Into (and out of) Arhentina

Cerro Rico (rich mountain) where all the silver came from and where (to date) over 8 million miners have been killed .... now also a tourist attraction ... so here I am sporting dynamite, detonator cord etc.


The train cemetary, Bolivia.

Urm, they`re flamingos (helpful captions)







She`s a Bolivian beauty standing outside a hotel made of salt.


The photo that really didn`t come off quite as hoped.

The Spanish school came and went, as, it turned out, did our ability to speak any Spanish.

We`re in Argentina now and we may as well not have bothered trying to learn Spanish because here they speak Geordie Spanish. We can`t understand them and they have no chance of understanding us. The Bolivians, as it turns out, all speak the Queens Spanish and also must have had a good imagination when it came to understanding us. If the Argentinians weren`t all so nice we`d be convinced they were like the French and were deliberately ignoring us to make us feel small.

Anyway, satisfied, as we naively were, that our Spanish was now marvellous (so long as everything we wanted to say we could achieve in the present tense) we moved on from Sucre and back to Potosi.

Potosi is the highest town of its size in the world (blah blah) and used to be bigger than London, Paris and everywhere else in the days when the Spanish were pulling huge quantities of silver from the hills. Now the mines are run by small independent groups of miners whose only troubles in the world are an incredibly short life expectancy and swarms of gawping tourists.

We bought a stick of dynamite, some ammonium nitrate (dynamite on it`s own is for wimps), detonator cord (told not to knock it accidentally), some coco leaves (pre-cocaine state) and, to cap it off, a two litre bottle of lemonade for the miners.

Anyone can buy the dynamite and lemonade in the market, and there were several randomly occurring explosions - mostly when the miners had had too much to drink (the miners have a pleasant drink which is 96% alcoholic) or for the benefit of tourists. We chuckled merrily when our guides lit a couple of bombs and passed them around our group (they`re on a three minute fuse (give or take)).

The presents to the miners are a small pay off for our annoying them as they work heaving huge trolleys around (Indiana Jones style) or manually hammering into rock or shovelling rocks in the boiling heat and darkness for up to 24 hour shifts.

Crawling around in tiny tunnels with random vertical shafts for either descending down or not accidentally falling down it was very hot, very dusty and a lot of hard breathing (at about 4,500 metres). On the way in we`d noticed lots of compressed air being pumped into the mines for essential oxygen. Essential oxygen for the occasional bit of machinery to work, as we all breathed in the arsenic, asbestos, cyanide and silica cocktail that tends to kill the miners by the time they`re forty.

Momentarily putting aside the misery and plight of the miners´ lives .... I had a really nasty headache for the rest of that day which no drugs could stop (although the coco leaves (the local remedy for altitude sickness) did the best work).

After Potosi we took a local bus for the six hour trip over unmade roads to Uyuni. Although Uyuni itself is small and nondescript, every tourist to Bolivia goes there (at the same time as us it seemed) for the tours to the Sal de Uyuni.

Day one of our four day tour took us out over some of the two thousand kilometres worth of salt fields. With mile after mile of flat white salt then cue attempts at hilarious perspective photographs of people`standing` in someone else's hand. With more patience they can look really good ... it`s a shame we didn`t have more patience.

In a burst of excitement I tried to get our tour group (six of us) to stand behind my open bag for a great and clever illusion photo. In my mind it looked as if we were all small people standing in a big rucksack. In actual fact it looked like we were a bunch of people standing behind a large bag - which was in the foreground. The driver looked on in very bored fashion like he`d seen tourists try these photos every day for the last twenty years (but never with such a bad result). Our group seemed to get much amusement (less from me) over just how bad this photo was.

Anyway, next tour stop was Fish Island. By far it`s greatest feature was that it was riddled with enormous and dramatic cacti, not really a feature at all was that from a distance it has a profile that vaguely could look like a fish. Fish Island must have been the only suggestion in the hat.

That night, promised as the most comfortable of the tour, was spent in a complete dive. After we`d had our fill of dinner (and stuffed the other 80% of served food into pockets, onto the fire, other peoples plates or just tried to compress it to make the amount left look less insulting) we played a bit of frisbee, and when it was dark, gawped at the stars. The stars were as incredible as you`d expect for somewhere so totally remote and without electricity. The toilets were also as disgusting as you`d expect for somewhere so remote, and given there were only two toilets for about twenty tourists (half of whom seemed to have food poisoning) you wouldn`t have chosen to settle down for a nice relax with the Sunday papers.

Day two took us down to the borders of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile via some dramatic scenery, volcanoes and lakes. The lakes all passably represented their names (green, white, red and err, probably a blue one). Each lake had slightly more flamingos than the last (that were slightly closer, slightly more pretty and slightly more pink). Each lake therefore made the previous copious photos of flamingos slightly more redundant.

The scenery was so dramatic with strange lava formed rock formations and volcanoes all around that I felt totally inspired to take my toilet in the wilderness. This mostly because I had chosen not to spend my time relaxing in the previous nights facilities (no Sunday papers) and also more worryingly was my own slightly deteriorating condition. I`d broken the golden maxim - take only photos, leave onlyfootprints etc.

I was however a changed man, and by the end of the tour I was converted to taking my dignified toilet outside. I approached the task of trying to convert others to my new preoccupation with zeal. Unfortunately my main campaign was led on the second night. In pitch darkness, the temperature at minus fifteen degrees and a howling gale- myself and Ben (on our tour group) set out with determination and toilet paper (in different directions). Two minutes later we were back, I´d popped an Imodium and Ben sat firmly on a chair for the rest of the evening. The `bathroom` on that second night had no flushing water and no running water and was grim. It wasn`t greatly improved with the redecoration provided by the arrival of the food poisoned tour group.

On the third day at five thirty in the morning we dressed swiftly by candlelight and were too late to see the sunrise through the sulphurous steam of many geysers. Nevertheless it was a dramatic sight that justified, retrospectively, the shocking waking time.

Next we moved to yet another lake, but this one was fed by lots of steamy springs that gave us the opportunity for the first hot bath in two months. This was absolutely lovely (not quite as lovely as the preceding minutes of isolation a short twenty minutes walk away).

Later in the day we dropped off the English/Argentinian couple (whom we`d been having a good old chuckle with) at the Chilean border. Our tour group now consisted of the driver, the overly attentive cook (with no teeth), myself and Sam and a Spanish couple. Despite wanting to discuss the Basque separatist issues of the day (they were from Bilbao), instead the conversation moved to, for eg, `my name is Bart,I am 34 years old, I live in England`. How proud our Spanish teacher in Sucre would have been.

On our return to Uyuni from the trip (the remains of the tour were just more of the same stunning, weird and unique scenery - most of which formed a perfect natural lavatory) we caught the 2am train out to Tupiza. In a land so diverse and beautiful it`s annoying how much they like their night travel. Nonetheless the lights of course all went off as soon as the train left the station and we were able to gaze at the stars and immediate scenery out of the window. Ten minutes later the windows iced up on the inside. Fortunately wearing all our winter clothes and market purchases of gloves and scarfs etc we were only just about cold.

Tupiza has more fantastic scenery, we were told, however somehow we didn`t find ourselves greatly motivated. The food was shocking as always and we were so close to Argentina that, after a day, we caught the 4am bus out (4am!! what`s wrong with them)??

We`re in Salta now, in Argentina. They have big supermarkets with proper food, they have health food shops and the restaurants serve food that would actually be a pleasure even if we were eating it back home. Today is Sunday and we walked to the out of town shopping centre, looked around the shops, had a MacDonalds (the proper food is great, the health food shops are probably excellent, but we couldn`t resist the only MacDonalds we`ve seen so far. We are bad people).

They have an excursion here called ´Tren a las Nubes` (train to the clouds). It`s one of the great railway journeys of South America with 21 tunnels, 13 viaducts, two 360 degree loops and two zig zags. It climbs four thousand metres and there`s stunning scenery along the route.

Anyway all that`s irrelevant as typically the train has been broken for months. Not wanting to be robbed the experience, we ended up just feeling like we`d been robbed. We took the close substitute `minivan a las Nubes` tour which attempted to follow the train line. Twelve hours in a dodgy minivan on unmade roads didn`t quite achieve the same `great train journey` experience.

Each evening in Salta we`ve been sitting on a restaurant steps at 7pm waiting for the place to open for dinner. We walk sheepishly in at 7:30 and order some food - probably from the cleaners. The waiters have all arrived by 8pm, and they come and eat their dinner on next door tables until 8:30 when they get changed into waiter gear. By around 9pm, after a few more tourists have dribbled in, we get our food. We finish a couple of minutes later (quite hungry) and try to get the bill. By 10pm the place is heaving ...... there are a few fatties in Argentina.

Anyway, next stop is Asuncion in Paraguay. We leave on Tuesday (16/8) for our small 16 hour bus journey. Terrific.