Taking the Biscuit contd...
The second day was spent bumping and jolting down the border between Bolivia and Chile, through a desert of rocks and volcanic ash and ice and unbelievable strange rock pillars and outcrops ancient lava flows and a volcano with smoke coming out of it that would make Mars look positively inviting. Incredibly, though it was hard to spot any vegetation, we did spot herds of rare wild vicunia (a relative of the llama, whose wool, the most expensive in the world, is worth more, gram for gram, than silver!!!), and more weird viscachas. They just must eat stones!!! We stopped of at four amazing lagunas on the way down, which continued the out of planet experience, being a deep deep blue in the centre, and changing hue through every shade of turquoise until at the edge they had a thick border of brilliant white (salt deposits, and also, to make everything more confusing in the glaring sunshine, ice). Each was home to flocks of incredibly pink flamingoes, who trawl trough the algae rich waters sifting out the plankton through their hooked beaks. It was an incredible sight, but stranger was to follow, as we finished the day on the banks of Lago Colorado (the coloured lake), a huge lake whose colour went from every shade of red (it's from the pigment of the particular algae, and it changes shades all during the day. Well, why not!!!) to the oligatory white shoreline. This time the white was borax, several metres thick in places, and looking so like thick ice floes that penguins would have been less weird than the huge numbers of elegant flamingos. Walking over the huge drifts of borax and constantly stopping to ensure that it really WASN'T ice), the vista was simply too odd to be true, and, with the whole thing topped off by the background of a perfectly positioned snow capped conical volcano, we had no choice but to blame our Lariam tablets, and settle down to another night of cards while the temperature outside dropped to minus 20.
Next morning we were up before dawn (and THAT was COLD!!!!) and bounced off across the lunar landscape (how the driver could possibly find his way was a mystery that lasted the whole trip) to our next planetary visit. This time, at an altitude of 5,000m we watched the golden orb of sun rise through dense plumes of sulphur smelling smoke, surrounded by great craters of bubbling porridge like mud, and screaming hissing geysers blowing high into the cold morning air. Surrounded by shards of ice from where the condensed steam returned to “earth" we had to be careful where to stand, - to make a mistake too close to the edge of one of the slippery boiling cauldrons would have been the last mistake one would make.
After sunrise our ancient space rattled us off to our next marvel, and 8am we had arrived at the southern tip of Bolivia, sourrounded with Chile to our right and ahead of us, and Argentina to our left, each delineated by a line of volcanic mountains. And right in this corner, determined not to be out-bizarred anything we had seen before, was an elliptical lake of pure jade green, ringed in brilliant white, and set off a perfect snow covered cone rising to 5,900m behind. This time the colour was arsenic, the white was layer of mineral foam, and there were no flamingos!
There was, however, a hot spring nearby, and so, surrounded by ice and snow at minus 10 degrees we sat in a little hot pool, drinking cups of hot chocolate laced with rum whike our cook made us breakfast. And why not!