Salt, Views, Altitude and Palestine
Trip Start
Jan 23, 2007
1
18
24
Trip End
Ongoing
Sucre,
Bolivia
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
To give you an idea of how extreme this journey was the first hour (the bus ride to the Bolivian border) consisted of a journey that took us 2km higher up to an altitude of 4.8km, the medical world adivses that for appropriate acclimitasation you travel upwards at rate of 500m per a day so we had done the recommended equivalent of 5 days in the space of an hour. The first stop of the trip was at a lake called Laguna Verde which was a huge green lake in the middle of the desert providing amazing reflections of the mountanous Andes in the water itself, as I look at the photographs I stare in disbelief that I was there, and rightly so, the panoramics blow your mind.
The next stop was at a hot springs where the most surreal thing happened. As we pulled up I looked out of my dust stained window to see 2 familar faces, my Mancunian friends Alex and Katie who I had met in RIo and had gave up all hope of seeing again later on making their way away from the springs. My utterance of Oh My God! This is Ridiculous! Confounded everyone else in the jeep, "does he like hot springs that much?" "They´re only girls in bikinis, Christ!" the reunion was short but sweet but seemed to be repeated at nearly every stop on the flats. The next stop was a series of Geysers that stood at an altitude of 5.2km they reeked of sulphur and only an egg-lover like myself could bare to stand in the path of the gaseous heat they expired.
I keep referring to altitude in this entry because my last experience of altitude at a mere 3km was a bad one but my self-medication left me astonished to find I was suffering from nothing more than a shortness of breath, it is bizarre to feel like you have sprinted 400 metres when really all you have done is got out of a jeep or hoisted your rucksack up into the air, I guess that´s what it must feel like to be morbidly obese. Unforunately this wasn´t the case for my friend Robbo and the Israeli girl in another of our convoy who suffered the epic headaches, fatigue and (in the Israeli´s case) physical sickness that seemed fresh in my memory from before.
Thankfully the first day´s altitude problems were non-existent the next day when we carried on in anticipation of the salt flats that awaited the next day. It was a bit of a drag as the journey last ages but yet covered very little distance as we were traversing the mountain range that surrounded this vast area of nothingness. Excitement soon occurred when firstly our jeep suffered a puncture and a motor failure however these were acute problems and it was the Israeli-English-Morrocan (I will call it IsEngcan to save on characters) jeep that suffered the worst damage.
Our legend of a driver (a short Andean man who seemed to enjoy nothing more than throwing the jeep into steep pot holes that nearly left me concussed on several occasions as my head smacked against the hard and low ceiling) was a relative novice. This was clear when he went the wrong way round a lake, had to cut across 6 desert lanes to get back on route and when he had to stop on numerous occasions to look to see where the rest of the convoy had gone because of this when we pulled up to the stalled IsEngcan the occupants of the jeep had been waiting for half an hour. It turned out that their axel had broken and as a consquence the 6 of them had to cram into the other 2 jeeps making for an amusing finally leg to our accommodation that night. The English couple and the Israeli in ours were amused by the Juvenility and randomness of our conversations as they had spent the past 48 hours discussing Palestine and cultural nuances but it was our jeep and our rules! That night at the gueshouse it was enlightening to finally speak to some Israelis (they have a notorious reputation out here for being inclusive, abrupt and large in number due them all travelling having finished military service) and see where all the stereotypes I had heard emerged from, the negative ones I feel are more of a consequence of their culture rather than themselves. Their attitudes about Palestine and drugs was particularly interesting although I can´t really say I agree with them. It was also nice to finally dispell my uncomfortableness with German company as we joked about WWI + II and the various stereotypes, before I had always possessed that English attitude of "don´t mention the war".
The culmination of our trip (and what we were all most looking forward to) of visiting the salt flats was delayed significantly because of the broken down jeep, it was miles away full of people´s rucksacks and the journey could not continue until it had arrived. To compound problems one of the Germans in our group was seriously ill (suspected food poisoning) luckily his travel partner (the Irish twinged German) was a medicine graduate but that is no substitute for the realtiy that nothing can help apart from playing the waiting game. This dampened affairs as we all felt so bad for the poor guy who had to watch the highlight of the trip conked out in the back of the jeep. The journey to the salt flats was amazing the first couple of miles out towards them consisted of driving through a terrain that can only be described as a half a foot deep ocean it was weird to feel at sea (technically the salt flats are a sea or lake of some sort but they are so incredibly saturated with salt that they are almost completely solid) in a jeep with nothing to see for miles but mirages on the horizon. The Salt flats consisted of a visit to a coral based cactus park in the middle of nowhere and then a quick walk throught he tourist trap and ecological disaster that is the Salt Hotel. We then took the classic photos where all perspective is lost on the empty landscap allowing you to seemingly hold other people in your hand, emerge from giant vaseline tubs and look like you are levitating.
Some things you should do and only do once to maintain their uniqueness and this was one of them, simply awesome.
