Perhaps unsurprisingly, two and a half days spent in an ancient Jeep shuddering its way across the rugged wilderness of Bolivia was a lot of fun. The landscapes were incredible, and incredibly surreal – at first dreamlike and sparkling, then lunar, or martian, or in any case, otherworldly. It was not so much salt plain, as Surrealism Tour.
We left La Paz three days ago, which was a little sad as it is easily my favourite capital so far (not that competition was fierce…) – it was shabby and chaotic but colourful and somehow beautiful, and friendly in a completely unexpected way. (Possibly just because I’m looking more Sudamericana these days? This tan is out of control.)
Then it was a day of travelling; bus to Oruro, then, for a very welcome change, comfy first-class seats on the train to Uyuni (which carved right across the middle of a huge and bizarrely bird-populated lagoon, which we shrieked excitedly over and which now looks almost dull in the photos, after the things we’ve seen in the past few days).
Then an overnight stay in Uyuni, which oddly made me think of small-town America: wide streets and square blocks but nothing really there. It was middle-of-nowhere and uninteresting and a little strange. The surrealism started there, I think, and intensified as we headed slightly outside the town to the train graveyard, a seemingly random bit of land littered with the carcasses of long-obsolete old trains.
The next morning, we made for the salt. And salt souvenirs, salt museums with salt sculptures, and a salt hotel. And many jokes about passing the salt.
Then, just when we thought we were all salted out, our jeep broke down in the middle of it. It was the ultimate middle of nowhere, as far as the eye could see, all that existed was salt and sky.
For that matter, after our flat tyre was replaced, we drove all day and all we could ever see was bright white salt and clear blue sky. It was as if it had snowed in the desert. You step out of the jeep expecting it to be cold and wet, but it was hard and crunching, and tasted salty but bitter.
But eventually we moved on, to flamingo-filled lagoons, and red lagoons and green lagoons, then impressive geysers, volcanoes, huge open desert spaces, pastel-coloured mountain ranges, lots of strangely shaped rocks, and all looking very Dalí.
All while sitting in the back of a dusty jeep, listening to Ronan Keating’s greatest hits.
At night we slept in adobe huts, freezing (but thankfully not as freezing as we’d been led to expect, though in my paranoia I’d piled so many blankets on my bed that I couldn’t sleep under the weight), playing various pointless games, and on the second evening, being so desperate in the cold and dark that our friends gave in and spent the last of their bolivianos on vast amounts of wine (and we praised our incredible luck that wine – and drinkable wine, at that – was available in a little adobe hut in the middle of the desert).
But, sadly, Bolivia ended and we crossed the border into Chile, taking a minivan to San Pedro de Atacama.
I feel like I have just woken up. San Pedro is a sweet little town, oddly Mediterranean and wonderfully warm (the altitude is about 2400m but after being at 4900m yesterday, this feels virtually coastal), and tourist-popular but tiny and quiet. I am wearing a skirt and (confusingly) actually feel like it may be summer for the first time this year.
And after Peru and Bolivia, all the food here seems amazing, albeit phenomenally expensive, but we’re hoping the rest of Chile may not be so bad.
But, er. You’re going to think we’re completely insane. Maybe we are. Maybe we’ve lost it after aforementioned friends left us to catch a flight to New Zealand. But in our defence, there just doesn’t seem to be anything worth seeing in northern Chile, and we’d both be very upset to miss Argentine wine country…
So we’re going to Argentina tomorrow. But we’ll be back! Probably to Santiago, hopefully with budget intact and in time for my birthday in September, because that also happens to be Chile’s independence day, and how serendipitous is that?
