Day two dawned, as I said, with the
crunching of salt under the feet of fellow travellers. After a nice
breakfast that even featured scrambled eggs – for the first and
only time in four weeks of travel! - prepared from the supplies we
brought along by the women who work in the salt hostel we were on our
way. It was just starting to get light, the sun still hidden behind
the high peaks to the east. The road – more like a sand track –
skirted the edge of these mountains and led through fields planted
with quinoa, fenced against vicuñas
with a single strand of smooth wire to which pieces of cloth and
plastic had been tied. Quinoa is the main means of subsistence
in that area. It must have been seeded within the last four weeks at
least, but in many places nothing visible had emerged yet, in others
a few plants showed here and there. The fields were waiting for the
rainy season for emergence, and it would be another three or four
months until they were ready for harvest – even now still done by
hand. We noticed the lack of farm houses: farmers live in the small
villages along the way and drive out to their fields, sometimes with
small trucks, sometimes by bike.
After stopping in the small town of San
Juan for a few moments so that Bemer could pick up a bag of coca
leaves we started to climb higher. The road required Bemer's complete
attention: deep ruts and big rocks made navigation difficult, and it
became clear why a four-wheel drive vehicle is essential for this
trip. Less and less vegetation clung to the rocks along the side.
We stopped for a few minutes amidst big
eroded rocks and deep gullies: after seeing all this it certainly would no
longer be necessary to visit the moon.
A later stop provided even more
bizarre rock sculptures, among others the 'stone tree' in the
following picture.
The main feature on this second day,
however, were the lagoons. It's totally amazing to suddenly come upon
these colourful bodies of water, flamingoes, sometimes in the
hundreds or even thousands, wading slowly back and forth, drawing
their hooked beaks along the shallow bottom to pick up the small
crustaceans that form their diet.
The first one we stopped at
provided very close access to the birds, and we had good opportunity
to study their beautiful plumage. Three kinds of flamingoes can be
found here, and they all resemble each other to the unschooled eye,
of course, the Andean, Chilean and James's flamingo. Young
flamingoes, already seeming quite apt at looking for food, were still
wearing their downy adolescent plumage, not yet pink but soft grey.
We saw a bit more wildlife along the
way, like this fox (obviously quite used to being fed by humans – a
bit of a disillusionment to watch a fox eat left-over pasta from
lunch ...) and, quite frequently, vicuñas,
sometimes by themselves, sometimes in small groups, their fine hair
gently stirred by the wind. What they survive on is a mystery to me;
they seem to graze the bare rocks, though I'm sure there must be some
kind
of vegetation not visible from the car.
The
last stop of the day was the 'Red Lagoon', its clay-coloured water
containing large amounts of iron oxide. It is a huge lagoon, situated
in a dip, like the others surrounded by high mountains. It was so
windy on the ridge above that it felt as if I would be carried aloft
if only I spread my arms wide. We spent some time walking along the
edge of the lagoon, admiring the thick-coated llamas grazing the
short grass, gazing at the plume of borax dust driven into
ever-changing deposits on the other side of the lagoon.
It
was still early in the evening when we reached our lodge, only about
twenty minutes from the lagoon. We had cleared a pass at 4700m not so
long before and had dropped to about 4300m, about seven hundred
metres higher than the night before and thus were well prepared for the
5000m we were going to reach the next morning. Predictions that we
would be cold at night were unfounded: four of the thick, very heavy
woolen blankets used everywhere we travelled kept us nice and warm.
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