Blog 13: 40 Days and 40 Nights in Bolivia (Part 2: Flamingos)

So began Day 3. Or in my book, it was really only Day 2, because you could hardly call the day prior to catching the overnight bus in La Paz Day 1, even though the promotional material did. But let's stick with the official line and call it Day 3. (As we will see in Blog 14 the numbering of desert days was to become an explosive issue in the final stages of the tour.)

I got up early and managed to shower (water was cold) and dress myself without waking my hut-mate, a Swedish guy named Andreas who was year younger than my daughter. Andreas and I were aligned on just about everything - politics, the USA, China, climate change, The Gringo, Germans, coffee, fitness and food. Aussies and Swedes seem to have the world sorted.

I headed into town and had just started to congratulate myself for being:

1. the oldest person in the group, and

2. the first person to be up and about,

... when I was overtaken in a cloud of dust by James, the Launceston medical doctor, out for his 7k run before breakfast. I'd met James the day before, when he was purchasing an alpaca cardigan in a store in Uyuni, and we'd talked on the bus about his addiction to extreme sport, his pulmonary oedema from some glacier climb in Iceland or triathlon in the Galapagos Islands (can't be sure) and his current cough, which was sharp, unproductive and (in his medical opinion) caused by dust he inhaled while mountain-biking down Death Road in La Paz or climbing active volcanos in Ecuador (again, can't be sure). James was to cough, pretty much consistently, all the way across Bolivia to Chile, but such a nice bloke he only ever elicited sympathy, even from the Germans. The Gringo continually recommended cocaine, and got offended when James declined.

James, far right, listening to the Gringo's lecture on Quinoa later in Day 3 along with the rest of our group.

Incidentally, this is Quinoa growing in pots. You can get Quinoa-flavoured anything in Bolivia, including ice cream, soup, pasta, liquorice (!) and possibly cocaine. There are 140 different varieties of Quinoa; the Inca's grew it on their terraces. (You might have observed I say there is 140 different varieties of everything, that's because I can't remember the actual number, but 140 was mentioned for potatoes or something, so I've used it for everything)

The tiny town adjacent to the camp was the most forlorn, sad, dusty and isolated human habitation I have ever seen. Nothing more than a series of mudbrick shanties with tin roofs, lining streets of desert sand. No vegetation. In the middle a sandy plaza with a church at one end, heavily reinforced by buttresses, presumably to protect against earthquakes. Surrounding the town, nothing but red sand, stretching to treeless volcanoes on all horizons.

It was stark and cold, but as the sun came up and struck the highest peaks, there was beauty in the starkness. In town I found an improvised basketball stadium with improvised concrete slab benches, and I climbed to the highest one to take a pic of the volcano.

Turning around, I noticed a woman emerging from the second story of a house on the other side. She was dressed in the Bolivian bowler hat style, and when her gaze met mine she froze and tried to hide. She remained hiding (fairly unsuccessfully with her bowler hat on) behind a pole until I clambered down and left. Who knows who she thought I was or what she thought I was doing; this struck me as a pretty lawless part of the world, maybe her fear of strangers was justified.

Meanwhile, these are the pics I took:

These are the mountains surrounding the salt lake, seen from a distance now.

We lose a vehicle, but gain a railway bridge

After a rudimentary but adequate breakfast (stale white bread and scrambled eggs, and red jam so sweet it was radioactive), we loaded our gear, piled into our cars and took off. The Gringo switched on his 1970s playlist and cracked open his first can before we hit the camp gates, but by now we were all getting a bit more used to him, so it didn't matter. After a couple of songs he turned down the sound suddenly and asked, fairly randomly, if we had all cleaned our teeth. He was concerned that we would have dust on our teeth and explained the importance of dental hygiene generally. It was hard to know if there was something actually useful in that advice or it was the first beer talking. We all said yes anyway.

Soon we were truly out in the wilds of Bolivia. The clouds retreated, the sun blazed, the tracks became less distinct, and our convoy sped across salt and sand in a total void, suspended in the grandeur of high-altitude volcanic valleys, some 4000m above sea level (that's about the height of Everest base camp).

My favourite pic from that morning

When I say 'convoy', however, it became apparent after an hour or so that the convoy had shrunk to two vehicles, not three. We pulled up at one of the photo opportunities promoted on the website, a disused rail bridge in the middle of nowhere leading from nowhere to nowhere. While the rest of us piled out and took touristy pics (see below), The Gringo actually looked worried, even slightly panicked, as did the other driver and guide. It had dawned on them that we were one car down.

For some reason the tour company hasn't caught up with CB radio technology, and of course there was no internet coverage out there on the surface of Mars, so The Gringo recruited a carload of volunteers and took off in one of the vehicles back across the desert to find the 3rd vehicle. Tiernan and the German couple began wondering if they made the right decision NOT cancelling their tours. I wasn't too concerned, I just hoped the delay wouldn't mean we had to cancel our visit to the highland flamingo lagoons later in the day - as for the missing carload, meh, ditch them.

Crazy railway bridge antics

About the time we were all starting to feel thirsty and sun-exposed and slightly vulnerable, we saw a glint in the distance, and soon after The Gringo and his volunteers screeched to a stop. They hadn't found the other vehicle, but someone on board had remembered seeing it speeding ahead of us, so The Gringo and the other drivers and guides took that at face value; we would forge ahead to the next stop and if the third vehicle wasn't there, someone would use the Wi-Fi there to initiate a search from Uyuni.

Ha ha ha ha, whew, problem solved then, we all said nervously.

Llama sausages at 4,400m

So on we pressed to the highest altitude of the day, 4,400m at the foot of an active volcano in the middle of Bolivia's high plains. Sure enough, the third vehicle was there, and its occupants (who included my Rumanian non-vampire from the bed bus) had already eaten their lunch (rude). They said they'd been worried about us while we were worrying about them, but it hadn't stopped them eating lunch.

To compensate, I tried my first barbecued llama-sausage sandwich, which I bought for 15 Bs from a dodgy vendor in a mudbrick shelter (what could possibly go wrong?). It was ok, but very dry, gamey meat, no fat and quite chewy. And the bread was stale. Worth trying though. Once.

I ate it while gazing at the truly massive volcano, with its small plume of dark smoke to the far left of the crest indicating activity:

Note the plume on the left of the summit; this was the biggest and highest of the Bolivian desert volcanoes. Lady walking towards me in the foreground is 'Gabby', the Rumanian non-vampire.

I asked The Gringo how many volcanoes in Bolivia were active; he led me away and showed me a rock formation he thought looked like a face.

The white lagoon

After lunch we sped off over increasingly rough tracks towards the first of the lagoons we were scheduled to visit, the so-called 'White Lagoon'. It was a bone crunching couple of hours; it seems the drivers race each other to keep themselves entertained, which didn't really take our comfort into consideration, especially those perched (with no belts) in what should have been the luggage area at the back of the vehicle. Toilet stops were pretty rudimentary - we just took off from the Landrover and got it over with out in the desert. At one stop Juliette complained that it wasn't fair on women; The Gringo led her away and showed her a rock formation.

After an eternity, we arrived at the first lagoon. The lagoons are incredible - bodies of water at the foot of volcanos, fed by thermal springs in the middle of the desert. They are rimmed by a thin border of grass and mud and for much of the year they are frozen. In winter they are snowbound, hard to imagine in the November heat, although traces of snow still remained on the barren slopes of the higher volcanoes. And as if that isn't bizarre and exotic enough, there were the flamingos. Flocks and flocks of them covering the lagoons in delicate blobs of pink and white. Just to see them was like a dream in this hostile environment; they could have been ballerinas. It was totally worth the pain getting there to see them.

Flamingos have quite small brains (don't go asking them for their opinion of Proust), but as Car 2's Guide explained, they live at this altitude because almost nothing else does (so no predators), and because they have a brain function that enables them to stand on one leg, and when that leg reaches freezing point, switch legs, without waking. That's pretty impressive. The one other thing that survives at this altitude is prawns, and the flamingos spend their lives grazing on them in the mud. If it gets a bit cold, there are thermal springs in the vicinity they can warm up in. So all in all, they're safe, they're not sleep-deprived, they're booking regular spa treatments and they're eating prawns all day. Not a bad life. And who needs Proust.

Incidentally, while Guide 2 was explaining about flamingos, The Gringo was drinking beers on a swing.

Rabbits, rocks and redness

After photographing the flamingos from every angle, we climbed back into the Landrovers and sped off over dunes to another lagoon, almost identical to the first, to see more flamingos.

You can clearly see traces of snow on the volcanoes in the background of lagoon 2.

From there we headed to some strange rock formations in a very high valley (see below), where we took more pics, then to a site where 'Viscacha' (South American rabbits) were known to live. And right on cue, a couple of viscacha made an appearance. They were half rabbit, half ring-tailed possum in my opinion, but no one asked me for my opinion. They were quite tame.

Here we were back with Fred and Wilma again ->

Below: Some of my rock-impersonation work

Tiernan getting acquainted with a rabbit (Viscacha)

Then finally it was back into the Land rovers for what I had anticipated would be the highlight of the day, the famous Red lagoon, featured in all the promotional material about Bolivia. It's dramatic in that it lies at the foot of one of Bolivia's tallest volcanos, and has a red surface covered in pink flamingos. I was looking forward to seeing the pink on the red.

The Gringo explained that the lagoon is only red because of the wind, nothing to do with algae. On a calm day it's not even red at all, it's only red when the wind changes the chemical balance of the water. Or something.

In any case, there was no shortage of wind when we got there, and the view didn't disappoint:

The red lagoon in all its glory. Well, most of its glory

Well, actually it did disappoint just a fraction. I'd expected to be down at water level so I could get some flamingos in the foreground with the red behind them.

But even had I been down there, the flamingos were unco-operatively flocking to the left, so I had to make do with what I had in front of me.

The pink flamingos on the navy blue water made for a striking sight anyway, I guess.

From there we headed to our camp for the night, an even more rudimentary building in an even more rudimentary setting. It was possible to be taking all the desert volcanos for granted by this stage of the day, but as the light began to cast shadows, I didn't forget what I came to Bolivia for. I snapped some pics of the giant red lagoon volcano as we passed underneath it's looming presence in the late afternoon light.

I will never forget the desert volcanos of Bolivia.