The Kingdom of the Land Cruiser

Bolivia so far can best be summed up by todays experience: twelve people crammed into a Toyota Land Cruiser. Ice on the inside of the windows. The sun rising over the desert. The ice melting, making way for views of deep desert canyons and red rocks. Suffocating heat. Dust in your mouth and unburnt petrol in your nose. Cars careering towards you as your traverse the side of a canyon, and the question of whether there is sufficient space for the two cars to pass. Loud, crazy Bolivian music. And the ever-present smell of someone chewing coca leaves.

We have been in southern Bolivia for four days or so now, and things are somewhat different. But different in a new and exciting way - after spending so long in the european cultures of Chile and Argentina, Bolivia is a shock to the system: kind of like a hit of the local product, if you get my gist....

From Salta, Argentina, we headed west over a 4800m pass into northern Chile - in spite of our previous experiences at altitude, Dorthe did very well, and survived the trip - although a quick sniff of Oxygen at the border crossing together with some coca leaves did do her the world of good, and made the remainder of the day bearable. As for me, well, I was positively loving it - 4800m is far higher than anything I´ve ever climbed, and I found it positively exhilarating.

Our first stop was the town of Calama, in Northern Chile. What´s there? Well, not much apart from a whacking great hole in the ground - the worlds largest open-cast copper mine. Being an engineer, I couldn`t go past such an epic undertaking without stopping to look at the big trucks and diggers... Hmmm, big trucks. Hmmm.... diggers. And epic is the word - a pit 4km long and 2km wide, with an uncountable number of trucks each carrying 360 tonnes of rocks 850m up from the bottom of the excavation. One million tonnes of rock removed every day, to produce 2000 tonnes of copper. As you can imagine, I pretty much stood at the top of the pit in awe for the entire length of the tour. Dorthe wasn´t quite as excited, but was still appropriately impressed.

From Calama, we turned back to San Pedro de Atacama, where we stayed in a beautiful little adobe cabaña and had a relaxing few days exploring the surrounding area. But the main purpose of San Pedro was to organise our adventure into Bolivia - a three day desert crossing in 4WDs, culminating in a crossing of the worlds largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni.

The Salar de Uyuni is a large area in southern Bolivia, about 200km wide, and 150km or so long - for about ten months of the year, it is a blindingly white salt flat, while for the remainder it is a lake covered in a couple of inches of water. Together with four others, Dorthe and I first took a shuttle bus from San Pedro to the Bolivian border, where we met our local Bolivian driver/guide/cook Faustino, and his trusty Toyota Land Cruiser. We then headed north through the high altiplano desert, crossing a 4900m pass, passing bright green lakes, beautiful symetrical volcanic cones, and strange rock formations along the way. Our first night was spent on the shores of Laguna Colorada, and it is an experience that will be hard to forget - walking along the shores of an island of pure white borax, the lake a bright pink colour and filled with flamingos, yellow and green deposits on the salt covered beach, the overcast sky almost purple in the fading light, and with the snow coming down. Foreign is a word that does not do it justice - humans simply did not belong to that world.

Our second day was a continuation of the first, with more flamingos, plenty of vicuñas (the wild relative of the alpaca) and beautiful lagunas. But the day that started in a freezing cold wind and ankle deep snow high on the altiplano, ended in the scorching heat of the catcus-covered hills surrounding the Salar. And it was the Salar on the third day was the true highlight - starting before dawn, driving across the white salt flats of the Salar, watching the ground turn from grey to yellow to blinding white. And blindingly white it was - in every direction, all you could see was the white of the almost perfectly smooth salt flat. Stunning.

Our tour ended all too soon in Uyuni, where we stayed last night, before carrying on here to Tupiza. And although we have left the tour and the salar behind us, in many respects things haven´t changed. Our "bus" was actually a Land Cruiser, packed to the brim with people - whereas we had seven people in our vehicle over the Salar, this morning we had twelve. It was tight. But when you see the country that you are passing through - deep canyons, steep hills, red rock, and streams that can quickly turn to torrents - you realise that you have not left the wild, beautiful and remote areas of Southern Bolivia behind just yet - indeed, you are still a subject in the Kingdon of the Land Cruiser.