From Freezing Glaciers to Steaming Cloudforests: El Chorro Trek

Bolivia has about 736,000 square miles (roughly the size of the U.S. states of Alaska and Washington combined), one-third of which is Andean altiplano and two-thirds is Amazon basin. Were it not for losing its Pacific War with Chile (1879-1884), it would have a coastline as well. (In fact, from 1825 to 1935, Bolivia lost half of its territory to neighboring Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Paraguay.)  The combination of altiplano and jungle make for a very biodiverse country and one of the best ways to experience that is by hiking the El Chorro Trek, just outside La Paz.


The El Chorro Trek in Bolivia

  After getting acclimatized in La Paz, we made arrangements to do the El Choro trek, a 43 km trek from the snowy tip of the Andes’ Cordillera Real range to the Yungas, the dense, steamy cloudforest that separates Bolivia’s altiplano from its Amazon basin. The trek starts out at La Cumbre, atop the Cordillera Real, the easternmost border of Bolivia’s altiplano, and goes to Chairo, before a jeep takes you to the relaxing tourist town of Coroico.

The first day we drove straight up out of La Paz, the Bolivian capital which sits in a densely-populated bowl in the altiplano. We headed straight up for an hour until we reached La Cumbre (“The Summit”) at 15,502 feet. The driver dropped the eight of us off (our family of 4 plus our guide, cook, and two porters) amid alpine lakes, glaciers and rocky peaks. We hiked strenuously upward for a half hour until we reached our highest point, Abra Chucura (15,941 ft). From here, it was all downhill on paved Inca stones, past crumbling piles of flat pizara (slate), roaming packs of llamas, and the occasional donkey train transporting goods from the Yungas to La Paz. After an hour we passed pre-Inca, guesthouse ruins, where travelers long before us broke their journey. Over one mountain pass from us was Bolivia’s infamous “World’s Most Dangerous Road”, where an average of 26 vehicles a year disappear over the edges of the road from La Cumbre to Coroico. The road gots its nickname from a recent Inter-America Development Bank report and is a magnet for adrenaline junkies on downhill mountain bikes. Later than afternoon we passed beautifully paved pre-inca stone roads and finished our day at Challapampa (9,268 ft). For dinner our cook served us a delicious quinoa and vegetable soup while we were entertained by a young boy scrambling on the grassy camping area on all fours. The next morning, we brushed our teeth and all visited Challapampa’s village toilet; a makeshift wood platform about 10 feet above a large pit next to the river. This image alone will convince our kids to never drink alpine river water without it being treated.

Day two was a delightful downward stroll through cloudforest dotted with orchids, bromeliads and butterflies. We passed a shack selling Oreo cookies and softdrinks and bought a pack of Oreos. Not far before we reached the next shack selling drinks, we saw about a hundred empty plastic bottles dumped down the cliff next to the trail. For the rest of the hike I intermittently thought about the tourist's responsibilty for such an unsustainable practice. We continued to cross makeshift bridges and small waterfalls and finished the day at the village of San Francisco -- a couple of huts in a level space carved into the trail, surrounded by banana trees.



We started out Day three with sore legs and very quickly descended into a dense jungle area with hundreds of beautiful Amaryllis plants. I recalled working for the Gardener’s Eden catalog over ten years ago where we sold “forcing kits” of Amarylis bulbs with smooth rocks and a glass pot for $30. I mentioned this to my wife and she picked one and put it in her hat. For lunch we stopped and ate at Casa Sandillani (6,725 ft) and spoke with the village patriarch, Tamiji Hanamura. Mr. Hanamura was a 80-year old Japanese man, who had traveled widely for many years and once he reached Casa Sandillana, stopped travelling and never left. He’s been there for 40 years. He showed us his collection of postcards from the United States and we promised to send him a postcard from some exotic place. That afternoon we continued steadily downhill towards the town of Chairo. About an hour before getting there we saw parrots noisily chirping in a tree. We finally reached Chairo, sweaty and exhausted, and jumped in a jeep for Coroico. We reached Coroico and immediately took showers at our hotel. The view from our room revealed densely-covered cloudforest, extending out towards the Amazon basin. The first day of walking by glaciers seemed worlds away.



Bolivian Biodiversity

The Bolivian "88" butterfly

Whether you are sailing along on Lake Titicaca at 12,500 feet, tramping through the Yungas (steamy cloud forest), walking through glaciers along the altiplano, paddling a dugout canoe through the Bolivian Amazon or taking in the bizarre Salar de Uyuni salt sea, Bolivia has something for everyone. Its biodiversity is staggering. 



Bolivia is one of four countries with the highest abundance of butterflies and one of eight countries with the highest abundance of bird species. In belongs to the Tropical Andes, according to biodiversityhotspots.org, is the richest and most diverse region on Earth, with about a sixth of all plant life in less than 1 percent of the world’s land area.



Bolivia has 4 biomes, 14 ecoregions and 199 ecosystems. The main biomes are jungle, forest, savannah, tundra, steppe, desert and wetlands. At the moment, more than 14,000 higher plant species, 325 mammals, 186 amphibians, 260 reptiles, 550 fish species and 1,379 birds are inventoried.

Don't like what you see in Bolivia? Jump on a bus and you'll be in a completely different ecosystem very quickly.

Sleeping On Salt: Bolivia's Salt Hotel

Our room at the Salt Hotel

 On the third night of our Lipez-Uyuni tour we arrived at our salt hotel, an inn made primarily of salt on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni.  The hotel was basic with walls of salt, beds made of blocks of salt, tables of salt and chairs of salt.  When no one was looking, the kids and I licked the walls to verify that they were indeed made of salt. 

The lodge, the Atulcha, had basic rooms with shared bathrooms and salt tables lined up in the communal area for the set course dinner that all guests would share.

Outside, it was cold with stong winds blowing off the Salar -- a flat cold area 19 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the U.S. state of Utah -- such that we had to turn our back to the Salar and look at the run down small village that is supported by tourists staying at the salt lodge.

Dinner that night was quinoa soup, roast llama and potatoes.  We shared our meal with a retired Geman man who was riding his bike around the Salar, stopping at various salt hotels (I believe that there are 7 or 8 of them).  After dinner we took hot showers before all the lights went out at 8:00 pm.  Nestled into our fairly comfortable beds atop salt blocks, I read my book with my miner's headlamp then drifted off to sleep. 




The dining area

 

Bolivia's Stone Tree: Sandblasting As An Art Form

The Stone Tree in Southwestern Bolivia

We gotten up early to get a head start on reaching the Salar de Uyuni that night, only to get a flat tire on our Land Cruiser within 45 minutes.  The wind blew unrelentlessly across the southwestern Bolivian aliplano and we all got out of the vehicle while our driver changed out the tire.  I braved the strong wind and took a short walk to find a place to urinate.  With winds this strong, a few calculations were required to ensure that I stayed dry during my nature call.

After a successful bathroom break I returned and our driver had finished changing the tire, so we all piled into the car and resumed driving.  Within an hour we arrived near some windswept stone sculptures on the edge of the desert.  We slowed down and plowed through deeper sand and stopped near a lone tent and two bicycles leaning against a large rock.  I guessed that whoever this was had tried a few different spots to avoid the wind until they finally settled on this one.  A French couple bounded out and greeted us.

We chatted with them for a bit and asked about their trip.  He was going from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska and she was visiting him for a few months and they'd been slogging through the desert sand for the last month.  We gave them some of our candy bars and the man wrote a message and email address on paper and asked that I email it to his friend, which I did two days later.

We wished them well and started driving and within a minute saw an immense stone structure and our driver said "Arbol de Piedra -- Stone Tree."  We got out an marveled at its size, its dimensions and the apparent nature of how it was formed: natural sandblasting.  It sat in the open where winds could shape it from all directions.  It was about 30 feet high and made of solid rock.  I wondered why it was so top-heavy; surely it would have been just as easy to sandblast a bottom-heavy pyramid type structure? 

We stopped for a few pictures and continued our journey.  While there were plenty of interesting sights along the way, we wanted to reach the Salar by sunset.

Swimming With Blind Pink River Dolphins

Jumping in with blind pink river dolphins

Deep within the Bolivian Amazon, the four of us peered over the sides of our dugout canoe, trying to decide if we should take the leap into the deep brown waters of the Yacuma River.  We wanted to swim with river dolphins but the piranha-filled, zero visibility water and the 10-foot long caimans eyeing us from the nearby shore kept us from jumping in.  “It’s Okay,” said our guide Wilber, sensing our reticence, “the piranha are too small to hurt you and the caimans are scared of the dolphins.”  Our kids weren’t going in unless Mom and Dad went first but we were clearly unsure ourselves.  We’d been to a few swimming spots along the river but each time we found a reason not to get in and this would probably be our last opportunity.

Wilber rhythmically banged his open palm on the outside hull of the canoe to attract more dolphins.  We had seen their pointy, toothy snouts rise out of the water as they surfaced high enough to expel water from their blow holes.  The chance to swim with dolphins in the wild and not in some over-sized Florida swimming pool kept us from backing out.  “Well,” said my wife, “We’re either going to do this or were not,” and she jumped in and disappeared into the muddy brown water.  My son followed his mother and in a few seconds both were floating and grinning, relieved to not be feeling any nibbles from hungry piranha. The curious dolphins swam circles around them and nudged a basketball to my son. After taking a few photographs of them I jumped in.  When I surfaced I was relieved to count the same number of caimans on the opposite river bank.  Our daughter was still in the boat.  She loves dolphins but she hates swimming in water where she can’t see the bottom.  After about five minutes of reassurance and cajoling, she reluctantly eased into the water.  While our son threw the basketball for the dolphins to retrieve, my daughter and I hung on the sides of the boat.  I felt a nibble around my armpit but did my best to keep this information from her.  Just as we were getting confident, there was a splash from a big tail and she screamed “What was that!” and quickly threw her arms around me.  One of the dolphins, apparently in a playful mood, had made a big splash with its tail and extinguished her budding confidence.  It was as if this river dolphin, with a brain 40% larger than a human’s, sensed her anxiety and was singling her out for teasing.

Flipper of the Amazon

For kids missing a lot of school, ours were getting quite an education on the flora and fauna of the Amazon basin.  The stars of our afternoon outing, the river dolphins, were the science lesson of the day.  These creatures were relatives of ocean-going dolphins but these river dwellers were very different.  Fifteen million years ago sea levels retreated and sealed them off from the ocean and they were forced to adapt to their new environment or face extinction.

Like us, they were faced with adjusting to a new environment here in South America.  As they evolved, they gained some things necessary for survival and they lost some things that weren’t essential.  They gained long, pointed snouts to reach through branches to find river crabs and they developed unfused vertebrae to allow them to make sharper turns through underwater tree roots.  They lost their dorsal fins to make navigating tight spots easier, they lost their eyesight because it was useless in the muddy water and their complexion turned pink due to a lack of sunlight penetrating the dark water.

Chasing the basketball

After about 10 minutes, the dolphins were suddenly gone and we climbed back in the boat.  Wilber fired up the outboard motor and we sped back to our lodge, savoring both the breeze from the boat and another great day along Bolivia's Yacuma River.

Attack Of The Bolivian Squirrel Monkeys

Bolivian Squirrel Monkey

We sped through the chocolaty brown waters of Bolivia’s Yacuma River, the breeze giving us respite from the moist and muggy Amazon air.  We’d seen a lot in one morning – capybaras, caimans, river turtles, river dolphins – and we settled in for a 45 minute ride back to our lodge for some lunch and a nap in a hammock.  Wilbur steered us swiftly in the 20-foot long dugout canoe and then slowed us down, killed the engine and we slowly drifted towards the far bank.  We were tiny white specks in a tri-color landscape of green trees, blue sky and brown water in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon.

With no breeze we started sweating and we wondered what Wilbur was up to.  Suddenly, the branches of the largest tree from the approaching bank started moving and shaking.  A closer look revealed that the tree was filled with about two dozen small Bolivian squirrel monkeys and they were coming our way as our boat now drifted under the branches.  The monkeys let their weight bring the branches down to the boat and one boarded near the bow.

Squirrel monkeys live in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America in the canopy layer.  They have short fur, olive colored shoulders and yellowish-orange coloring on their backs and extremities.  The grow to about 25 to 35 centimeters and their brain mass to body mass ratio is a remarkable 1:17, the largest brain, proportionately, of all the primates.  To put this in perspective, you have about a 1:35 ratio.

Our kids were by now anxious and I calmly told them “Don’t move.  All they want are the oranges.” My voice was fatherly and authoritarian, laced with a hint of nervousness.  I envisioned a worst case scenario of the kids being bitten by the monkeys and having to make the long 5 hour trek back to the closest town.   By now, eight of them were on our boat looking for food.  My wife was snapping photos and videos and one jumped in her lap.  My son moved to the edge of his seat and another monkey jumped on the spot he vacated.

They quickly grabbed the oranges and peels from the bottom of the canoe and started leaving and we were relieved that everyone was safe and no one had been bitten.  While I had sweated and worried about the kids safety, I felt that my wife -- who had filmed almost the entire episode -- was more concerned about missing any footage of the event.

Searching for our oranges

Bolivian Coco Leaf: The Red Bull Of The Andes

Hoja Sagrada (Holy Leaf)

We’d decided to take the overnight sleeper bus from La Paz to Sucre, given our somewhat rushed itinerary and desire to save time and the expense of a hotel room. We nestled into our reclining seats and went through our overnight bus checklist. Bag locked and secured to the overhead rack…check. Bottled water and toilet paper handy…check. Earplugs secured and bandana fastened over eyes…check. We settled in for a 12 hour bus ride along the Bolivian cordillera.


Overnight bus trips in the Andes always make me a little nervous. The amount of bus crashes in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador that share a disproportionate amount of headlines in the South American International Herald Tribune’s website, caused us to jokingly refer to that site as “Andean Bus Crash dot com.”

We all snoozed as we made our way southward. Every time the driver pumped the brakes to slow down, a part of my brain -- while still asleep -- registered the motion, ready for anything that might follow.

After a somewhat fitful night of semi-sleep, we arrived at 8:30 a.m. in Sucre. We collected our belongings and drowsily made our way out of the front of the bus. Before I turned right and down out of the bus, I looked over to the driver’s area. Below his empty seat were dozens of broken bits of coco leaves scattered over the floor. Now that we’d achieved safe passage to Sucre, I knew that my well-being had been insured by the hoja sagrada, the sacred leaf that has been used for medicinal, cultural and religious purposes in the Andes continuously for thousands of years. It’s been used as a protection against altitude, hunger and cold and in our case, it was a stimulant to keep our driver awake and us alive.  Thank goodness for the Red Bull of the Andes.

The Red Bull of the Andes

The La Paz Witches' Market

Llama fetuses outside a shop in the Witches Market

As I glanced through my Lonely Planet guidebook to Bolivia, I scanned the sights for something that looked interesting until I came to the following: El Mercado de Las Brujas…the La Paz Witches’ Market.  Out of all the sights in the world’s highest capital city, the Witches Market instantly soared to number one on our list.

We walked down the main thoroughfare and followed our map, which was unclear and not helped by the location description in the text.  After a few false alarms, we found Calle Jiminez and Calle Linares and knew we were in the right place when we saw lots of dried llama fetuses handing from shop windows.

We stopped at one shop and a middle-aged woman looked at us as if sizing us up.  I wasn’t sure if she was gauging our interest in buying or surreptitiously seeking signs of good or bad fortune.  She sat behind a table that displayed toad talismans, coco leaves, amulets, soaps, many different types of plants, owl feathers, totems, candles and dried snakes.  I wondered if her business from people who felt they really needed her products were now outweighed by people like me, who just want a souvenir to show someone back home. 

Inside the store, was a colorful collection of boxes that addressed many illnesses and health problems.  Usually looking at the cover of the box told you what it was for: a vigorous soccer player suggested more energy, a sultry woman advertised erectile enhancement, a picture of two kidneys targeted renal help and a full head of black hair unmistakably offered a solution to baldness.

The cure for what ails you

We walked from shop to shop but they all seemed to have the same merchandise.  I wanted to get some pictures so I awkwardly snapped some pictures while pretending not to.  I was careful to hold the camera to my waist which is why the photos here are cropped so poorly.  The last thing I wanted was an angry witch casting a spell on me.

Surreality In Bolivia

The Salar de Uyuni in Southwest Bolivia

The area around the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat in southwestern Bolivia, is an other-worldly landscape of hallucinogenic visions and poses some difficult questions. For example: How did 10 billion tons of salt get here? Why is that lake green? Why are there thousands of pink flamingos living more than two miles above sea level? Why am I looking at steaming geysers and bubbling mudpots while freezing my butt off? Why is that lake red? But the question that I’m struggling with the most is: How is it that I am navigating an island of petrified coral, covered in cactus, in the middle of a sea of salt…at 12,000 feet above sea level?


The Salar de Uyuni is the remains of prehistoric Lake Minchin, which lost all its water via absorption and evaporation over 40,000 years ago. As the water disappeared, it left a perfectly-flat layer of salt covering 4.085 square miles, roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the U.S. state of Utah. As the Andean altiplano was pushed up by the forces of plate tectonics, the Salar reached its present-day elevation.

Laguna Verde

We took a 4-day jeep safari starting in Tupiza and ending in Uyuni, the town that shares its name with the Salar. The first day was spent riding through the Lipez, a desert-like area in the farthest southwest corner of Bolivia, that resembles many areas of the U.S. southwest. We passed silver, gold, tin and antimony mines amidst thousands of roaming llamas, alpacas and vicunas (and one Andean ostrich). We also saw an odd animal called a viscacha, a rabbit-like creature with a long curly tail. The second day we passed hundreds of pink flamingos traipsing through lakes of swampy ice and borax. Three types of flamingos are indigenous to the swamps and marshes of the altiplano: the Chilean, the James and the Andean flamingos. By late morning, we arrived at Laguna Verde, a lake sitting in the shadow of a volcano, which keeps it’s green appearance due to the high arsenic content of its waters. After lunch and a dip in some thermal hot springs, we passed more volcanoes and flamingos and arrived at Sol de Mañana, an area of intense geothermic activity with steaming geysers and bubbling holes of mud. We carefully walked around the perimeter of the area but had to quickly retreat to the jeep due to the intense wind and cold. We spent that night on the shore of Laguna Colorada, a large lake that gets its red color from the profusion of algae blooms in the water. The third day we traveled past more snow-capped volcanoes and stopped at the Stone Tree, an eroded volcanic rock in the shape of a tree 25 feet high. We spent that night in a salt hotel, an inn made primarily of blocks of salt. Our beds were platforms of salt and the dining area boasted dining tables and block seats made from salt. When no one was looking, the kids and I licked the walls of our room to verify their saline content (trying not to think about how many previous guests had done the same).

My legs form a very long shadow at sunrise

We woke at 6:00 am on the fourth day and drove out to the middle of the Salar to watch the sunrise. The kids and I took pictures of our extremely long shadows, which stretched hundreds of feet to the west. We ate breakfast on the “shore” of Isla Inca Huasi, also known as Fish Island for its fish-like shape. Inca Huasi is an island covered with petrified coral and cactus that was once in the middle of ancient Lake Minchin and now sits in the middle of the Salar. The cacti are relatively new; we’d heard that they grow about 2 centimeters a year, so none could be much more than 1,000 years old. We climbed to the top of the island to see white salt and blue sky in all directions.

Any land of coexisting extremes like this one -- hot, dry, swampy, steamy, salty, windy, cold -- is bound to raise questions. Our 4-day jeep safari through the Salar answered some of them for us.

Lunch In Uyuni, Bolivia

Humorous signs are everywhere in South America and this one is from Uyuni, Bolivia, where we sat down for lunch after completing our 4-day tour of the Salar de Uyuni.

We wondered if the restaurant only catered to men upon reading "We Offer Him the Specialty of the House."  We did not try the second item, called "Pasture," so we still have no idea what that was.  The heading after the second row of items, "Plates National Meat of He/She Calls or Head" was quite puzzling and looking at the first two plates listed below it confused us more: "Chop Male" and "Mounted Loin."

We decided to go with pizza, figuring that there could be no miscommunication about such a widely known dish and although the taste was not the best, we knew what we were eating.

Bolivian Bowler Hats

I’m sure Thomas and William Bowler had no idea that the hat they created back in 1849 for English gentlemen on horseback would be a South American fashion statement amongst Andean indigenous women. Walk the streets of La Paz, Bolivia and one of the first things you’ll notice are the cholitas, the indigenous Aymara women with bowler hats perched on their heads. They sell just about anything from street corners; during the first hour of our La Paz walking tour we saw them selling soap, meat, stuffed animals, onions and dried llama fetuses. When we popped in to see a Harry Potter movie that night we bought some popcorn from one of the cholitas lined up in front of the theater. They each wore layers of petticoats over shiny skirts with a shawl covering their shoulders. Each of them had long black hair braided into waist-length pigtails with bowler hat balancing on top of their heads.

There does not seem to be a clear consensus on how the bowler hat got to South America and why these women adopted it. One story relates an accidental surplus of the hats, leading the manufacturer to market them to women. Another story says that they were made for British railway workers here in the early 20th century. Yet another story relates that there was no surplus of the hats, they just made them too small for the Europeans so they were given away to locals. One thing is certain; the hats do not fit properly. They are all too small and must be balanced on the head or if you’re cholita who cheats, a bobby pin can be used.

The Bowler brothers designed the hat 160 years ago so that gentleman horseback riders in the English countryside would have an alternative to the top hat which was often knocked off by low-hanging branches while riding. While the origins of the Bowler hat are steeped in functionality, its current usage in the Andes is not. It does not fit well, it doesn’t provide shelter from sun or rain and the felt is not particularly waterproof. Despite this, the Bowler hat is a Bolivian fashion statement.

Bolivian Sojourn: Potosi, By the Numbers

The story of the town of Potosi and its Cerro Rico ("Rich Hill"), the mountain of silver that bankrolled the Spanish Empire for two-and-a-half centuries, is one that can be told with numbers:

13,420 = The elevation (in feet) of Potosi, the highest city in the world, almost two and a half miles high.

1544 = The year (according to legend) that llama-herder Diego Huallpa, while keeping warm one night after searching for a lost llama, lit a fire at the base of Cerro Rico and saw liquid silver running from underneath it. The Spaniards soon were mining the mountain.
1572 = The year that Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, in an effort to boost sagging productivity, instituted La Ley de la Mita, whereby all indigenous and African workers over 18 would work 12 hour shifts, not leaving the mine for 4 months at a time.
1672 = The year a mint was established in Potosi in order to coin the silver.
1825 = The year of Bolivian Independence.
1908 = The year that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ventured to southwestern Bolivia to rob mining companies’ payroll accounts.
1987 = The year UNESCO named Potosi a “World Heritage Site” for its legacy of riches and misfortune.

14,000 = Population of Potosi in 1547, a few years after the Spanish learned about the silver within Cerro Rico.
200,000 = Population of Potosi around 1672, at the height of its wealth and population. For a time it was the richest and largest city in the Americas.
10,000 = Population of Potosi in 1825, at the time of Bolivian independence, once the silver had effectively run out.
140,000 = Population (approximate) of Potosi in 2009

0 = Number of experts who agree with each other on the amount of silver extracted from Cerro Rico during the colonial era. Here’s a sampling of estimates taken from the web, for varying time periods: 70,000 metric tons, 2 billion ounces, 45,000 tons, 62,000 metric tonnes, 137,000,000 pounds and 60,000 tons.
86 = Number of churches in Potosi at the height of its wealth in the late 1600’s.

8,000,000 = Estimated number of miners who have died between 1545 and 1825, mainly from silicosis pneumonia and accidents.
30,000 = Estimated number of African slaves imported to Potosi to work in the mines during the colonial era
115 = (Degrees Fahrenheit) routinely experienced in the 4th and 5th levels of the mine. To breathe easier, miners take off their protective masks, which further increase their chances of contracting silicosis pneumonia.
10-15 = (Years) Range of life expectancy of miners after starting work in Cerro Rico. Few miners live beyond 40.

1,124 = (US dollars) Yearly Gross Domestic Product (per capita) in Bolivia in 2006 (IMF)
3 = Rank of Bolivia amongst the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. (IMF; nominal GDP 2006)

Bolivian Sojourn: Amazon Basin

Our 45-minute flight from La Paz to Rurenabaque was a short but perception-altering experience. Had we not decided at the last minute to visit Bolivia’s Amazon basin, we would still be associating Bolivia with bowler hats, shortness of breath, llamas, woven alpaca textiles and extreme temperature swings on the altiplano. Our 19-seat, twin-engine propjet “bumped” down on Rurrenabaque’s dirt runway amid clear jungle skies -- according to Lonely Planet’s web site this was one of Bolivia's 1,068 airports with unpaved landing strips. Arriving in the Amazon basin, we entered a different world; a world of canoes, insects, humidity and hammocks.

We checked into our hotel, jumped into our hammocks and the difference from the altiplano was immediately palpable. The breathlessness that accompanied physical activity on the altiplano was gone, our skin and hands were no longer perpetually dry and we welcomed the cacophony of birds, bugs and frogs calling in the night. Rurrenabaque is the jumping-off point for river trips into the Amazon basin; we had picked a 3-day tour of the pampas, the vast wetland savannah with rivers teeming with wildlife. The night before departure, we bought some last-minute provisions: water, snacks, a miner’s flashlight and batteries. I also needed a khaki long-sleeve shirt to keep the mosquitoes at bay. We checked at a local market by the river and some of the shops on the main street selling predominantly used clothing, many items still having a Goodwill tag. I bought a beige shirt that looked very similar to one that I donated to a local Goodwill store many years ago.

The next morning we took off in our jeep for the 3 hour ride to our lodge on the Rio Yacuma, a distant tributary of the Amazon. Along the way we spotted toucans, storks, herons and one sleepy, leaf-munching sloth. The moment we arrived at our lodge, a pink river dolphin jumped out of the water to mark our arrival. We settled in to our rooms and the kids immediately found a frog family living in the tank of the toilet. After lunch we set out in our 20-foot long canoe and watched turtles sunbathe while caimans of various sizes eyed us from the banks of the coffee-colored river. Within minutes we saw about a dozen capybara, the world’s largest rodent, milling about near the shore. These brown “water-hogs” are about 2 feet high and 3 feet long and are plentiful because no man or animal wants to eat them. In Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, he describes the appearance of the capybara: “Both the front and side view of their head has quite a ludicrous aspect, from the depth of their great jaw.” Later in the day we viewed several types of monkeys before heading back to the lodge.

The second day we toured a different section of the Yacuma. We navigated a bend in the river, glided near a dense thicket of trees and were immediately beset upon by small, gold-colored monkeys, who boarded our canoe without permission and liberated us from our oranges. There were about 15 of them in total and they were extremely curious…that is until the oranges were gone. In the afternoon we went piranha fishing. While the kids caught many river sardines and a few catfish, our guide was the only one to catch a piranha. None of the fish were suitable for a meal so we threw them all back. That night after dinner, we got our flashlights and went looking for caimans. Orange eyes peered at us from both sides of the river as insects were magnetically attracted to our flashlights. We observed the Southern Cross up in the sky and watched fireflies glitter in the larger trees, making them look like Christmas trees.

On day three we swam with pink river dolphins. We found a deep spot in the river where a couple dolphins were swimming and waited until our guide got us comfortable with the idea of swimming in piranha-infested water with zero visibility while 10-foot caimans watched from the shore 25 feet away. Wilber, our guide, explained to us that the caimans are afraid of the dolphins and that we were safe from the piranha as long as we were free from cuts or blood. After about 20 minutes we got up enough courage to jump in. To our surprise, the dolphins stuck around to swim with us, playing with a ball we tossed to them, gliding in and out of the water and at one point giving us a big splash of water. These dolphins once swam in the Atlantic, but changing geography and 25 million years of evolution have changed them into blind, freshwater, bottle-nosed creatures with smaller dorsal fins. Obviously sight was not needed in muddy water but Wilber explained to us that the longer nose and smaller dorsal fin enabled them to more easily reach into bushes for crabs and small shore animals.

Earlier that same morning we also went on an anaconda hunt, getting out of our canoe and walking along an elevated dirt road for a few hours. We didn’t spot any anaconda, but getting out of the boat put the pampas in its proper perspective – flat, endless, wetland savannah for thousands of miles. While life along the river is more interesting, this view was more indicative of the pampas. Just as our trip to the Bolivian Amazon (which comprises two-thirds of Bolivia’s land) gave us a more representative picture of the country, getting out of our canoe put the pampas in perspective.

Bolivian Sojourn: Navigating a Coral Reef at 12,000 feet Above Sea Level

The area around the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat in southwestern Bolivia, is an other-worldly landscape of hallucinogenic visions and poses some difficult questions. For example: How did 10 billion tons of salt get here? Why is that lake green? Why are there thousands of pink flamingos living more than two miles above sea level? Why am I looking at steaming geysers and bubbling mudpots while freezing my butt off? Why is that lake red? But the question that I’m struggling with the most is: How is it that I am navigating an island of petrified coral, covered in cactus, in the middle of a sea of salt…at 12,000 feet above sea level?

The Salar de Uyuni is the remains of prehistoric Lake Minchin, which lost all its water via absorption and evaporation over 40,000 years ago. As the water disappeared, it left a perfectly-flat layer of salt covering 4.085 square miles, roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the U.S. state of Utah. As the Andean altiplano was pushed up by the forces of plate tectonics, the Salar reached its present-day elevation.

We took a 4-day jeep safari starting in Tupiza and ending in Uyuni, the town that shares its name with the Salar. The first day was spent riding through the Lipez, a desert-like area in the farthest southwest corner of Bolivia, that resembles many areas of the U.S. southwest. We passed silver, gold, tin and antimony mines amidst thousands of roaming llamas, alpacas and vicunas (and one Andean ostrich). We also saw an odd animal called a viscacha, a rabbit-like creature with a long curly tail. The second day we passed hundreds of pink flamingos traipsing through lakes of swampy ice and borax. Three types of flamingos are indigenous to the swamps and marshes of the altiplano: the Chilean, the James and the Andean flamingos. By late morning, we arrived at Laguna Verde, a lake sitting in the shadow of a volcano, which keeps it’s green appearance due to the high arsenic content of its waters. After lunch and a dip in some thermal hot springs, we passed more volcanoes and flamingos and arrived at Sol de Mañana, an area of intense geothermic activity with steaming geysers and bubbling holes of mud. We carefully walked around the perimeter of the area but had to quickly retreat to the jeep due to the intense wind and cold. We spent that night on the shore of Laguna Colorada, a large lake that gets its red color from the profusion of algae blooms in the water. The third day we traveled past more snow-capped volcanoes and stopped at the Stone Tree, an eroded volcanic rock in the shape of a tree 25 feet high. We spent that night in a salt hotel, an inn made primarily of blocks of salt. Our beds were platforms of salt and the dining area boasted dining tables and block seats made from salt. When no one was looking, the kids and I licked the walls of our room to verify their saline content (trying not to think about how many previous guests had done the same).

We woke at 6:00 am on the fourth day and drove out to the middle of the Salar to watch the sunrise. The kids and I took pictures of our extremely long shadows, which stretched hundreds of feet to the west. We ate breakfast on the “shore” of Isla Inca Huasi, also known as Fish Island for its fish-like shape. Inca Huasi is an island covered with petrified coral and cactus that was once in the middle of ancient Lake Minchin and now sits in the middle of the Salar. The cacti are relatively new; we’d heard that they grow about 2 centimeters a year, so none could be much more than 1,000 years old. We climbed to the top of the island to see white salt and blue sky in all directions.

Any land of coexisting extremes like this one -- hot, dry, swampy, steamy, salty, windy, cold -- is bound to raise questions. Our 4-day jeep safari through the Salar answered some of them for us.

Bolivian Sojourn: El Choro Trek

Even when you take a year off, you need a vacation; we are currently touring Bolivia and everywhere we go we are impressed by its biodiversity. Bolivia has about 736,000 square miles (roughly the size of the U.S. states of Alaska and Washington combined), one-third of which is Andean altiplano and two-thirds is Amazon basin. Were it not for losing its Pacific War with Chile (1879-1884), it would have a coastline as well. (In fact, from 1825 to 1935, Bolivia lost half of its territory to neighboring Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Paraguay.)

We decided to experience some of this biodiversity first hand. After getting acclimatized in La Paz, we made arrangements to do the El Choro trek, a 43 km trek from the snowy tip of the Andes’ Cordillera Real range to the Yungas, the dense, steamy cloudforest that separates Bolivia’s altiplano from its Amazon basin. The trek starts out at La Cumbre, atop the Cordillera Real, the easternmost border of Bolivia’s altiplano, and goes to Chairo, before a jeep takes you to the relaxing tourist town of Coroico.

The first day we drove straight up out of La Paz, the Bolivian capital which sits in a densely-populated bowl in the altiplano. We headed straight up for an hour until we reached La Cumbre (“The Summit”) at 15,502 feet. The driver dropped the eight of us off (our family of 4 plus our guide, cook, and two porters) amid alpine lakes, glaciers and rocky peaks. We hiked strenuously upward for a half hour until we reached our highest point, Abra Chucura (15,941 ft). From here, it was all downhill on paved Inca stones, past crumbling piles of flat pizara (slate), roaming packs of llamas, and the occasional donkey train transporting goods from the Yungas to La Paz. After an hour we passed pre-Inca, guesthouse ruins, where travelers long before us broke their journey. Over one mountain pass from us was Bolivia’s infamous “World’s Most Dangerous Road”, where an average of 26 vehicles a year disappear over the edges of the road from La Cumbre to Coroico. The road gots its nickname from a recent Inter-America Development Bank report and is a magnet for adrenaline junkies on downhill mountain bikes. Later than afternoon we passed beautifully paved pre-inca stone roads and finished our day at Challapampa (9,268 ft). For dinner our cook served us a delicious quinoa and vegetable soup while we were entertained by a young boy scrambling on the grassy camping area on all fours. The next morning, we brushed our teeth and all visited Challapampa’s village toilet; a makeshift wood platform about 10 feet above a large pit next to the river. This image alone will convince our kids to never drink alpine river water without it being treated.

Day two was a delightful downward stroll through cloudforest dotted with orchids, bromeliads and butterflies. We passed a shack selling Oreo cookies and softdrinks and bought a pack of Oreos. Not far before we reached the next shack selling drinks, we saw about a hundred empty plastic bottles dumped down the cliff next to the trail. For the rest of the hike I intermittently thought about the tourist's responsibilty for such an unsustainable practice. We continued to cross makeshift bridges and small waterfalls and finished the day at the village of San Francisco -- a couple of huts in a level space carved into the trail, surrounded by banana trees.

We started out Day three with sore legs and very quickly descended into a dense jungle area with hundreds of beautiful Amaryllis plants. I recalled working for the Gardener’s Eden catalog over ten years ago where we sold “forcing kits” of Amarylis bulbs with smooth rocks and a glass pot for $30. I mentioned this to my wife and she picked one and put it in her hat. For lunch we stopped and ate at Casa Sandillani (6,725 ft) and spoke with the village patriarch, Tamiji Hanamura. Mr. Hanamura was a 80-year old Japanese man, who had traveled widely for many years and once he reached Casa Sandillana, stopped travelling and never left. He’s been there for 40 years. He showed us his collection of postcards from the United States and we promised to send him a postcard from some exotic place. That afternoon we continued steadily downhill towards the town of Chairo. About an hour before getting there we saw parrots noisily chirping in a tree. We finally reached Chairo, sweaty and exhausted, and jumped in a jeep for Coroico. We reached Coroico and immediately took showers at our hotel. The view from our room revealed densely-covered cloudforest, extending out towards the Amazon basin. The first day of walking by glaciers seemed worlds away.