If San Pedro was gun-slinger’s town then the landscape taking us from Chile to the Bolivian border was a sub-zero version of Death Valley.
Reaching the Chilean border within half an hour of leaving the campsite, we joined a queue of trucks and car transporters, buses and vans, each weighing up the merits of staying warm in their seats against getting an early place in the queue for passport exit stamps.
We opted for the latter and stood shivering for thirty minutes, waiting for the office to open. When it did, our gamble failed spectacularly as the border official announced that he would process the crowd according to the order of the vehicle queue rather than the passenger one.
The ignominy of being overtaken in the queue by a Peruvian ballet troupe was unbearable, until boredom finally prompted them to a few spontaneous pas-de-deux in the dusty road, as much to stay warm as for our entertainment.
Sharif saw the opportunity and seized it with both hands.
Rummaging in his ruck-sack, out came a crumpled tutu and some dusty ballet shoes. In seconds, the rouge was applied, his shaggy hair was tied back and the dishevilled over-lander was transformed into....
...Well, its hard to say really.
Something between a swan and a drag act.
What followed was a performance of sheer fantasy - a marriage of Teutonic efficiency with Peruvian elan against a backdrop of Bolivian chaos.
Some may say that it never happened and that it was just the musings of a fevered mind having spent too long in the oxygen deprived wilderness.
An hour and forty five minutes and three standing ovations after we joined the queue, the bouquets were handed over and our passports were stamped. We rolled across the Chilean border into the empty triangle between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile having rifled the local kiosk of crisps and biscuits for the journey.
The milky coffee was a purchase too far and it slopped over our feet as we left the tarmac and re-joined the familiar dirt track that was to be home for the next 50km.
We climbed further and further until satellites passed below us.
By 4,500m, the sickness had claimed five serious cases and a pall descended over the truck as pale faces and sunken eyes began to multiply.
Just to be clear, 4,500m is around 16,000 feet. Only 5% of climbers will ever exceed that altitude without booking an in-flight meal.
Dave and Iban conferred.
There was nothing to do but press on and like an indiscriminate plague, some succumbed while their neighbours inexplicably escaped symptom free. We became an inverted community of haves and have not’s.
Only the deprived were rewarded.
The rest looked shrunken and distinctly green.
We ploughed on through the No Man’s Land between the three adjoining countries and finally, after leaving the road from time to time to avoid the retreating snow drifts, we arrived at the Bolivian border. There was a single storey grey building, a dirt track and a rusting yellow barrier. The border was marked by a six inch ditch cut through the rock field. There was no fanfare; only cursory check of passports and a quick wave through to spare everyone the biting wind that tore between the purple mountains.
All for the cost of 21 Bolivianas (or Bobs) - about two pounds.
The border area is hostile. There are no plants, animals or flowing water. It is a bare, desolate place, devoid of anything but rock, snow and a little air. The plains are littered with boulders and the mountains loom overhead in brooding shades of brown and red.
Cameron rattled across the high plateau until we reached the Avaroa National Park where we picked up Braulio, a local guide who we needed to navigate our way across the desert that lay ahead.
There are no roads for hundreds of kilometres.
What followed was a kaleidoscope of natural colour. The mountains around us were like lopsided sponge cakes, full of orange and yellow strata, iced with snow and surrounded by collapsing scree slopes. Rounding a bend we parked on an elevated plateau and gazed down onto Laguna Blanca, the first of three colourful lakes. The Calcium Carbonate that lines the lake bed creates a surreal body of white water that contrasts in a monochrome with the black sand and rocks that surround it.
Further down the track was Laguna Verde, a green lake, poisoned by minerals and unable to support life either in its waters or on its banks. Cairns had been erected by visitors over the decades and the shoreline was dotted with a forest of rock piles in varying sizes and states of collapse. The green was a translucent shade of corroding copper.
Twenty kilometres ahead lay Laguna Colorada, home to Bolivia’s pink flamingos who feed and absorb their colour from the red algae filled waters in the shadow of the Licanbur Volcano, still active but temporarily dormant.
It is no coincidence that this hostile, volcanic terrain was chosen by NASA as the best place for training astronauts and testing equipment in a near Martian atmosphere.
And anyway, by now the truck was full of little green men.
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