Having been spoiled by having a single room through most of Peru, I was now landed with Chris from Ausralia. Nice enough when you get talking to him, but slightly lacking in social skills. He also had a habit of turning off his hearing aid when he felt like it, much like Data the android turning off his emotion chip in Star Trek. If Chris has an emotion chip, though, it was set to “self-pitying hypochondria” most of the time. Not that I’m suggesting he’s an android, although now I think about it, that might make more sense than the theory he was human. Most of the hotels only had accessible power points in the bathrooms, and he spent a lot of his time locked in there. Perhaps he was recharging.
The group’s Scottish quotient was boosted by Colin and Emma, who made vital contributions to the pool of sick jokes that James and I had been working on. Our tour leader was a camp Peruvian called Tad, a much more laid-back character than Katy had been (perhaps a little too laid-back at times, but it’s nice to experience a different approach).
The first full day of this leg of the trip was a long bus journey to Uyuni, a basic town which exists purely because of the nearby salt flats. The next few days were to be a 4×4 trip across the flats and up to some multi-coloured lakes and volcanoes, with the first stop being a train graveyard – lots of derelict locomotives, great fun to climb into and pose on. There was an awful lot of metal just being left to decay, it seems strange that it wasn’t being recycled in some way.
The nearby village had a tiny museum advertising “the biggest llama EVER”, which was made entirely of salt – much like a lot of the buildings, bricks of salt being cut straight out of the ground and used as they were. We also had a guided tour of a salt processing plant – basically a small house where the salt is brought, heated up and then shovelled into bags.
The salt flat itself is huge, stretching off to the horizon with a mountains sticking up at various points. After trying various optical illusion photos (one person or thing in the foreground, one in the background, hilarity ensues) we drove across miles of empty salt to an island made of fossilised coral, dotted with massive cacti (some of them well over 1000 years old) – perhaps not what you expect to find at four kilometres above sea level. Sitting on the island and looking out across the surroundings, you really do feel like you’re marooned with no way of escape – until you see a car driving across the white emptiness.
The accommodation that night was made entirely of salt – walls, beds, chairs, tables, everything. Well, perhaps not the windows. Or the toilets.Thankfully there was also a small cubicle where it was possible to buy alcohol. Erik, Kim and I played poker for matchsticks (with a 10 Boliviano stake to make things interesting) while most of the rest of the group played Ring of Fire, a seemingly lethal card game with forfeits which mostly involved drinking whatever is in front of you.
Next day involved more driving, this time leaving the salt flats behind and moving on to rocky paths between the volcanoes. The rock formations got ever more otherworldly, and the drivers obligingly stopped the cars every so often for people to have a look and/or evacuate their bowels. At least in the middle of nowhere it was free, when we stopped for lunch at the “smelly lake” (sulphur, in case you were wondering) it cost five Bolivianos for the privilege. The flamingos on the smelly lake looked whiter than the pink ones on a lot of the other lakes we stopped at.
Apart from flamingos, there were plenty more vicunas and llamas wandering around. They were much more at home in the surroundings than our 4x4s, which conformed to Bolivian stereotype by being a bit shit. Our one had a huge crack across the windscreen, and some of the others had tyres which were pretty worn. Still, at least it wasn’t snowing…
After stopping at some more huge rock formations, we spent the night at a very basic hostel somewhere over 4000m. We were to get up at 4:30am for a trip to the geysers and a volcanic hot pool at just under 5000m, so I was prepared to wake up early. Not quite as early as I did, because poor old Chris was unwell, and asked Ronnie (who doesn’t sleep, as she told everyone at any available opportunity) to get Tad because he felt “really ill”. Tad was duly woken up, and Chris told him that he was dizzy and nauseous. Quite what he thought Tad was going to do about it in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is anyone’s guess. Still, a problem shared is a problem halved, and since Chris loudly shared his problem with six other people, I hope it reduced it for him.
The geysers were a bit of a damp squib, they probably would have been impressive if we could see them. There was some dissatisfaction about leaving so early in the morning that the sun hadn’t risen by the time we got there, so the only light was from the headlights of the 4x4s. It was too cloudy to see the sunrise, so it gradually got lighter as we drove up to the hot pool. Flecks of white powder came from the darkness as we drove, and it took a while to realise that this wasn’t volcanic ash but was actually snow. The hot pool itself was nice after not having had a shower for three days, but didn’t quite make up for having to get up so early in the morning.
Most of the day was spent driving to another lake and then back to Uyuni, in the deepening snow. At least our 4×4′s tyres were almost able to cope, unlike the worn slicks on some of the others, which fishtailed around on the precarious tracks. Shame one of the wipers didn’t work, or the heating – the driver and whoever was in the passenger seat had to take turns to wipe the inside of the windscreen, and it was bloody freezing for most of the day. When we got downhill and the snow turned to rain, it started dripping in through the top of the windscreen.
We had to have a change of driver when Juan couldn’t get the accelerator to behave properly. He swapped with one of the more senior drivers, who found that there was nothing wrong with it, it was just that Juan didn’t really know what he was doing. He also switched off the air-conditioning, which had been on all the time – no bloody wonder it was so cold. That’s customer service in Bolivia in a nutshell for you.
Upon leaving Uyuni on the bus the next day, I saw a signpost revealing that our next stop (Potosi, the highest city in the world, apparently) was 208km away. The fact that the journey was to take seven hours tells you what the road was like. It wasn’t even a road for most of it, just a rocky track. Lots of mountain views and rock formations to admire, if you could get your eyeballs to stop rattling long enough to see them.
Potosi is also over 4000m above sea level, so poor old Chris started feeling the effects of the altitude again and had to get a doctor out to see him, discovered that his blood pressure was slightly high – sorry, “through the roof” – and give him a questionable treatment of an injection of furosemide and five enalapril 20mg tablets to take. At least Chris was able to e-mail his doctor (who essentially told him to shut up and take his medicine) and research enalapril on the internet (“there’s an interaction with ibuprofen, so I can’t take ibuprofen”) rather than… oh, I don’t know, asking a pharmacist or something.
The two main attractions in Potosi are the mint, and the silver mine. Like most of South America, they don’t like large banknotes – the man at the counter barked “change!” at everyone as he asked for 20 Bolivianos. In his defence, it turns out that Bolivian money isn’t actually made there anymore (coins are made in Canada, notes in France). It has lots of paintings and collections of old coins, and the mule-driven machines used to press them.
To visit the mine and see where the silver comes from, first you have to buy presents for the miners – coca leaves, biscuits, their favoured tipple of 96% alcohol, dynamite… from the only shop in Bolivia where you can walk in and buy dynamite without any kind of permit. I was asked to help push a cart with a ton of dirt out of the mine – not because they needed the help, but to allow them to have a laugh at the stupid tourist. Still, can’t begrudge them that, they don’t have much of a life expectancy so they might as well get their entertainment when they can.
There is a stone statue of a devil in an alcove by the mine shaft, which we ducked in to to avoid them pushing one of the carts out. The miners give it offerings of coca leaves, sweets and alcohol – they drip the 96% stuff on his hands, feet and chunky wooden penis, then drink the rest. Our guide kept telling us that this aspect of the miners’ culture was from the Catholic religion, as imported by the Spaniards. I’m not entirely sure how giving offerings to an effigy of the devil squares with the teachings of the Pope, but I suppose the alcohol would probably ruin any latex contraceptive on the devil’s dong, so perhaps there is something in it after all.
Having walked down the mine shaft, over planks of wood atop gaping chasms and taken chunks of silver and zink embedded in rock as souvenirs, Tad and our mine guide rolled some of our dynamite into balls and put them in plastic bags full of mothballs before lighting the fuses and running over to an empty space and depositing them in the ground. Sadly they didn’t make a Hollywood-style fireball, but the explosions were reasonably hefty.
The bus journey to Sucre was, thankfully, mostly on actual roads. Sucre itself is a nice city, the central area being mostly comprised of white buildings. I went on a city tour, which took us out to a castle on the outskirts before coming back to walk on the roof of a church and admire the view. Sucre’s other USP is its dinosaur footprints, and the classiest way to get to them is by taking the dino bus – a truck with wooden seats on the back, and a rubber dinosaur head on the front.
They do like dinosaurs here, there are various statues of them dotted around the town. The visitor centre has more fake dinosaurs and a viewpoint to look at the footprints, which are on a solidified mud bed which has been shifted by tectonic movements so it is now nearly vertical. Some of the footprints were destroyed in a recent landslide, but the layer revealed has more, older footprints in it. The reason for the landslide? In the valley between the visitor centre and the footprints themselves, there is a huge concrete mine and they use dynamite to excavate the ground. At least the huge mining equipment gave the footprints some sense of scale, which was essential seeing as how they were so far away that you had to squint to see them.
Nearly time to say goodbye to Bolivia now, after a short flight to Santa Cruz. The surviving members of our group have said goodbye to the ones who went back to La Paz, and hello to our new guide and the new people joining us. Sadly, I’ve lost Chris, and the other single bloke who was due to join us cancelled so I’ve got my own room back. The new people seem nice (one English, one Australian, one Dutch) and Marianne the guide is a larger-than-life Brazilian with a quick wit and a merciless sense of humour. Brazil should be fun.
