This is the most beautiful place on earth, I’m sure of it. When I stepped out of the Landrover, it seemed both silent yet full of sound all at the same time; the silence of the early morning desert and the noise of the flamingos perennial cooing. Unlike the jagged edges of Patagonia, everything here seemed soft, muted. Patterns of algae formed sweeping curves on the lake; the mountains seemed soft like dollops of coffee ice cream. The layers of colours were perfectly harmonious: soft, sandy browns, mustard yellows, rich olives, the vivid rusty reds of the water.
The night before I had been incapacitated by a momentous headache after going straight from San Pedro de Atacama (2400 metres) to the slightly strange Bolivian settlement at 4,800 metres. I was sharing my Landrover with a doctor, a paramedic, a midwife/nurse, a doctors’s assistant and a stem cell researcher so I felt in good hands should I react badly to the effects of altitude. As it was, there was nothing any of us could do to help each other, and for while we all lay around not really know what to do with ourselves. It did resolve itself by the morning – although one guy in another group was not so lucky and needed oxygen before being taken down to a lower village. The world around me did still feel very surreal the next day and I am not sure if this because it really was very strange, like being in a David Attenborough documentary, or it was just the altitude.
