Lima, 8th April
At long last I’m reunited with my computer after 5 weeks without a recharger. Lord knows what happened, but it’s amazing how bereft I felt without the comfort of wifi and the ease of uploading photos and blogging.
The internet in the back blocks has been painfully slow and often outdated...hard to open a pdf let alone find a new Mac charger. How on earth did people backpack in the old days????
I’m holed up in a nice hotel in Lima at the moment, laid up with a lurgy that makes me very loath to venture outdoors. The joys of travelling! After 9 weeks, I finally cut my umbilical cord with Gus - the cool kids mostly left after Cusco and I was ready to relinquish my role of honorary crew/truck cleaner.....
The last 5 weeks have been almost an overload of all the senses....a kaleidoscope of colour and cultures, of people and poverty, of extreme effort at altitude with the reward of unforgettable vistas; (and of the never ending and all pervading stench of non functioning loos!!). I awoke yesterday morning atop a sand dune after sleeping under the stars, and finished the day in a less than salubrious hotel in a seedier part of Lima....But I get ahead of myself; I need to start where I left off before the old cogs of my memory refuse to be kicked back into life...
14th March Yuyuni
Forgot to mention the Mummies in the Salta museum....3 perfectly preserved mummies of children sacrificed to appease Apu, the mountain God at the top of nearby LLullaillaco volcano, buried at 6,720m....the highest archaeological site in the world. The skulls were conical, deformed after birth to signify royal lineage.
Also a statue of a pregnant Madonna in the church of San Francesco.... quite extraordinary....
From Salta we started an incredible journey upwards, ever upwards, slowly up more switchbacks...a lunch stop on some salt flats where they were actively mining salt for export, a leg stretch at Pumamarca and a colourful market at the base of the “Hill of Seven Colours”, and then a long winding stretch still upwards across the never never between Argentina and Chile to San Pedro. Our last camp was a dusty one at 3,500 metres...set up finally at 9.30 and wandered down town to eat at a surprisingly flash restaurant...quite a shock in a frontier town of adobe houses and dusty streets, litter everywhere. We’re reminded that we/re really on the edge of the 3rd world here. And we’re feeling the first effects of altitude sickness... , no appetite, the air is thin...
An early start the next morning takes us up to the Bolivian border crossing, a shack of an outpost in the middle of nowhere, and then onto an extraordinary tortuous (and quite full of torture) drive across the infamous Altiplano...
the Laguna Blanco with its beautiful reflections, laguna Verde, iridescent green in the morning light, full of arsenic and magnesium; the thermal springs at 4850m where we dunked our toes and tried to eat a little.... by this stage any exertion is tiring; many have headaches.....past geysers belching steam and lord knows what, then over the highest pass at 5020m.... suddenly there’s a soccer field, basketball “court”...it’s a sulphuric acid processing plant where they bring the borax mined 800m down the other side of the pass. What desperation or enticement would bring one to work here?
Several in the group are really sick now, vomiting, headaches... and Gus jolts onwards over the most ordinary of roads. I had to ask for a reprieve from the back seat!
We descend slowly past the borax mine and the road deteriorates rapidly...past the Laguna Colorado, awash with pink from the betacarotene, and flush with flamingoes ...truly mind blowing vistas.....
we almost crawl to our refugio for the night, a bleak spot high on the Altiplano where there are the first signs of semi arable land next to a spring. The locals are shy, colourfully dressed ... the women with bowler hats topping braided hair, their skirts stiff with multiple layers of gathers, their skin lined and deeply tanned from the harsh sun...
a tail plane on top of a wall tells another woeful story .....hardly anyone can eat, and sleep eludes most at this altitude of 4200m...., but the bed is good, and the heavy llama wool blankets keep us warm
Everyone is keen to descend the next morning, if not keen to rattle around again in Gus. We past a collection of amazing rock formations, interspersed with same ancient mosses of Tierra del Fuego, and inhabited by chinchillas...
down past more and more signs of habitation, basic adobe huts and llama corrals dotting the landscape.....
the llama are beautiful, festooned with ribbons by their owners as a sort of brand; crops of quinoa struggle here and there, breaking up the constant expanse of stony hills.
We pass San Cristobal. the largest silver mine in the world, built by the Americans, (they moved a whole village and brought water and electricity to the area, but now the Japanese Sumimoto (?) own it - they are the ones who are in negotiation with the Bolivian gov. to develop the Lithium mines .... and onto Uyuni at last, on the edge of the salt flats, las Salinas.
It’s a wild west, frontier sort of town, treeless, unbelievably dusty...the edges of town are strewn with litter and plastic bags as far a the eye can see. The locals are desperately poor; they don’t make any eye contact and won’t have their photo taken...it’ our first glimpse of the traditional dress, the women in their black bowler hats, voluminous gathered skirts and leggins...
It’s the end of carnival here though....a strange mix of Christian and pagan festivals; (a sort of cross between Meiringen in Switzerland with the caricatures of evil spirits, and Palm Sunday, with the locals dancing behind a band, swaying corn sheathes in the air.) We headed down to watch the parade in the street, and ended up caught in the revelry, sprayed and being sprayed by cans of foam, the local kids taking great delight in our playing with them....
Off to the salt mines the next morning in 4WD’s....what incredibly hard work, reaping this harvest from the endless flats, covered in water now because of the wet season; the process of gathering, roasting and packaging the salt is labour intense and pays a pittance...
Lots of fun taking perspective bending photos on the flats; a wonderful lunch in a surreal landscape...tablecloths and fresh tea, picante grilled chicken and pasta salad, cooked by the mother-in-law of hotel owner, an American pizza maker who who married a Bolivian, and now makes the highest (and arguably the best) pizza in the world.
There’s also a train graveyard here... it’s the end of the rail line built with the British to ship out minerals, and the place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid plied their trade before their final siege.
Another day’s slow drive with an ailing Gus through more treeless “lunar” landscapes finally brings us to Potosi, the once great city (bigger than London) which kept the Spanish Empire rich for 300 yrs. Built at the foot of the bare mountain where the silver was extracted, it’s almost haunting ......lavish Spanish architecture, even more lavish cathedral, numerous churches and monasteries embellished in mind blowingly ornate silver, a huge mint which supplied most of the world’s coins.... the tangible reminders overlaying a sad and brutal history...... 8 million indigenous and African slaves died here over the course of 300 yrs in the still appalling mine conditions; the miners were fed coca leaves to increase their output; the life expectancy of miner was 30; a mule’s was 3 mths as they drove the giant cogs that pressed the ingots of silver...
The local Chequa people felt abandoned after filling the coffers of Europe for so long, but still have an unbelievably deep conservative Catholic faith. We eat heart and tripe and huge white local corn in the street stalls; watch them celebrate yet another saint’s feast day, dancing beneath arches of beaten silver and plastic flowers...
The markets are very basic, more so than China of 20 years ago... cows heads and intestines displayed next to toiletries and overripe fruit; corn and llama meat are staples ..
17th March
On the road again, on the way to Le Paz, celebrating St Patrick’s day on the bus... we deck her out in green balloons and shamrocks; a few stalwarts stow some liquid sustenance on board to celebrate..
Gus is really sick now, struggling to a standstill climbing up the ranges. The boys change the filter and expoxy up a fuel link, and she agrees to carry on. A few glasses in Club Gus for Paddy make the 13 hr day pass more quickly...finally after Bangkok style traffic jams, we’re treated to a glittering view of Le Paz, stitched onto the sides of a gorge, and only 3,600m. It’s easier to breathe, but not easy...
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