For the past nine months, we've found ourselves almost universally opting for the cheapest version of everything. And yet, for some reason, when it came to picking our tour company for this trip, we opted to spend a little more.
Never before have we been so grateful for a minor investment.
Never before have we been so grateful for a minor investment.
We speed off in the morning towards a rocky outcrop that juts illogically out of the middle of the desert. But just before that, we notice a sickly-looking Bolivian being ferried around in the back of another 4x4. At the time we don't think much of it, but, as it turns out, his malady is nearly fatal to another group who had gone for the cheapest option.
The jaundiced little man was in fact another driver who had come down with some kind of horrendous food poisoning (though others claim to have seen wine stains on his trousers) and, without a backup or any co-drivers, his passengers are forced to drive themselves for six hours, sans road, bypassing all kinds of geological weirdness.
So, sucks to be them, but for us, the first part of the day lives up to the ridiculously high standard set on day one. It also gives us plenty more photos.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
But as my grandfather used to say, “a blind man on a galloping horse” could take decent photos around here, so long as you pay attention to the basic rules of photography and don't ruin the shots by sticking your stupid-looking face in the middle of them.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
And that's another thing. I still don't understand people who insist on thrusting themselves into every picture – are they so narcissistic that they need to have their own heid in every shot they take? Are they so incompetent a photographer that they need to have something to fill the frame? Does their family have a history of early onset dementia, hence they need to document the fact that they were there, man? In all instances, we find it chronically boring – the most uninteresting thing one can take a picture of while travelling the world is their own, gloating mug.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Anyway, from there we set off on a drive through pure desert which rivals anything I ever experienced while living in an actual desert. The odd thing here is that while the four wheels fight the slipping sands, in the background the horizon is filled with snow-capped peaks.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Perhaps unsurprisingly, all this geological freakishness does bottom out after a while, although how much of that is down to the now grey skies, I cannot be sure. After lunch, the groups struggles to feign interest in yet more lakes, stripped of flamingoes and colour as they are, and though the shapes of the rocks continue to baffle, there is a lingering doubt that this is something of an anti-climax.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
After one final stretch along a dull highway, with llamas now grazing in every field, we stop in a ghostly little town called Culpina K, the only discernible reason for which is the availability of cheap guesthouses. Wee Mo and I head out to try and take some more pictures, which is a pretty tough job, save for the presence of two unsettling cats and a couple of playful kids.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
The guesthouse puts on llama for tea, which is halfway between lamb and beef, but covered in so much seasoning that it's hard to put a finger on the actual taste. Then one of the Dutch girls busts out a bottle of Brazilian cachaça, which is so vile that taste becomes irrelevant. Still, we all launch into another big, long discussion about pretty much everything, including religion. Thankfully, no one makes any objections when I make my views clear – in fact most people agree, which is reassuring, given we are all under-30 and represent a broad mix of cultures.
And before long, the bottle is gone.
And before long, the bottle is gone.
Our last day starts with a lot of driving before a brief stop at the “graveyard of trains”. As Bolivia's rail network was increasingly ignored and left to ruin, so these engines – some allegedly over 100 years old, although we find nothing that dates before 1950 – were abandoned to the elements.
And this, unfortunately, is what Bolivians choose to do with all the crap they no longer have a use for, whether that's a train, a plastic bag or a shitty nappy.
(We travel for another three weeks in Bolivia after this point and nowhere in the past three years, nowhere in the other 41 countries I've been to – many poorer than Bolivia – have I ever witnessed such nauseating squalor and neglect for the environment. And I've been to Kilmarnock – I've been a few times.)
The vast planes of the altiplano, soaring more than 3000km in the sky, are home to fierce winds that carry waste for miles. When it reaches points like the train graveyard, it encounters little brush bushes that grow no more than a couple of feet. As you approach almost any town in Bolivia, then, these little bushes – hundreds of thousands of them – find themselves wearing this waste, like little faecal jackets.
From the graveyard, we make a short transfer into the town of Uyuni and quickly find that the utter lack of dignity and laughable contempt for hygiene isn't banished to the wild. No, here in the heart of tourist town, there are people pissing everywhere, kids fighting for elbow-room with dogs to shit in the street, and no one – not a soul – gives the tiniest recycled fuck about what they drop at their arse.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
On the plus side, just outside of Bolivia is one of the entire planet's most remarkable quirks. Apparently, if you ingest enough psycho-active chemicals, some humans experience a phenomenon known as synesthesia, a condition where senses become intertwined and confused; some people report tasting sounds and hearing colours etc.
Alas, I've never been so tremendously high/psychotic to experience that, but the experience at the Salar De Uyuni provides my brain with a similarly bizarre conundrum: namely, what is sky and what is earth?
Even for someone with such a tiny mind as I, should normally be able to work that one out, but standing here on the world's biggest mirror, it's genuinely a tough task.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
During the dry season, this same, brilliant landscape provides tourists with endless opportunities to make a tit of themselves with sly perspective shots: allowing themselves to balance their loved ones on their shoulder, or crush them underfoot, and all manor of other fucking hilarious hijinks.
But as its the wet season, before bidding each other farewell, our group settles for dicking around like long-retired Power Rangers, which, y'know, is kind of fun too.
