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 [...]