As first impressions go, this maybe isn’t the best. I have just crossed the dusty frontier from Chile into Bolivia, in the high Atacama Desert. I’m in the back of a 4x4 with a guide called David and a driver called Marco, and a distinct lack of oxygen — we’re at 13,000ft. I’m here to get a handle on what is arguably the most obscure yet intriguing of all South American countries, and what I’m seeing is a lake tinged reddish-emerald with arsenic — literally a poisonous lake.
Apparently unfazed by the lunar-like Sea of Lethality, David gestures at a grey escarpment beyond. “That’s Licancabur, an abandoned Inca fortress built by slaves. The Incas used it as a prison for bad people sent from Peru.”
No kidding. As punitive landscapes go, the environment is state of the art. Everything is superbly bleak. The desert sands of yellow and ochre are ringed by savage volcanoes, some of them active yet scarred with snow. If you are so minded you can stop the car and climb them with relative ease (as long as you don’t mind stopping every three steps to take a very deep breath). If you reach the top you will be higher than anyone in Europe.
A few bumpy kilometres later we pass another copper-red lake, yet this one is alive with preening flamingos, squawking and feeding, even though we’re at a lung-scorching, head-fogging 14,000ft (you may have seen this place on Planet Earth II).
When we get close, I realise with a shock that the muddy shores of the roseate lake are littered with the feathers and bones of dead flamingos, as if there has been some concerted, but curiously patterned pogrom of pinkish-white birds. David kicks at one feathered cadaver and gives me the facts: the problem, he says, is that the birds misjudge the viciously variant temperatures; that is to say, sometimes they step out of the relatively tepid water and linger too long before taking wing, at which point they simply freeze to death on the spot.
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Frankly, I don’t blame the bewildered animals — the cloudless sky makes the day feel slap-on-the-sunblock hot, perhaps 35C. Yet the thermometer in the car tells me that the temperature at this altitude is only 12C. As we continue along the dusty road David tells me that the locals don’t use fridges, they just keep beers or perishables in the shade, where they stay cold.
I’m kind of hoping that we might soon descend to something less head-spinning. Yet farther we climb, into the Altiplano, reaching the complex of boiling geysers and bubbling mud pools known as Sol de Mañana, the still-whirring ruins of a mighty spa for long-dead aliens.
The sand is now multihued, sulphur orange to ethereal purple. Glittering icicles hang like glassy fangs over rock-hewn kettles of scalding water; one slip on the greasy mud and you’re boiled. There are no fences or signs. In fact, there’s no ticket office, no tourists, no people, nothing. It’s us and the vicuna (a relative of the llama), nibbling at the naked rock. Experts aren’t entirely sure how these gracile camelids survive in this brutal environment.
“I know, let’s have a picnic,” says David.
“You what?”
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“In Salar de Uyuni . . . The biggest salt pans in the world. It’s a few hours away.”
He’s right. Come the afternoon we have descended — somewhat — from the highest peaks and we’re skidding across a ice cap of salt, fully 10,000 sq km of blinding white flatness. The intensity of the landscape imposes an awestruck silence (not easy for David, who likes to sing ribald Bolivian folk songs when he’s not complaining, in an amiable way, about Bolivian politics). Horizons shimmer, perspectives are warped (try taking a photo and see if you can judge size and distance). The various cactus-sprouting islands of the salt flats seem to float on the bleached horizon. Then, in the middle of the world’s greatest expanse of raw salt, David and Marco set up a little picnic table and we have a high-altitude bottle of Bolivian wine (yep, Bolivia makes decent wine) and roast potatoes with lamb. As picnics go it’s not bad, although I reckon it could do with a bit of salt.
Lunch over we scoot across the western pans to one of the little villages of thatched cottages that surround the Uyuni flats. This particular village apparently guards a famous shrine. David guides us past the humble crofts, where women in coloured leggings and black bowler hats regard us placidly from their doorways. An old man sits in the rare shade of a quishuar tree, chewing coca leaves with lime and ash, which make a goitre-like bulge in his cheek. I have to ask: “Where are all the young guys?”
David answers with a shrug: “They’re either working in the zinc mines or the lithium mines . . . or the silver mines. The shrine is just up here.”
It turns out that the shrine is a cave. And the cave is full of mummies, half unwrapped, their skeletons showing. These mummies have been lying here, stiff and frozen, for 1,000 years. It is thought that some of them might be sacrificed infant twins. I shudder at the silently shouting skulls, and David and I sprinkle a dash of picnic wine on the cave floor; it’s a reflexive, ritual offering to Pachamama, the mother earth god of Andean indigenous folk. Pachamama quickly returns the favour; when we emerge from the caves we see that the slantwise evening sun has caught the polygonal crystal ridges of raised salt that scar the surface of the pans, creating a vast and exquisite tracery of fiery yellow — a craquelure of glowing amber veins, threading across a plateau of misty rose-diamond.
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We head to La Paz after a night in a salt hotel (which is, slightly disappointingly, like a Bauhaus villa made of very pale gingerbread, rather than a Taj Mahal of white crystal; although also quite luxe, and nicely heated by night).
As all guidebooks will tell you, La Paz is one of the world’s highest cities. What they might not tell you is that it is also, quite possibly, the weirdest. In the middle and at the bottom is a vivid, chaotic, giddy and compelling downtown, a gritty and challenging whirl of beggars and churches, plazas and flyovers. All this is surrounded by slopes of slums, then a palisade of ice-capped mountains.
At night La Paz is even more striking; the surrounding hillside barrios turn into walls of twinkling golden lights, looking down on the sultry, lamplit boulevards. Women with trays of roast-chicken sandwiches loiter on every corner in their A-line skirts and bowler hats, hawkers sell cheap tapes of sappy Latino music, a young girl carries a tray of lurid red desserts from bar to bar. A man sleeps, inexplicably, under an umbrella devoid of fabric: it’s just prongs. Here is magic realism made real.
In short, it’s all very diverting — I love new cities, the stranger the better — but after a walk and a few drinks the tiredness and altitude get to me, and I retreat to my hotel for the Most Terrible Dinner in Latin America. In retrospect I should have bought some of the delicious sandwiches. I should, indeed, have remembered the central lesson about Bolivian food, which is that the best tucker is nearly always the simplest.
Marraqueta bread, for instance, is great when served with a rough hunk of Bolivian cow’s milk cheese and makes a noble breakfast with strong coffee. Also good is choripan, a kind of hot dog, or silpancho, halfway between rice lasagne and hearty stew. Salteñas are very nice — like empanadas, but with spicier meat juice. Best of all is the custard apple, possibly the universe’s most delicious fruit.
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Morning in La Paz dawns bright and polluted. David takes me to the Witches’ Market, where I browse the dried llama foetuses, the money-making potions, the eerily moustachioed dolls and the “powder of sexual domination”. Passing up the chance to haggle over a dead baby flamingo (“ideal for black magic”), we proceed to the stately colonial arches of Plaza Murillo and the grandly dilapidated cathedral. As we tour the historic core — visiting the Hotel Copacabana, where the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara failed to stir an insurrection in 1967 — David tells me some of Bolivia’s political history, which mainly consists of comical coups, embarrassing defeats and various periods of imperial subjugation (overtly under the Inca and the Spanish, covertly under the British and the Americans). La Paz, for instance, is surely the only capital that has a “Museum of the Lost Coastline”, commemorating the failed 1884 war against Chile when the Chileans stole the last bit of Bolivia’s littoral, landlocking the country and leaving the Bolivian navy with only one port.
It’s on Lake Titicaca, and it’s my final stop. Titicaca is one of those names, isn’t it? Like Samarkand or Timbuktu, the chiming syllables embody the sense of something far away and exotic. And Lake Titicaca is a place I have long wanted to visit. Will it live up to expectations?
Early signs are not good. North of La Paz the Altiplano becomes ever bleaker and drearier; aside from the enigmatic, pre- Inca ruins of Tiwanaku there’s zero to see for hundreds of kilometres. Finally, as the shadows lengthen, we round a random curve and there she is, a wide, cold, glittering alpine lake, fully 12,000ft up, with the Royal Range of the central Andes providing an imperious blue and silver backdrop, tinged to pale scarlet by the dying sun.
The main way to get around Titicaca is by hydrofoil, one of which takes me from the hamlet of Huatajata to the biggest lake island. This is called Isla del Sol and it is home to a couple of fishing villages, a famous Inca site of human sacrifice and one rather fine hotel, the Posada del Inca, once the presidential palace.
Be warned, however, there are no roads on the island, so you have to hike from the hydrofoil stop via an Inca temple, some 5,000-year-old vegetable terraces and a couple of grumpy llamas. It’s worth the hour of thin-air huffing and puffing because you are rewarded with tranquil rooms, shaded courtyards and, best of all, shining, Edenic, rose-filled gardens from where you can guzzle high-altitude wine and enjoy the Amalfi-like views of the turquoise lake waters, sublime and perfect vistas once reserved for Inca royalty (who were the only people allowed on to Isla del Sol). It is intensely seductive and entirely detached. No phone, no wifi, just bliss, blessed sleep and bloody good vegetable soup with green salsa.
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My Bolivian journey is nearly done. Soon I have to cross the lake-shore frontier into Peru. And so, come the next sunny morning, I reluctantly jump on another hydrofoil, which deposits me in the main Bolivian town on the Titicacan shore, Copacabana. This is the home of the Bolivian navy, and it’s an engaging place, a kind of 19th-century Latin American hipster-voodoo St Tropez. People come to Copacabana from across Bolivia to have their cars ritually anointed by priestly witchdoctors; people come from across the world just to relax and enjoy the dulcet, languid ambience.
And I am determined to be one of them. After a couple of punishing weeks on the road I am happy to loiter here in Copacabana, with its quinoa menus, German hikers and bustling wifi cafés, drinking beer on the rooftop terraces, gazing out at the sunlit waters of ancient Titicaca. And as I sip my cold and delicious Pacena lager, it occurs to me that famously unlucky, put-upon, stolen-coastline Bolivia has one thing that no one can take away, something that becomes ever more precious as the world quickly shrinks. Bolivia may be remote, daunting and strange, yet it is utterly and brilliantly different from anywhere else on Earth.
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Sean Thomas was a guest of Journey Latin America (020 8600 1871, journeylatinamerica.co.uk), which has a 14-day holiday to Peru and Bolivia visiting La Paz, Lake Titicaca, Isla del Sol and Machu Picchu from £2,857pp. The price includes internal flights, transfers, excursions and B&B breakfast. International flights are extra and start at £650pp