The Salt Flat tour. 3 days and 2 nights driving in a massive circle round the south west of Bolivia. We are a group of six in a 4x4, an Irish couple, a couple from London, me, and a Aussie. Aussies!
The trip starts by us visting a train graveyard, where all the unused British steam trains have been left to rust. It's quite a sight but you get the feeling that we're filling in time, then a lot of other 4x4s begin to turn up, and I am again reminded that tourism drives this part of Bolivia, and that I am not the first person to see or do this.
We hang about and I start to hear a loud wonky cockney accent drift across the plain, it turns out to be the voice of the one and only English bloke I met in Machu Pichu, Luke, closely followed by his lovely girl Jade.
A nicer pair of people you couldn't wish to meet, especially when you've only had a bunch of French, Swiss, Belgian, and Spanish to not talk to for 3 days. Their accents and cries of 'fack me' and 'ave a look at that' were music to my ears. My group had stopped for lunch during the trek to Machu Pichu and they arrived at the same lunch spot. He started singing loudly to 'it's raining men' and Jade had this amazing sunglasses white batch on her face from her wrap around D&Gs. I knew straight away that they were going to be my sort of people.
I run over, jump on Luke's back and shout,
"where's my friend request you mug?"
they both turn and it's all shouts of,
"oh my gawd! Facking ell! we couldn't find ya!" we hug and have a bit of banter but their group starts getting a bit pissy, so I take their names for the facebook and promise to meet them in Argentina in a few days for beers.
The salt flats used to be a salt water lake 10,000km wide, the water evaporated, leaving a desert of salt as far as you can possibly see. The views are awesome, with miles of whiteness, surrounded by imposing mountains.
Before I'd left my hostel in the morning I'd seen on Facebook that it's been 15 years since 'what's the story (morning glory)' was released. 15 years is a very scary number when it's in years past, I think about things I've done and seen in those 15 years, and I get whistful.
I was 17 when that album was released, and the world was on it's knees to me, I could be whoever I wanted, and do whatever I wanted, and I never imagined then that my life would angle and contrive the way it has. As the salt flats fade away behind me I reach for my Ipod. I listen to music from 15 years ago, Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene, Menswear, Shed Seven, Gene, Elastica, Blur, music that meant everything to me then, and I get nostalgic.
I think about the friends I had then, and the things we did, the gigs we saw, and the jokes we repeated and repeated. The clothes we'd obsess over, and the girls we didn't sleep with. The memories pass through me as fast as the landscape around me does.
Memories are what you have left to remind you that you've lived, and I love my memories more as each year passes, but you have to create new memories as you go, because if you don't, or can't, the memories turn and become reminders, reminders of when you were happier, and that's not how to live a life. You have to fill your life with new experiences to pile on top of the others, filling your mind with more memories than you can cope with, otherwise you're wasted.
Day 2
We drive further into the Bolivian countryside and it's other worldly, lakes of red water, still lakes of crystal blue, flamingos standing in freezing cold lagoons, mountains as far as the eye can see, some with snow on top, some in different colours, others that seem to have animal faces etched on their sides, bright blue skies but freezing gale storm winds, rocks that seem to be from Mars, where hundreds of years of nature have made them beautiful and splendid. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I am so small in the face of this nature, so unnecessary and insignificant, and it's a beautiful emotion, because you understand that to experience it and feel it makes you something, something greater than what you are seeing, it makes you concious that you are. And I feel inside me that I know this feeling, I get it when I cross the Thames, and see London bow to me. I just don't recognize it most of the time.
It's fucking freezing though, so I run back to the 4x4 and tell the drive to turn the heating up.
Day 3
We get up at 4:30am and it's -20 outside. I have stomach cramps from eating too fast the night before, and this is not the perfect way to start the day. It's pitch black as we head to the volcanic geysers. I'm in no mood for this but once we get to a hot spring and I have a coca tea, and about 5 shits, my stomach finally settles.
We have to drop Conor and Jean at the Chile border, and I am sad to see them go. 3 days on a trip with people you don't know is the make or break of a tour and these people are lovely. But we're all swapping details, and I'm making outrageous claims that I'll take them to see Wales play Ireland at the rugby so it's all good.
We spend the rest of the day driving back to Uyuni, talking, joking around, and trying to sleep in a 4x4 that's bouncing across the badlands of Bolivia. my legs and back ache but to see what we've seen, it's worth every stab of pain.
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