We´re in Uyuni, Bolivia with almost a dozen hours to kill before we catch a train at the ungodly hour of 1Ñ45 a.m. We survived our four'day trek though south'western Bolivia, though some of us just barely.
I managed to catch up on my paper journal while we were ensconced in a comfortable hotel last night, but I´ll just give some highlights, rather than the day'by'day, blow'by'blow )no idea where the proper punctuation is here=.

So, we rendezvoused with our driver, cook, fellow passengers and well'used but sturdy looking Nissan 4X4 at 9 a.m. on Nov. 1, a Tuesday or Wednesday, I think. There were four of us on the tour, not counting the staff. It´s slightly more expensive to go with four than with six, but I really can´t imagine being jammed in three to a bench for eight to ten hours a day over the sort of roads we would see in the coming days.
Our co'passengers were Tom and Claire of Dublin''seriously, everyone we meet seems to be Irish. Juan Carlos was our excellent driver-guide, though he was a man of few words. And Moises cooked for us.

So, leaving Tupiza, we were almost immediately climbing into pretty serious mountains via narrow dirt roads with sheer drops. It was intense. I was always struck to see, here and there a house or a llama pen in the absolute middle of nowhere. You have to imagine the residents must almost never stray far from home. At one point there was a small school way up in the mountains and just enough space had been levelled off for a little soccer pitch.
We also started right away with the oddball soundtrack that would accompany us through four days of surreal terrain. JC and Moises would put on a CD of MP3s, sometimes traditional Bolivian music or contemporary Latin pop, but more often an interminable stream of American pop songs that I imagine came collected under titles like Every Single Song Recorded from 1991'1995, in no particular order. So when we reached the top of the first mountain and were gazing at these incredible vistas in all directions, we were hearing Careless Whisper by Wham! Sometimes, by sheer chance, the songs would be totally appropriate. There´s no better place to hear Where the Streets Have No Name than when you´re blazing a dusty trail across a high plain.
Anyway, before we knew it, we were up at 4200 metres and we were feeling it.
We finished that day in a tiny village called San Antonio de Lipez totally exhausted. I had a throbbing headache )not helped by the bone rattling jeep ride= and I think Rhia was beginning to be a bit queasy at that point.
We were trying to fight the altitude sickness with coca tea and chewing coca leaves. The former is more pleasant, but the latter you can do on the go. It would help temporarily, but we both had pretty sleepless nights.
When I lay down I could hear the blood rushing by my ears. I got a nosebleed at one point. I also had this weird sensation where when I seemed to be drifting off it felt like my body would forget to breath and I had to gasp, which didn´t help my headache.
It´s so dry you get very congested, your tongue literally sticks to the roof of your mouth and your lips begin to split.
So we both got up'before 6'the next day, feeling pretty crappy.
Our drive took us through a little town that had spring up around gold but been abandoned when it was overrun with these rabbit'like rodents. There was one sitting definatly on the wall of an abandoned home as we passed.
One highlight of the day was a visit to a hot spring where we were glad to get out of the howling wind and let some of the previous day´s grime wash away. I´m sure we got equally as coated immediatelt after we stepped out of the water into the dusty gale.
After a lunch break we came to the gorgeous Laguna Verde, a lake at the foot of the 6,000 metre'high Volcano Licancabur. It´s a bright teal colour and was blown into a pleasant choppiness that afternoon. The surreality continued as we entered a desert appropriately name after Dali.
The mountains surrounding the desert were all striped with colour.
It was amazing how you could travel through these absolutely different landscapes in relatively short time.
In short order we were at a spot called Sol de Manana where the volcanic activity caused geysers to shoot out of the ground and made all these sulphur smelling puddles of bubbling grey water.
Nobody caught the name of the town we stayed in that night, but nobody really saw anything of it either. It was absolutely freezing, and still up over 4,000 metres.
I was totally sapped and headachey again. The cold didn´t help.
Rhia couldn´t keep dinner down that night and it was the beginning of a few really miserable days for her.
We started taking some prescription drugs we´d brought for altitude sickness and went to bed wearing virtually all our clothes, including the alpaca toque I´d bought from a girl standing by the side of the road halfway down a mountain the first day.
The drugs were helping me by morning, but we think Rhia must have caught some weird bug at some point, because things kept getting worse for her.
Let me tell you, there´s just about no worse place to be really sick than in the mountains of south western Bolivia. Even if we could have abandoned the tour, we´d have been in a village with no services hours in every direction from any kind of care. Through that day and the following ones, Rhia put up with this admirably, even though we were stuck in a hot dusty truck for hours at a time going over incredibly jolting terrain that would make even a well person nauseous. Our hosts were concerned and compassionate, but realistically, there was little they or anyone could do.
So we all soldiered on.
That day we saw the amazing Laguna Colorada. It´s a deep red coloured lake full of flamingos. I didn´t expect to find flamingos in this otherwise barren spot way up in the mountains, but there they were.
We passed through another desert with strange rock formations that seemed to have droppd out of the sky. An indication of how deeply Star Wars shaped my imagination as a lad''I kept expecting a sandcrawler to appear on the horizon or Ben Kenobi to pop out of a cave.
We also got to explore some volcanic rock at the foot of a still smoking volcano.
We finished the day at what turned out to be a relatively posh hotel )it not only had a shower, it had hot water= right on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni. I was back to feeling normal by then. Rhia managed some broth at supper but was still pretty sick.
The salar is the world´s biggest salt flat. When you see pictures, it looks like the prairies covered in snow, but it´s just salt, four to 20 metres deep and layered over water.
We set out to catch the sunrise the next day but were minutes late. The landscape was just unforgettable though. Absolutely flat and empty in all directions. There´s an island in the middle, where we had breakfast and climbed a bit to look at the ring of mountains around it. It rains occasionally on the salar and the water leaves these amazing honeycomb patterns all over the ground. In spots these openings allow the water to come through''I can confirm it tastes very salty''and our guides plundeg their arms in to retrieve crystals of salt. It was an amazing day.
They do harvest and process the salt to sell and we learned a bit about that in a village right on the edge of the salar. From there it was a short drive to Uyuni where we asked JC and Moises to drop us at the nicest hotel they knew of. The spot we ended up in was not luxurious but entirely acceptable. A warm sleep in a double bed and a very accomodating chef in the restaurant resulted in a much better Rhia today I am pleased to report. Now, I think she has some pictures to post, so I´ll sign off.
Salud!