Salt flats

Dusty road, winding through another dusty set of mountains, zigzagging around gaps where the road used to be. The colours play with the mind, the hillsides washed in pastel oranges, the verges a gentle blue washing into freshly turned fields of green earth. I want to get out and grab a handful, is it real. Ghost towns, mud brick houses open to the sky, mountains turn to dunes. End of the road an edge of a flat white expanse.

Crap hotel, cold shower, no electric, write by candel lite, but I do a deal and get it for free and leave tomorrow by 4x4

We set sail in an ocean of blinding white space. Its unhinging just white, no shadows like staring at porcelin, There is just a single horizontal line where the sky starts. No echos, violent bright sun but no warmth. Even with Raybanned eyes the sunsears by frazzled retinas.

I forgot to mention after the last climb I suffered snow blindness, its like having a handfull of grit permanently revolving around your eye balls. Using my eyes for more than two hours required lying the dark for another four for the paim to subside. My eyes took a week to come back to something likr normal, PS dont use Bolivian sunglasses.

Continuing the journey we stop for lunch at an island in the dry salt lake. Cacti stand shoulder to shoulder and spectate on the tourists scurrying across the bleak wasteland.

We drive for hours, but nothing is moving only the engine noise gives any indication that something is happening. Visit a house made of salt, tables and chairs of salt, play with the local kids, forget its 4000m above sea level and it leaves me gasping for air. The lake gives way to desert, sand, scree, dirt, wind swept shapes rise from out of the ground. The wind whips stinging sand into any exposed skin. We stop in grey mud brick town.I amble through the deserted street and watch the lamas herd themselves for the night in their corals.I got surprise when I looked over a high wall into the church yard, shaking in the wind were hundreds of pink and purple paper flowers. There brightness was shocking in this brown and dusty town.

i sit by a lake and count the colours, blue sky, red mountains, lilac hills, terracota sands reflecting in a smooth lake of blue grey, edged in sulpher yellow, while vivid pink flamingos stroll on white banks of salt. No one really talks, we spend our time sitting and watching.

Looking across the desert and see black sgwiggly shadows rushing across the horizon, expanding and contracting as if held behind a lens. The lighting plays tricks, its three 4x4s in a mirage. As they get closer a wedged shaped wall of dust rises up to obscure the distant mountains.

At dawn with the temprature hovering at -10 C we bath at the edge of a thermal spring, the lake frozen, ice crystals catching the low angled light. Take a stroll around the adjacent geysers. Its a vietnam war movie, great bomb holes let forth engulfing plumes of steam ,rims of the interlocking crators form a maze from hades. the jet engine roar of escaping gas, splash and plop of boliing mud leaping and landing. The sun is hidden, shadows of other tourists appear and disapper in the twisting sulpher clouds , Feet gently sinking in the soft earth, closing and opening jets of ankle high steam.