breathless in Bolivia

My Bolivian adventure began last Friday when my friend Carly and I walked over the border from La Quiaca, Argentina, to Villazon, Bolivia. From there we got our first taste of the joys of Bolivian buses, with a three hour journey to Tupiza, a quiet town 100km from the border. Here we booked our four day tour to the Salar De Uyuni, supposedly one of the highlights of the continent. It wasn´t to disappoint.

We set off on Saturday morning in a jeep that had seen better days with our guides Emilio and Daisy, and three English girls called Anna, Sarah and Sophia. We were relieved to find out we all got on well, as four days is an awfully long time with dull people! The first day took us through more canyons and Wild West style scenery. Bolivians don´t seem to like paved roads by the way, so every moment even in a jeep is a constant clatter and shudder. We had heard that some guides like to either drink heavily or take ´stimulants´along the way to keep them awake. Luckily driver Emilio had the habits of a true Catholic...

Day two was a lot more exciting. We entered a national park in the southwest of Bolivia, an vast landscape dominated by smoking volcanoes, multicoloured lakes, and millions of flamingoes. We also saw some geysers and had a swim in a thermal pool. One lake was bright green, due to the algae in the water. Apparently it is only green when the wind blows the alga in a certain direction. Another as bright red, due to its mineral composition, including borax and quite a lot of arsenic. So no swim was possible. If the arsenic doesn´t kill you, the zero degrees temperature might. In the daytime, it was quite warm in the southwest, but as you rarely drop below 3,000 metres above sea level, the temperature plummets at night (3,000 metres is approximately twice as high as Ben Nevis). On all three nights we stayed in primitive accommodation, with electricity in short supply and no running water. No showers. Windows made of something like paper. The eight blankets I had each night only just kept me warm...

Day three was spent looking at salt caves, visiting little villages (more damned handicrafts!) and driving through the Dali Desert, so called after Salvador Dali visited and took great inspiration from it. It is easy to see why. The bare desert is dotted with oddly shaped rocks which look like they have landed from Mars.

The Dali experience picks up on the fourth day at the Salar de Uyuni itself, a mind boggling four hundred thousand square miles of flat salt. Driving through it plays trick on the mind. Mountains in the distance look like they are hovering on the surface as the salt reflects off the sky to make it look like there is daylight between the salt and the mountain. Taking pictures here is fun as the is nothing to offer distance perspective. You can have great fun putting some cigarettes in front of th camera and you ´standing´ on them from 50 yards in the background!

Although it was a great tour, I think I prefer trekking to being stuck in a jeep for days on end. Nobody likes feeling like a tourist, and when you are walking around seeing things without a sheet of glass between you and the scenery, you somehow feel like you have earnt the right to see it more. Case in point = on the third night I went for a walk after we had finished touring for the day (Interestingly, we stayed at a hostel made entirely out of salt that night, including beds and tables) on the edge of the salar. It had gotten dark, but there was no sign of the moon. Suddenly it arrived on the horizon, and because of the endlessly flat landscape ahead of you, it looked as if you could pluck it from the sky. Even Byron would be a fool to try and describe how amazing it was, so I am certainly not going to try! Moreover, unlike everything else on the tour, I wasn´t expecting it to happen, which made it very special indeed.

Now I am in the capital, La Paz, for a couple of days, after a torrid 12 hour journey through the night from the town of Uyuni. La Paz is a huge city built in a natural bowl in the shadow of a snow tipped volcano. As it is 3,600 ft above sea level, you feel out of breath attempting the most trivial of exercise. It is absolute pandemonium all day and night, but lots of fun. There is a Witches Market, selling dried llama foetuses (feti?), petrified toads and many other horrible curios, all in the name of good luck, apparently. I think I am going to stick around here for a while though, before possibly heading north towards Peru...

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