Sickness and Salt

To the time conscious of you, here is the briefest of summaries of recent events - Me and Anna split up this week, then got back together and went mining. For a more detailed description of events, please read on.

Uyuni provided us with an abundance of cheap street food the like of which we hadn't seen since Vietnam. We threw our stomachs perilously into the fray sampling every deep fried morsel we could lay our greedy tongues on. It was always going to be a case of who met with the cold, unforgiving surface of the ceramic bowl first and to my surprise, it was Anna.

After six days rarely progressing further than the bathroom we set off towards Colchani, a town just 22kms away and from where we would begin our journey across the largest salt flats in the world. It turned out to be an entirely terrible day. A day that should be spent wrapped firmly in a furry blanket in a hotel room watching Legally Blonde and eating cheerios. Definitely not a day to be spent on a bicycle. The storm began conveniently as we left town, not the rain variety but the much less enjoyable dust variety. We choked our way through 6 kms of misery until Anna pointed how completely unenjoyable what we were doing was. And she did make a very convincing point. However, I wanted to carry on. In the end, for the first time in the last 5 months, we went our separate ways as Anna headed back to Uyuni to wait for me.

The storm only intensified after Anna left me, to the point that visibility at times was just a few metres. I abandoned the road in the hope of consuming less sand somewhere else and found instead that I lost the road. I struggled on blindly for hours, feeling like a sand timer, dust pouring into every orifice and settling in my lower limbs which got heavier and heavier until pedaling seemed absurdly difficult.

I at long last saw the hazy form of a cyclist coming towards me and I have never been happier to see an Australian as I was just then. Dallas led me to the shelter of a hostel and I spent the rest of the evening scraping dust out of my nasal passages. The storm knocked out power for the area for two days and, surfacing as a snow storm in the areas where we had cycled the previous weeks closed the border to Chile.

The storm raged through the night but by morning all was calm and we set off across the salt flats. Unable to find a road we simply headed towards the volcano far in the distance. It was a surreal day, cycling across a perfectly flat sea of salt with nothing and no-one to be seen. Judging distances becomes impossible with no objects to guide you and our volcano seemed at times to be moving obstinately away from us. We finally arrived at a village as dusk approached, the wrong village it turned out, but we were much to tired to care.

The following morning we headed our separate ways, Dallas going North with his map, his GPS and his various life skills. I headed South with my compass.

I was aiming for an island in the centre of the salt flats that, according to the map, could be found due South of the volcano. So I made my bearing, recalling all those skills learnt in the near completion of my Duke of Edinburgh bronze award and set off at what I will refer to as a cycling gallop.

After an hour I had spotted the island far in the distance. In another hour I had realised that that was definitely not an island, but a mountain over 150kms away. After a further hour I was feeling a little disheartened and comprehensively lost in a sea of salt. I had a sit down, scanning the horizon, and spotted what could well be an island, to the North West of me. So, I wheeled my bike around and set off towards it. Yet another hour later and it had stubbornly refused to come any closer to me. It was at this point that it dawned on me that this might not be the correct island. There are two.

I was quite quickly running out of hours and any sense of where I was. So I abandoned the island, found some jeep tracks leading South East and hoped they would lead somewhere good.

I spent the night camped in the middle of the salt flats and experienced the most beautiful sunset and sunrise either side of what felt like 13 hours in an enormous freezer. Thankfully my tracks took me back to Colchani the following day and I was feeling happy to be off the salt flats and on the road back to Uyuni.

After picking up Anna (a much easier feat after a week on the toilet) we headed off towards Sucre and rest. Standing in our way were a predictable abundance of outrageously large mountains but a beautifully paved road made life infinitely easier. Camping has, at least for the moment, lost all of its charm and so we set out to stay in villages along the way. Each provided a floor or a bed and it was, although never easy, a beautiful few days cycling. In TicaTica Anna's illness returned in the night and so we headed that morning to the newly built hospital down the road. Disappointingly we found only two resident Alpacas and no doctors. Luckily after another day of rest she was good to go and after two more days of mountains we arrived in the mining town of Potosi, one of the highest cities in the world.

This is the worlds richest ever mine and has claimed the deaths of (according to our guide) around 8 million people. We donned the gear and spent two hours crawling around the mines getting just the tiniest taste of how terrible a job it would be.

In two more days we should be in Sucre, enjoying being able to breathe again at a much more sensible altitude. 9 years after an acrimonious end to my school Spanish lessons I will be giving it another go and hopefully our Spanish will become muy bien.