High & Dry

I´m in one of a well spaced convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers in the middle of a desert, seemingly devoid of anything but salt. The terrain is almost perfectly flat and white in all directions, as far as the eye can see. I´m in the company of a pair of Portuguese, another pair of Germans, and an Indian woman of fifty-something years, on holiday from Australia, who reminds me greatly of my dearest grandmother. Our Bolivian driver has let us loose with the auxiliary input on the stereo. This is a good thing, because three days of Bolivian pan pipe music is three days more than I have the appetite for. My selection from the German iPod is AC/DC, so as to recreate an opening scene of Iron Man.

The main stop is a isolated rocky island of many, many cactus, upto ten metres tall and a thousand years old. The rock is almost like coral, and whilst my shoes grip perfectly, it´s quite capable of shredding my hands, so climbing is a no-go. This is where tourists insist to take tens and tens of largely unoriginal and poorly focused photos, amateurishly taking advantage of the natural "green screen" effect. I´ve no such interest.

In the afternoon, we arrive at a basic hostel. The hostel is in the shadow of a red mountain in the middle of this salty desert. The floors are covered small stones of salt, which I´m using to extract the moisture from my watch. I suspect much of the building is made of some kind of salt rock. There´s a couple of hours of sunlight left and I invite the Europeans to join me for a walk. Their preference is to play some game of cards. Their choice is entirely perplexing, but in reality, I´m happier to explore without them.

Despite being too mature for the earlier nonsense, on this rocky mountain, I have the mind of a seven year old boy. And so I being a game of Kevin Bacon´s Tremors. The game essentially involves leaping from rock to rock without touching the ground. Half an hour later, I´ve conceded that I can´t get to the top of the mountain without being eaten by the subterranean Graboids. Another half an hour later, I´m still scrambling up and have found a another type of rock. It´s red, smooth, and strong - probably a sandstone - so perfect for bouldering. From a few hundred metres up, the sun sets behind me and casts a shadow over distant salt flats. That motivates a new game of Let´s Get Off this Rock Before the Sun Goes Down. As I´m jogging and bounding down a path of switchbacks that I´d ignored on the way up, something goes awry in or around my right foot. Thankfully, I´m able to protect my sunglasses as I crash to ground and roll. With just a few small cuts, I rejoin my party and we set about emptying a bottle of rum.