Jason Devitt

The burned-out tourist bus at the border between Bolivia and Chile is not a good omen.

Chile and Argentina are two of the richest countries in South America, and the road from San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile to Argentina via the Paso de Jama is well-paved and signposted.

About forty minutes out of San Pedro there is an unmarked dirt road on your left. This is the road to Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. But in three days and just 500 kilometers of driving along that dirt road and off-road to Uyuni in south-west Bolivia, Summer and I saw some of the most beautiful scenery that we have seen anywhere in the eight months since our trip began.

Sol de Mañana geyser field

The landscape changes every hour, from high desert to fields of stones scattered by volcanic explosions, from geyser fields to salt lakes. We saw mountains and lakes colored red and green and white by minerals. And we saw pasture and marshland and stone houses that might still shelter families or might have been abandoned a hundred years ago.

All of this was in the Bolivian altiplano, a high plateau between the twin cordilleras of the Andes. We were never lower than 3,500m and at one point we reached 4,900m. (For the sake of comparison, Mount Whitney is about 4,400m high and Mont Blanc 4,800m.) And crossing this almost deserted land meant spending one night at 4,600m in a ranger´s hut that had no electricity or heating.

Two kids stand by a frozen water tank in an abandoned railway town near the salt lake.

The problem was not, as I had expected, the cold. Temperature swings in the altiplano are extreme, from highs of 28°C during the day to as low as -30°C overnight. That night it was maybe -25°C outside, but the sleeping bag I’d hired at the border and the six densely-woven Bolivian blankets provided by the rangers kept me very warm. (I did forget to take my clothes into the sleeping bag with me and some fell onto the stone floor. For a similar effect, try putting tomorrow’s clothes in the fridge before you go to bed tonight.)

The problem was the altitude. Different people react to altitude in different ways - headaches, vomiting, even diarrhea. My heart began to beat double time. I tried breathing deeply and evenly but my heart felt as if I had left it a thousand meters below and it was still climbing. I could not sleep, and nor could Summer or the other people in the room. One had an altitude-induced headache and moaned all night long. It was one of the worst nights of sleep of my life, but it was worth it to see places like this.

There is so much ochre in the water of Laguna Colorada, above, that the whole lake is colored a fiery red. Llamas graze on yellow-green paja brava (brave straw), one of the few plants that will grow at this altitude and in the mineral-rich soil. The flecks of pink on the surface of the lake are flamingos, which feed on micro-organisms in the water.

The Salar de Uyuni, above, is the world´s largest salt lake. I took this photo on Isla Pesca, an outcrop of rock near the center of the lake and a surreal version of the tropical islands that we have visited elsewhere on our trip. The sun is blazing, but in the morning it is still freezing cold; instead of white sand and reefs, rock and petrified coral; instead of coconut and palm trees, cactuses, some more than a thousand years old; instead of blue waters lapping the beach, a solid white ocean; instead of little fishing boats, four-wheel drive cars and trucks criss-cross the salt.

More photos from this leg of our trip here.

The Esteros del Iberá or Iberá Wetlands are a national reserve in the north-east of Argentina. They cover about 16,000 square kilometers. That´s about one quarter the area of Ireland, but most of the Argentinians we met have never heard of the place. It´s a big country and hard to get around.

To get there we had to fly to the little town of Posadas, and then drive for five hours over mostly dirt roads in a 4WD to the much littler town of Carlos Pellegrini, where 500 people live in the center of the reserve. A man from C.P. swore that the roads are left unsealed in order to deter visitors, particularly hunters. Ecotourism isn´t supposed to be easy.

Summer and I spent two days in Iberá, touring the marshes in a motorboat. The water is no more than six or seven feet deep and everywhere there are dense mats made up of aquatic plants, knitted together. Animals as big as deer graze on them, swimming gracefully from one to the next. In some places wind-blown soil has been trapped between the plants and the result is an island dense enough to bear the weight of a person. It looks like land, but wobbles underfoot like a trampoline.

The main attractions are the birds; 300 different species live in this little reserve. (There are about 800 species of birds living in the whole of the United States.) We saw dozens: herons, storks, humming-birds, kingfishers, vultures, cormorants, woodpeckers, cardinals, woodrails, southern screamers. All stayed a little too far away for a poor photographer like me. Less wary of us were the black caimans and the capybaras, the world´s largest rodents. The one above looked as if he weighed about 40 kilos.

And then there were the spiders.

In the reeds along the water´s edge we often saw great nests of spiders, hundreds of young wrapped in a sac of web. In other places, larger, adolescent spiders had built a web several feet wide, so that each had a few square inches of space. Teenagers always want their own room.

On the second day Summer spotted a pampas deer, a stag, six points for those who like to shoot them. Our guide Marco gunned the engine and took the boat right into the reeds for a closer look, but the stag bolted when we ran aground.

I turned around to look at Summer and she said simply "you are covered in spiders."

I looked down. We had run into one of the larger webs. My coat and hands were coated in web, and there were spiders everywhere. Strung out along their lines of silk, the bright red patches on their black abdomens blinking into view as they span around, they looked like Christmas lights, scary little Christmas lights that crawl off your tree.

For a moment I thought about jumping off the boat. But I knew that the spiders were not dangerous, while the dark marsh water was cold and home to black caimans, yellow anacondas, and several species of piranha, so instead I began to brush the webs off my coat. About fifty spiders fell into the bottom of the boat and started marching towards Summer.

Summer loves animals. Really. She has swum with sharks; she adores bats; she once owned a pet rat; she can even tolerate snakes. But she cannot bear spiders. To her credit, she stayed calm while I spent the next fifteen minutes bailing spiders out of the boat. (Marco was too busy driving and laughing.) Every time I thought I was done another one popped up, bearing down on Summer.

I quite like spiders. Had she been standing at the front of the boat, this would have been much less funny.

The view from the highest point - about 10,000 feet - on the Bishop´s Road in Salta Province, Argentina.

Travelling around South America is unexpectedly harder than travelling around South-East Asia.

I say unexpectedly because Asian cultures and languages seem so much more remote. Religion, food, and customs are all different. You understand what it means to be illiterate when you are surrounded by signs written in Khmer or Thai. Western tourists are awkward and obvious.

In South America we feel much less strange. Buenos Aires is so European that people usually assumed I was a local, until I opened my mouth. We took three days of Spanish lessons in Santiago. I speak a few words of French and we both grew up watching Sesame Street (SA—LI—DA; SA-LI-DA; ¡SALIDA!). Now we can understand about a quarter of what people say to us.

But cultural differences are superficial, and half a dozen muttered words of Spanish in a Chilean accent may as well be Vietnamese. Practically speaking South-East Asia is much easier to get around.

The distances here are much greater. Thailand has four times the population of Chile and twice as many people as Argentina. But Chile, that little ribbon of land on the map, is 50% larger than Thailand and Argentina is the next largest country in the world after Australia. Both are dwarfed by Brazil. The main population centers are hundreds of miles apart, often separated by deserts, rainforests, rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other, and the second highest mountain range in the world.

Both a cause and an effect of these great distances, transportation is pretty poor. Unlike most of the rest of the world, there are no discount airlines. Flying from Salta in north-west Argentina to Buenos Aires costs more than $600 return; not cheap for us, and more than two weeks´ wages for a salteño. (In England it costs about one day´s wages to fly from London to Frankfurt on Ryanair.)

Almost thirty years ago Paul Theroux wrote a book called The Old Patagonian Express about a journey by rail all the way from Boston to Patagonia. It was a crazy journey then; the trains were hot, filthy, and chronically unreliable. But today much of the rail network has been closed down, and the Great Patagonian Express itself hasn’t run for more than ten years.

That leaves road. People in the U.S. often forget that the government not only subsidizes gas prices, it built and continues to maintain the interstate highway system - $80 billion in tax dollars every year. Nobody down here felt the need to move ICBMs around the continent at short notice. Argentina and Chile have decent roads, but only 5% of Bolivia´s roads are even paved, and through much of the interior there are no roads at all.

If you don´t speak any Spanish, language is more of an obstacle here than it is in South-East Asia. As in the U.S. and China, Latin Americans are surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who speak the same language they do, and have no strong incentive to learn another. In South-East Asia - as in Europe - people in neighboring countries speak mutually unintelligible languages, and so many have to learn a second language for trade. And pretty much everyone who works in the tourist industry in South-East Asia speaks English.

To be clear: I am not whining that people in Chile should learn English for my benefit. They speak only Spanish for exactly the same reason that I speak only English. I am just stating that as a consequence, it´s easier for U.S. tourists to visit Vietnam.   

So why come? Deserts. Rainforests. Rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other. The second highest mountain range in the world. Colonial cities that rivalled Paris and London when New Yorkers were still trading beaver pelts. A native American culture that hasn´t been extinguished. Ruins to rival Angkor. I´ve been enjoying myself so much that I haven´t updated this blog for three weeks. Sorry.