Blog 14: 40 Days and 40 Nights in Bolivia (Part 3: Bye Bye Bolivia)

We woke early on Day 4 or Day 3, our last day in Bolivia. At 5000m, it was freezing outside. Our camp had been warm and comfortable but the air had been thin and sleep had been elusive; I'd just start to nod off and find myself gasping. Others complained of the same thing over breakfast. In any case, The Gringo wanted us awake at 4.00 for a 4.30 departure, as today was Hot Springs day.

4.30 was never going to work, if only because breakfast wasn't ready until 5.00, but most people made a token effort. The showers were more a single stream of hot then cold then hot water, so the shower I had was pretty quick, and fairly unsatisfactory. The toilets were fairly confronting, as the door was just a glass half-shutter, deliberately opaque so that people could see if anyone was in there; not very conducive to privacy.

We stumbled into the breakfast room cold, sleepy and only partly clean and sat quietly at our seats, passing stale bread to each other, avoiding the jam, avoiding conversation and yearning for coffee. Then The Gringo arrived with great fanfare, loud and proud, sporting a Bolivian flag and announcing he was going to sing the Bolivian National Anthem. Which he did, unaccompanied, and very loudly, and it goes for quite a while. We were all in a state of shock at the end of it, but The Gringo was highly moved by his performance, so some of us clapped a little. He then told us the cars would be leaving in 5 minutes. Which is the reason I left most of my toiletries in the bathroom at Camp 2 in the middle of the Bolivian desert. No matter I thought, later today I'd be in Chile, in civilisation again.

We drove initially through an intensely barren valley with intensely barren and intensely high volcanos on all sides. The air pressure was intensely lighter, I actually felt lighter up there. The Gringo proudly announced that just in the valley we were driving through (not the volcanos) we were now 5,500m above sea level, the highest we had been in the whole of Bolivia and higher than Base Camp at Mount Everest.

The highest I have ever been, staring at a volcano even higher

Snow on the higher peaks around us

Height seemed to be a source of national pride to The Gringo, he said several times that we would soon find out that Chile would be much lower. After a brief stop to watch the dawn glow arrive in the thin atmosphere, we pushed on to a thermal area at the foot of one of the volcanoes, where we were to view Geysers.

The geysers were quite a sight in this barren place, and the sun rising over the mist they created was definitely worth seeing. I asked the Gringo if the area had ever erupted and he pointed me to a hill and said if you look closely you can see a face in it.

Next, we drove to nearby springs, where we were able to bathe in hot springs, outside and in the company of flamingoes. Astoundingly, the equipment hire people wanted us to surrender our passports to borrow a towel. I had a very quick dip, because I was more interested in photographing the early morning sunlight on the thermal springs and the flamingoes. I was only partly successful on both fronts.

From there, we headed off to the last stop of the tour, a lagoon at the eastern foot of Mount Licancabur, a massive volcano shared by Chile and Bolivia (the east side is in Bolivia, the crater is in Chile). It was called the Green Lake, although for some reason, 'green' was in the eye of the beholder; it looked pretty white to me. The view of the volcano, however, was awesome. It's hard to appreciate the scale of the thing in photos, without any reference points such as forests or foothills, but it loomed over us majestically.

The Gringo unfurled his Bolivian flag again and we braced ourselves for another national anthem. It didn't happen, he did group photos instead. The party returning to Uyuni said farewell and headed off into the sunrise.

Controversy About What Constitutes a Day

But just when everything looked happy and over, the issue of which 'day' we were on finally erupted. It wasn't anyone from our group, in fact no one we knew at all, but an American couple on the same tour with another vehicle for some reason decided to confront The Gringo about the length of the tour, not their own tour guide. And it got nasty, very quickly. HOW DARE YOU advertise 4 days, when there is really only 2 days of land content, the man yelled, while his wife, yelling at the same time, pointed furiously to a brochure and said stuff like they had only seen two flamingo lakes and the website had promised them three, and why did they call this the Green Lake, it wasn't even amber and so on. The Gringo, to give him credit, fought back, citing disclaimers that said the actual sites visited would depend on weather conditions at the time, but pretty soon he was shouting too. IT IS a four day tour, he shouted, you've been in the desert 4 days. NO WE HAVEN'T, ONE OF THOSE 'DAYS' WAS A NIGHT ON A BUS. YES YOU HAVE. NO WE HAVEN'T. And so on. It ended with the Americans storming off threatening to sue (good luck with that in Bolivia guys) and The Gringo shouting obscenities in Spanish.

Heaving with emotion, The Gringo snapped at all of us to get in the cars, and soon after, we were speeding towards the border control, a disturbingly remote shed complex in the middle of nowhere at the foot of Mount Licancabur. Despite his residual anger, he explained the border procedure and delivered us to the office, where the long and tedious process of passport checking, declaration-signing, baggage handling and ticket checking began (in Chile you have to produce the 'ticket' you were given on arrival, to prove you are not a Chilean resident subject to Chile's 19% VAT). The German couple quibbled over whether to declare a packet of peanuts in their backpack, then The Gringo patted each one of us on the back, said each of us were 'heroes' and with tears in his eyes, said he hoped we would all remember Bolivia fondly. He and the driver then sped off at incredibly high speed into the Bolivian sunrise.

The blurry little compound across the lake is the Bolivian border control. We were processed there first, then loaded onto a new bus and taken over the ridge in the background to the Chilean border control on the other side.

After some officious bossing about by a very uptight Chilean official, (and a quick pee in the desert behind the customs area) we were all loaded back onto the bus with our baggage and headed off on a sealed road (the first in 3 days) into Chile, the Chilean side of Mount Licancabur now smiling down on us.

By now I was seeing faces on everything, even the Chilean side of Mt Licancabur.