In the middle of the Salar de Uyuni, I’d met a traveller from Manchester who said that by far the most exciting thing he’d done in South America was cycling from La Paz to Coroico. I like mountain biking a lot, and this ride, which would actually involve mountains, sounded like a lot of fun. [...]

On the bus to Copacabana I met Victoria, a traveller from Alaska who I’d previously met in Potosí, and her friend Amanda from Vermont. None of us had booked a place to stay, but luckily things didn’t seem too busy and we got rooms at the second place we asked at. It was overcast and [...]

In the end, to get from Potosí to Sucre I had to get a taxi, because buses were on strike indefinitely. I was sharing it with a traveller from the US, two Bolivian women, two babies and a dog, which made for a cramped journey. After about an hour and a half of good running [...]

In the desert of south-western Bolivia, 3600m above sea level, is the town of Uyuni. Outside the town, for reasons unknown, there is a vast collection of train carcasses. They rust slowly under the Altiplano sun and attract the odd traveller from town. Shortly after I took this photo, a giant dust [...]

Uyuni is a dusty town surrounded by desert and salt plains in the middle of the Altiplano. There’s not a whole lot to do there. My immediate problem was that it was a Saturday, all the banks were closed, and none of the cash machines would accept my card. For a while I thought I [...]

Early on the first day of Bolivia’s new era, I got a bus to Potosí, a city two and a half miles above sea level, at the foot of a hill containing such extraordinary quantities of mineral wealth that the city was once the largest and richest in South America, and in Don Quixote, Cervantes [...]

I got up at 5am the next day to watch a beautiful sunrise over the Salar. Then, after a quick breakfast we got onto the highlight of the journey which was seeing the Salar itself close up. We drove straight out onto it, which was oddly disconcerting, and followed vague trails marked on it. It [...]

The early start was not too brutal - I slept well even in the thin air, and woke feeling fine at 5.30am. The others felt better too, and more up for a day of sightseeing than they had been yesterday. The lake, so red the previous day, was now more or less all blue. We [...]

We headed on to Laguna Colorada. We arrived in the mid-afternoon and the lake was bright red, with flamingoes dotted all across the waters. What looked like steam rising from the lake in the distance was apparently salt water whirlwinds, a common site here. We were staying here for the night, at Campamento Ende, a [...]

Over the previous month I’d travelled from the ice-bound fjords of Patagonia more than two thousand miles away, all the way to here. From northern Scotland to Timbuktu is about the same distance. Chile had been an amazing place but I had less than two months left until I needed to be in Quito so [...]