My piece of La Paz (and Uyuni too)

Bolivia is surreal--it might have been the altitude, but my memories of the country are laced with seeds of doubt. Did I really see flamingos flocked in the middle of a red lake framed by purple mountains? Were the cacti in the middle of the salt fields real or part of some acetazolamide-induced dream? There were cups of tea made from coca leaves that the government encouraged me to drink. And a black Escalade with tinted-windows full of officers in jumpsuits that stopped our tour in the middle of the desert to check that the our run-down Toyata LandCruiser wasn't carrying any contraband coca. The best steak I have ever eaten for less than $4. Men carrying packages the size of refrigerator boxes on their back up San Francisco-dwarfing hills. Dried llama fetuses sold on the street for witch's spell-making. What a long, strange trip it was.

My friend Mike and I started in La Paz, the world's highest capital at about 4000m above sea level. (I took acetazolamide for the altitude, which makes your feet and fingers randomly go to sleep, which was rather tiresome, but far better than other things you can get with altitude sickness.) La Paz is shaped like a big bowl--the lip of the bowl (where the airport is) is on average 4 degrees cooler than the bottom of the valley. La Paz is big, bustling and dirty, but endlessly interesting. You can buy almost anything in the market--alpaca blankets, Nike hats, toilet bowl cleaner, coca leaves. And all of it is carried to the market by men who strap it to their backs in packages that would easily hold both me and a six-year-old.

An overnight bus ride later, we reached Uyuni, a town notable only for its dust and as a starting point for trips into the Salar, a huge salt flat in the southwest of Bolivia. We joined a tour with four European backpackers and set off with our guide, Tio, in a somewhat ramshackle (for good reason, it turned out) Toyota Landcruiser. Not long after, we reached the Salar, which is one of the strangest places I have ever been. Some areas were blindingly white in every direction. And other places water had collected which perfectly reflected the sky, so the horizon was only visible as a thin strip far in the distance. I think it is better illustrated than described. Please forgive the number of pictures, I was (and still am) a little bit obsessed.

In the middle of the salt flats was an island covered with cacti (the Charlie Brown type with the bent arms). It was named, inexplicably, fish island.

Riding with Tio was an experience. Our SUV was a bit worse for the wear--threadbare tires, a gearshift that required an oil pump prior to being shifted into reverse, a tarp mysteriously covering the undercarriage. And Tio was either optimistic or crazy--I think maybe a bit of both. A stream 10 inches deep? No problem. A steep incline laced with boulders the size of a man's head? Let's take it at 30 mph and see what happens (we got a flat). Now I believe the SUV commercials.

From the salt flats, we headed into the desert. Massive, open spaces of land with no roads, only the tracks of prior tour groups. I have never been someplace that felt so lonely. Hurtling through the desert, not another person in sight with miles visible in every direction, was so eerie. However, the emptiness was interrupted intermittently by big lakes named for their color (Laguna Verde, etc). And many of these lagoons were home to, of all things, large flocks of flamingos. (Keep in mind that the Salar is bitterly cold.) So we were standing, freezing cold, at the edge of these large, unusually colored lakes looking at pink flamingos. I've run out of synonyms for bizarre, so I'll let you just insert whichever you like best.

Unfortunately, Tio's job description did not really include guide (except for the part where he navigated in open country with no landmarks and no roads), so I don't know much about what we were seeing, except that it was surreal and beautiful. So in the same spirit, here are a few photos to give you a taste of the strangeness that is southwestern Bolivia.