La Paz and Uyuni, Bolivia, September 10 to 16, 2003 — Because of the bus strike, we couldn’t leave La Paz, even though we were tired of staying in the city. So, we took a taxi to the outskirts of town, a place called Valle de la Luna — a relatively wealthy area with a surreal lunar landscape. We stayed at the Swiss Hotel Oberland, which promised tennis courts and a swimming pool, but turned out to be missing both (though looking at their website 10 years later, the hotel appears to have caught up to their promises). I explored the terrain while Sherri wrote, and scaled the wall to a golf course which claimed to be the the highest in the world at 3,342 meters (10,965 feet — over 2 miles in the sky). I booked an extraordinarily expensive (by Bolivian standards) 18 holes for the next day, which was Sept 11 (sidenote: 2 years after 9/11 it still felt somehow direspectful to be playing golf on Sept 11). Playing golf at 2 miles in the sky should have been amazing, with tee shots going forever. But I hadn’t played in many months and had terrible rental clubs, so it wasn’t quite the highlight reel I was hoping for (I lost 4 balls on the first 5 holes).
From there we took a train to Uyuni, Bolivia’s high desert, for a three-day Jeep tour. Uyuni takes surreal to a whole new level; it even has a section called the Dali Desert, named after the painter. Uyuni is best known for its salt plain (the Salar de Uyuni), which is an immense white desert. But it also has red, blue and green lagoons (depending on the mineral content in that section of the desert), crazy rockscapes, and beautiful mountains. There are very few animals in the desert, except of course for bright pink flamingos to add to the overall weirdness of the place.
At night, temperatures can drop as low as -20°C. We stayed in small hotels that were barely heated, but we were given plenty of blankets to stay more or less warm. One evening I left the hotel to take some sunset photos, and though I was probably no more than 1/2 mile from the hotel, I literally thought I was going to die on my walk/run back because the temperature dropped so precipitously once the sun had set. It may have been a bit of a panic attack (I don’t remember ever having one before or since), but with the cold temperatures and thin air, I couldn’t catch my breath and my heart started racing to the point where I got light headed and was worried I would pass out. But I managed my way back and survived to share these pictures…
