On Friday morning I started a four day journey into the wilds of Bolivia. My tour group consisted of three charming young ladies from England, a driver and our tour director Nancy, a native of Bolivia. We loaded a jeep with our personal needs, extra gas and food for four days. The day started off bright and cool as nearly every day seems to start in this part of the Americas.
After a mile of paved road we drove on very rugged and rocky trails for the next four days. Over the next four days we saw very few cars and few people. We were clearly entering a wild part of the world.
We never got below 13,000ft of elevation during any of the journey. At times were were nearly at 17,000ft. It is an inhosbitable land with incredibly bright sun,fierce winds and bone numbing cold at night. The ground cover is very sparse. the Altiplano is essentially a cold desert. There is green moss scattered about and it grows at only one millimeter a year. The only snow we saw were on the high peaks that border Chile.
Our evening accomodations were very sparse. no light, no heat and shared rooms (the girls sure liked to talk so I just pretended I was sleeping). It was essentially like living in a tent with cement walls. It got so cold at night it was difficult to sleep. I got to dislike Bolivian food too. One day all I consumed was Coca Cola.
Well into the highlands we visited a Spanish ghost town that was 300yrs old. There were numerous rock walls remaining from the houses and three churches that were part of the city. It was incredible that the Spanish could establish a city in this hostile environment. Food and water are not available from this land so I wonder how they survived. The drive to get silver apparently overcame the odds.
We saw large herds of llamas grazing on this harsh land. How they were able to locate food is a mystery to me. The llamas were the only mammals we saw except for dogs in the small villages that we visited.
One of the highlights of this journey is to see the high mountain lakes. One was dark red ( due to the algae), and another a greenish blue. What made the lakes especially interesting were the large flocks of flamingos that were feeding in the lakes. One type of flamingo we saw is extremely rare. I always thought flamingos lived in tropical sea areas.
The mountains in this part of Bolivia are immense (nearly 20,000ft) and all of them are extinct volcanos. Many were very conical in shape with just the top off and some were mountains with the side blown off. The mountains were not in a chain but spread out over the vast landscape. You began to feel like you were on another planet and not on earth.
On the final night we stayed in a motel made of salt. It was located at the edge of the great salt flat called the Solar. It is so huge that it is easily seen from space. I bet it is almost the size of Lake Erie. I took an evening walk on our last night before we entered that flats and I saw many stone walls running up a hill side. these stone fences were in great shape and they were from the age of the Incas. It is so interesting to see so many well constructed stone walls that predate the arrival of the Spanish.
Our final day was a drive accross the great salt flat. Given the altitude and the intense sun, the experience of being on the flat felt other worldly. Within the flats there are about 20 islands. we vistied the larest of them. It was covered with ancient cactus and it was occuppied by the Incas. On top of the island, human and animal sacrifices were made.
At the end of the flat we saw many men working with shovels, scraping the salt and loading it by hand onto trucks. It was sad to see such inefficient use of human labor.
It was a facinating four days. My group got along wonderfully and we all have many memories of a very unique experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment