Southwest Bolivia

That bus from La Paz to Uyuni really was horrendous. I knew that only 10% of Bolivia's roads are paved, but I didn't know that in the stoney desert areas the sand and stones can create a surface like a very long draining board. I remember at some stage in the middle of the night, in a half-sleep exhausted daze, thinking that the constant violent rattling couldn't really, in all seriousness, continue for much longer. But it could. And it did. For christ himself only knows how long.

Thankfully negotiations with Alberto, our shady Bolivian tour operator of choice, were led by Charlotte and Christine, two take-no-shit ladies (from england/denmark and germany respectively) who were inventing fake appointments and flights in order to ensure a speedy departure from the dusty little desert town of Uyuni, leaving myself and David (the frenchman) to attempt to recover our mental and physical composure. Once Alberto had scrounged around for a tank of petrol for the 4x4, we were joined by an Austrian couple and took off for a 2 day drive across the deserted wilds of southwest Bolivia.

The first stop was the train cemetery, where the abandoned hulks of Bolivia's first locomotives rest and rust in the desert, though their peace is regularly disturbed by the tourists than run around and climb on them like it's a grown-up's playground.

Pretending to drive a choo-choo train

We arrived at the main event later that day: Salar de Uyuni, 12,000 square kilometres of the largest and highest salt flats in the world, and one of the strangest places I've ever seen (the Bierhaus at 5am not included). The blinding white surface seems to stretch on indefinitely, and it plays tricks with your eyes so that it seems that the mountains at its edge are actually floating just above the ground. It took a few hours to cross it with a couple of stops along the way, including one to climb the Isla de Pescado, a cactus island rising out of the flats, and several attempts at taking goofy pictures of perspective tricks, with varying levels of success.

Our driver wasn't one to disclose information, and decided to keep to himself the reasons for driving around for an hour on the other side of the Salar trying to find someone to whom he had to deliver what seemed to be a bag of meat. He wasn't too forthcoming with an explanation for his two hours of tinkering with the jeep that evening either, and after another couple of hours tinkering the following morning (during which we saw various parts being extracted from the engine), he informed us that there was a "defecto". No shit, sherlocko. This was not a place to be driving around in a dodgy truck. Anyway, Wildur (some strange names around these parts) eventually got the defecto fixed (allegedly), and we were off for another day driving across the wilds. The landscape around here is incredible: the desert is sprinkled with extinct and active volcanoes and lagoons populated with flamingoes. Different mineral concentrations in different areas combine with the glaring high-altitude sun to create amazingly vivid colours and contrasts, while the wind would cut the nose straight off your face.

Flamingoes!

We got to our lodgings just before dusk, a cluster of small buildings at about 4,500m surrounded
by miles and miles of nothing. Another jeep had apparently broken down and there was a hurry on to get another one out to them before it got seriously cold. Having anticipated a night of limb-deadening cold, it was actually fine thanks to a sleeping bag, a pile of blankets, and several layers of clothes. Getting up in the dark at 4.30 wasn't a whole lot of fun, but the early start was necesary to see the geysers at their best (this really is high-altitude endurance tourism).

The geysers were going off like billy-o, and by 7am we were in our swimming togs getting nicely warmed up in the nearby thermal springs, with the sun still low in the sky and the air clouded with misty vapour.By 10am we'd been dropped off at the Chilean border and were on our way to San Pedro de Atacama.

Coyote and bus at the Bolivie/Chile border

The remoteness of the area meant that we had no idea who'd won the big vote in America. At the entrance to a national park we met a Bolivian lady who'd been in La Paz that morning who told us that the "el moreno" (the brown one) had won. Viva el moreno!