Salt.

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I had acually tried to make a reservation for a trip here in Potosi. On A recommendation of a tour company - eviently the only one that spoke english - I had wanted to ring from Potosi just to let them know I was wanting to do it if they had placed. Whilst the operator indeed did speak perfect English, the connection was so bad that it almost foiled my efforts.

"Can I take your name please?"
"Thomas"
"Robin?"
"Thomas!"
"Ok Robin, see you tomorrow"
"No, Thomas, Tom, T- O- M"
"Ooooh sorry! Ok then Jon, sorry about the phone, it´s a bad connection"

No kidding.

Anyway we got there in the end, and after a half night bus, half hostel nights sleep I was rearing to go, especially after caramel and pankakes for breakfast. It was to be a two day tour, with 10 of us, a guide, the two drivers and a cook spread over two jeeps. First stop - train graveyard.

After the mineral market slumped in the early C20, an with rising coal prices the govern,ment and foreign investors could no longer support the trains (almost all british trains, I want to add) or the rail network. Enterprising individuals tried relativly successfully to run the trains on guano (bird poo - highly flammable doncha know) imported from Chile for several years. However, the Chileans soon hiked the prices up fo this aswell, and so with no better option avaliable, dozens and dozens of engines were abandoned to the elements, i these vast train graveyards. Anything of real value has long since been gutted from them, and the only paint visible in this haunted place was that of the graffiti fom the locl toughs wh use the place as a hang out.It seemed these trains were staked for miles, wheels now half burried in the sand, all broken and twisted. I thoroghlky enjoyed clambering over these, jumping from one to another, just a Butch Casidy and the Sundance Kid once had, re enacting fantasies of my not so distant youth because I am old now etc.)

We then plunged onto the salt flats, first to where they gather the alt for sale. A skim of water covered much of the flats, about n inch deep, and the mounds were reflected in this - along with gringos (me) clambering atop their peaks! Very bizarre. In fact it only got more bizarre the more we went on. We stopped some where in the middle of the vast acheing plains at a small hotel, made entierly from blocks of salt. Here we speant a while taking photos with distorted perspectives ( see Flikr http://www.flickr.com/photos/telliot/). From here it was a long drive to a volcanic ísland´where we stayed the night in a hotal - only half built, but far more comfortable than I expected!

The next ay we ascended to the bottom rim of the crater, commanding magnificant views of salt as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by the occassional island jutting darkly out of the brilliant white. Moving on from here, we went to a Lipez tomb - a pre-pre-Incan people, where mummies made with tortora reeds (the same as those used on the Uros islands of Titicaca) were kept. This was almost certainly as close as I am ever going to have been to one of these people, believed to date back to 1000bc!! Surely (and sadly), without a baro-controlled chamber, these newly re-descovered bastions of an age long past will fall to the strains of the elements, and to time. Still, it was amazing to see them. Before we left, we got to see several James' flamingos filterfeedig on the phytoplankton at the edge of the flats, where the fresh water meets the salt. Intresting fact, they sleep on the slat to avoid predators (andean fox and puma), but occassionally they get frozen to the spot -and if anything comes near them nunexpectedly, they break their legs and die. Also, the pnink colur comes frome the sulfur they ingest, sulfur found in abundance at the salt flats. Still, not the first animal I had expected to see there!

The final stop on this trip was to an Island home to over 4000 giant cactus'. Giant cactus' grow at a rate over approx. 1cm/year - and the tallest here was 12m - pretty unbelievable really! More than that, it was an island made entierly of calcified coral, witht basic coral shapes still very much visible. The combination was mesmerizing, and a tad stupifying as it was so difficult, at least for this observer, to get your head around the enormous time scale involved!I think the pictures speak for themelves, and I feel woefully illequiped to try to describe a lot of the sights out there, it was just a completely different world. The way the horizon would mirror itself, folding downwards, and then the reflection be abtuptly ended by a dry expanse was just so surreal.


This was the last stop on an absolutly breathtaking tour, an the end of a truely fantastic foray into Bolivia.

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Two hours back to Uyuni, 11 hours (on unpaved roads) back to La Paz, and then a last 14hours up to Cusco, and now I am back in Peru, ready for my next bit of sightseeing - a 4 day 'alternative' (so edgy right?) Inca trail to Machu Picchu. Bring on tomorrow!

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