A 3000m high Ocean

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We did finally make it to Uyuni. Isla got there in the day and booked us on a tour, found a hotel and got to enjoy the scenery from Potosi. I however travelled in the night on the worst road, in the smallest bus, but at least arrived two hours early.

Uyuni is a town that dies every night after 10pm and everyone hibernates at home within their very sexy 80s ski-suits, but then unlike every other town nearby it is born-again-bustling by 8am due to the hundred plus tourists who leave for the salt flat tours each day.

First stop after about 10 mins is the train graveyard. Bolivia in the Spanish conquest hayday had an impressive train network that criss-crossed the remarkably flat Altiplano allowing smooth, fast transport to virtually everywhere. But like the unsustainable train network of the UK, nearly all of these lines have been abandoned and replaced instead with the worlds worst roads (or not-roads). Anyway, so just outside Uyuni, in the middle of desert and at both a metaphorical and literal 'end of the line', rusted but never to rot lie several train lengths of Carriages, and shells of steam engines. With the horizon reaching altiplano fringed by snow-capped mountains in every direction this ghost train is more than merely picturesque. Every man and his crappy Kodak 'point-and-shoot' becomes a cutting edge artistic photographer, diving in and out the ghostly shadows, creeping up on the spirits of steam and setting the past glories of S'panish conquest against the barren desert of modern Bolivia.

Then comes the Salt. An area of white large enough to see on google-earth, just 5 inches thick in perfectly flat, perfectly white and perfectly freezing slat extends seemingly forever in every direction, and is restricted only by the perfectly blue of the dry season's blue sky. Again every man and his Kodak gets excited, but this time it is with the daft possibilities of photos using the blue-screen effect of the whiter than white floor. Right in the middle of this surreality, just when things couldn't get surrealer up pops Pescado Island, awfully named due to its lack of resemblance of a fish, but appropriately named as in it is a dead fish - pescado being a caught fish as opposed to Pez a live one - given the sense of barren death of ther place. This lump of 50m high rock is coated in a thick covering of very dead coral that stand to prove the once living oceanic origins of this now very dry and dead place. In irony the Island that was once deep in water is covered with the only plant that can survive now; 20ft cacti reach phalically towards the searing sun, rooted at the bottom of the sea, yet hanging on to every drop of precious agua they can.

The air just doesn't heat up here. The white is absolutely perfect, and so even at midday whilst getting sunburnt from underneath (that is even with a wide-rimmed hat) one is still abolutely freezing! That night we slept at about 4200m in a village not far off the flats. We got hideously drunk and completely befriended our jeep load and any other that cared to join in.

The next two days took us off-roading in the stunning desert hills surrounding the flats. We passed numerous lakes, with and without flamingos, some of green colour (dyed by Copper) and another red(!) from the algae. Pink flamingos don't half clash with their favoured food of red algae. By this red lake we slept briefly, now at a mere 4950m and rose in -20 degrees to reach some geysers by sunrise.

The mountains all around are of varying colour stained by the wealth of minerals that they keep. The mines of Potosi are not the only ones, but there is no digging in this National park. The terrain is rocky, barren and, well, dead. Bottomless canyons and ravines open up infront of you where rivers of yesteryear and yesterseason have carved through the red land, and huge rocks stand starkly in sand valleys. There is a tree ready to topple (http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0256-0604-2813-5917.html), and a landscape of silent stones that inspired the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali when he travelled here. This landscape is the earthly home of the artistic movement and even the definition of the term surrealism.

On the third days after our freezing awakening to pass the sunrise bubbling geysers we stopped for breakfast by another frozen lake, this time with a boiling spring. In what must have now been about -10 people stripped naked and leapt in to soak there car numbed arses and thaw their icicled toes. The country of opposites strikes again.

A monstrous 8 hours drive got us home. People thinking of going salt flat touring should finish in San Pedro to save you this ache, or make a four day trip of it. The scenery might not change much but it is still just as awesome on the third day, it costs virtually the same and nothing is worth the horror of 8 jiggling hours on and off the worlds worst roads after three days already in a jeep.

We decided not to go to San Pedro (Chile) because we could return to hop on one of the few trains still functioning in Bolivia to the border and there cross in Argentina. Oh, but Bolivia strikes again (as if she was some kind of malevolent anti-tourist spirit, a very close relation to that infamous british sprite: Sod). There is a train strike in Oruro and now trains can get past. So busses it will be. 8 hours have got us to Tupiza, in which I write this mail.

This is a country of contradictions. It has been the richest in the world, and now certainly isn't. It contains the highest and coldest cities, as well as the deepest hottest jungle. Anyone can buy 100% drinking alchohol and high power explosives for less than an average meal in any miners market. It is one of the only countries in which it is legal to grow, sell and consume Coca leaves, from which you make the class-A highly illegal concaine, which causes the country great trouble with America, on who they depend for aid, yet hate for oppression.

I love it. Everything about the place excites me demanding my attention. Yet we have to leave, because we cannot stand it any more. Bring on Argentina, the first world, good steak, fine wine and the worlds most comfortable busses.

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