1992 Bolivia

HIGHLIGHT: In Sucre I hired a guide and walked a nearby Inca Trail. The Incas built “roads” throughout the Andes – beautifully constructed of flat-faced rocks fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. My guide, Katinka, promised me that the 6km trail was all downhill and that she would walk slowly. It was and she did. What a superb morning! Just the two of us in a countryside too vast and lovely to capture on film. A hot blue sky over our heads, a light breeze to cool us, delicious local yoghurt for our parched throats. Superb.

HIGHLIGHT: The bus ride to Uyuni and the Uyuni salt flat in western Bolivia was incredibly beautiful. The shapes of the mountains, the vegetation and the colour of the earth changing with almost every bend in the road. Muted greens and tans. With bright red berries on the trees and bright red laundry laid out to dry beside the rivers in which it was washed and bright red wool decorating the ears of the grazing llama.

We stopped in a tiny town to quench our thirst and (or so I thought) go to the loo. I was most disconcerted to find that there was no loo in town, especially as I had just downed a Coke, and that I was expected to join the locals behind the virtually non-existent bushes. The Indian women wear very wide skirts under which they squat, modesty intact. As I was convinced I would pee on my skirt if I tried this I had to wait until we reached Uyuni several hours later!

Uyuni is a dusty, dry, unattractive town with a fascinating graveyard and a salt flat on its doorstep. The flat covers over 12,000 square kilometers and is a blinding white that stretches to the horizon and beyond. I went to see how the salt is “mined” (either scraped off the surface in granule form or shopped out in block form) and to walk nervously over the thin (in parts) surface to see the petroleum and natural gas bubbling to the surface of small pools where the salt cover has collapsed. Here the salt is stained a lovely pale peach. Amazing.