notes and images
Sept 2010: The Milton Farm. A tiny Quaker family in far eastern Bolivia. We’d just finished a hike and had stopped in to buy some fresh yoghurt. Our friendly guide, the young friend of Milton W’s five kids, told them about the yoga poses Yon had done on the hike.
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A complete transformation happens to Bolivia when you leave the well-visited altiplano and places like Uyuni and Sucre. The climate and culture are very different. And it’s not crawling with backpackers – in 2010 at least. To feel it, head east…
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We raced across the high desert in the morning sun. The salt flats were far behind but the scenery here was almost as bold and extreme: bright blue sky, dry desert, and high volcanos.
Apart from sand and rock and drug smugglers, there were plenty of llamas, vicunas and even flamingos…
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The Uyuni Salt Flats – largest in the world – were probably Bolivia’s premier tourist attraction when we visited in 2010 (if not today too). And it’s easy to see why. More than 10,500 square kilometers in size, and around 3,600 meters above sea level, they extend south and west from Uyuni nearly as far as Chile. Unless you have the time, money and inclination to sponsor your own expedition, you’re more or less forced to take a tour. Finding the right one is a chore, but at the end of the day, like banana pancakes in Vietnam, it’s a case of “same-same but different”. The best thing to do is just plonk down your Bolivianos, jump in the jeep, and roll out.
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The darkness fell over our bus and the high Bolivian plateau south of La Paz. We’d ground to a halt an hour ago, along with every other truck and bus for two kilometres ahead and four behind, their motionless headlights tracing a smooth arc through the blackness. Suddenly everyone leaped to the left side of the bus, as blinking red lights told us we were about to see what had held us up.
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“Hola chicos!”
From Horiol’s very first friendly greeting as we opened the gate of his tiny hotel in equally tiny Putre, Chile, we knew we were in for a good time. This was a welcome omen, even more so once we discovered we’d been robbed in the Chilean frontier town of Arica. Boo! But it was our fault – a real beginner’s mistake. And it was just cash, and not too much, and Horiol’s big smile washed away the memory very quickly.
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↑ Glacier Yoga, 5,600 m above sea level
Edmund Hillary once said “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it”. That very much sums up our approach to Huayna Potosi, a popular peak just north of La Paz.
Sir Ed, a remarkably likeable guy, it seems, also said: “You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things – to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated.” This is certainly true of Huayna Potosi, known by some as the “easiest six-thousander in the world”. We’d even heard one woman, blissful in her ignorance, tell us Potosi was easy because “there are no clouds above 4,000”.
But as we battled a fairly convincing snowstorm before dawn at 5,750 meters – just a shade above the mythical “zone of no clouds” – we thought that perhaps Potosi wasn’t as easy as the “been-there-done-that” guys on the backpacker trail liked to make out.
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