The final run into Uyuni, the last two hours. It looks like 14 hours will end up being 15. Now the sun is reflecting back from lozenge-shaped yellow roadsigns warning of llamas. Funny that no enterprising Bolivian hasn't started merchandising the image. The Australians are good at that stuff with their kangaroos and koalas, and you can buy them in Piccadilly Circus.
My dormant mobile phone suddenly erupts. A text message from my wife, sent 9 hours ago alerts me that we're back in range. Amazing really, I'm in the middle of a high-altitude sandy desert, in instant touch with my wife who's 100 miles away by means of a signal that, to my untechnical mind, has bounced off a heavenly body that thinks we're both in Britain.
I ponder what Charles Darwin would have though of that. I realise three weeks later in the Galapagos that Darwin would have needed quad-band to communicate from any part of what is now Ecuador. However, tri-band is fine in Bolivia, except down in the far southwest where nothing's in range.
The message is "Wots Spanish for mouse?"
When I translate for Rodrigo, he grasps the implications immediately and his face goes white. He's left his client's wife in a vermin-infested hotel room.
I reassure him that Sue is unlikely to be phased by a mouse. I begin to muse, out loud, how she will have coped with alerting the hotel to the presence of the hapless rodent. I imagine small drawings, and warming to my subject, try my own hand at charades - knowing Sue to be well skilled in this. Without boasting about how well I carry off this miming and squeaking, the result is that both Rodrigo and I are laughing so much that he has to stop the car.
The truth, when we finally arrived, is funnier still: Sue had acted out a similar but much longer performance to a chambermaid who had spent all night drinking chicha at a local fiesta, and was barely on the conscious side of catatonic.
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