Day 2 South-west Bolivia, into the wild

Weather: Freezing Boiling Freezing

Llama count: Replaced by flamingo metric temporarily, in honour of the pink coats Janet and I own. Flamingo count: 5672.

Janet woke us at 5, and we had breakfast in the dark. Early morning made better by mate tea, Dulche De Leche, and bread biscuits. We head off into the sunrise, which illuminates the snow capped mountains with a beautiful red glow. It looks deceptively warm, its bloody freezing.  I remind myself if I was in the UK I would probably be beagling in Northumberland, suddenly Northumberland feels likes the tropics compared to this place.

Stop number 1 is the ´ville de phantom´. (I had better add at this point Janet had given up with the English, and we were mainly operating in French.) The ghost town was eerie. It was deserted, but better built than any place I had seen in this part of Bolivia so far. The original architects were the Incas, and elegant archways, and complex building systems could still be seen in the ruins. The problems for the town started when the Spanish arrived, it was one of the first places in Bolivia to be colonised. Yet, the Spanish had trouble convincing anyone to move here... they had obviously heard about the morning temperature. Instead of civilians the Spanish filled the place with former prisoners, who all came with various forms of sickness. Consequently the local population were ravaged by disease, and depleted. Many fled, but a few of the older generation remained, and the town was still partially inhabited.

The Spanish brought with them Roman Catholicism, which blended rather well with the local religion. In the middle of the town was an impressive church which we climbed to the top of. (Definitely would have not been approved of by the health and safety executive.) It was here where things went from bad to worse for the town. In the middle of mass one Sunday, the local priest went mad. This was the final straw for most of the inhabitants, who feared the town was occupied by the devil. Most fled, and only a few remained to pull down the roof of the church, and build another next door.  The little chapel, which was white washed to purify it is now also in ruins, as the old died and the young moved away. Today none of the locals will go to the town at night, and those that have report that red lights and singing float across the thin air from the church...

So after a rather macabre start to the day we head into the national park. This is the land of volcanoes and lagoons. It is spectacular, flamingoes everywhere, and more llamas. We stop for lunch at some hot springs, which look out over an aqua marine lake, which is dotted with pink flamingoes, and yellow mountains rise in the distance.

Next stop is the Desert of Dali, named in honour of Salvador Dali. He never visited the place, but in a rather too perfect example of nature imitating art it could easily have been one of his paintings. Then I think we went to the green lagoon, which was a poisonously colourful combination of arsenic and copper. I say I think, as somewhere at this point we went above 4800 metres, and I reverted to fen routes, and got altitude sickness. This basically meant nausea, a throbbing head ache, and a desperate need to sleep. Luckily I was travelling with a French doctor, who gave me strong painkillers, and some odd looking Bolivian pills, which were basically caffeine, aspirin, and coca. I was soon bouncing along again.

We drove back through the Dali desert. It was about in the middle of this arid place, with not another living thing in sight, let alone a human, that the radiator on the Toyota broke. It did so with an impressive amount of smoke and clattering. I think this might have had something to do with Freddy´s love of speed. I don´t think Janet´s folk music was to blame, no matter how loud she played it.

The day then turned into a survival game Bear Grylls would be proud of. Every ten minutes the Toyota broke down, every ten minutes we filled the radiator with water, and push started it. The French had had enough of the folk music by this point and produced an ipod. So everything was done to the soundtrack of Queen´s Under pressure, and Gloria Gaynors I Will Survive. We spent a very long afternoon deciding we were going to eat Janet first (she like all Bolivian women had plenty of meat on her.) Finally with the moon rising we made it to the accommodation...having used thirty bottles of water on the radiator... and with only one bottle of water left.

This time we were in purpose built tourist accommodation, which was freezing despite a cactus fuelled fire in the middle of the eating room, but anything was better than sleeping in the Toyota in the desert. We played cards and went to bed... for more odd altitude fuelled dreams.