Travelling is as much about the journey...

---

Last December, with several weeks' holiday to take between finishing one job and starting another I decided I had to realize a dream I’d been harbouring for many years of travelling to South America.

Before doing anything, of course, I had to decide where in this vast continent I should go. I cut my travelling teeth as a teenager heading across Europe for the lush green mountainous backdrop of Lake Garda, leaving me with a longing for the contrast of majestic green against effervescent blue. I haven’t been to Vietnam so I have no idea whether these equal the spectacle of its own lauded watery landscapes in which mountains appear to rise in the aftermath of volcanoes. All I know is that the scenery surrounding that lake in Italy made my skin prickle with goosebumps. So to Venezuela perhaps?

But then I also longed to hear the roaring and crashing of centuries-old glaciers of Patagonia frozen around the brittle bones of some unfortunate beasts of the latest ice age, similar to the white candy goldfish suspended in jelly of my childhood birthday parties. Something I’d barely glimpsed several years ago at the edge of Vatnajokull in South West Iceland, was this the way to go?

And then there was the more recent pull of bone-drying desert and nothingness that I’d witnessed a year ago crossing the Gobi desert en route from China to Mongolia. A landscape that my imagination had managed to evade for a quarter century had suddenly taken hold, literally enveloping me and depositing itself under my nails. I think it cemented its status as the king pin of fairytale landscapes the morning I woke up in my bunk to a thin sheen of Gobi sand, rather like an evasive object of affection in a story of unrequited love. Perhaps the other common denominator, the train on which I’d bounced happily along for the previous 18 hours was to blame, because a similar, albeit unexpected, jaunt from Luxor to Cairo several years ago was at the same time conjuring nostalgia for endless hours of dessicated scrub and the warm glow of geometrically defiant rocks basking as if members of a cult of Helios. Northern Chile and the Atacama were beckoning.

Into this melting pot a shameless whim of Said-ian orientalism made the lure of alien territory irresistible. A few years ago I’d heard a radio programme discuss Bolivia’s unfortunate border history - a tale of incessant land-grabbing from all sides which had left it totally landlocked in 1879. Despite re-establishing a naval force in 1963 (its landlocked status is still a powerful call to action today whilst the government remains wedded to its policy pledge to regain a coastal border) the country remains coast-less, insulated by Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. The combination of this most seemingly-hopeless of ambitions combined with images of the elusive Salaar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, seemed to offer itself up as slightly alien and ripe for exploration.

So I had finally arrived at some options. Venezuela, Argentinian & Chilean Patagonia, Chile or Bolivia.

---

Photos

South America
I wasn't sure where my latest journey would be taking me