It's exactly a year since I was in Bolivia. I did a big circle - flying into La Paz, then driving in a 4WD with Rodrigo Garron, our man on the ground.
We went south across the altiplano to Oruro (good paved road all the way) and on by an increasingly poor dirt track to the huge salt flats (salar) at Uyuni. The whole-day journey is over terrain which varies little from an altitude of 4000 metres
We stayed in one of the three hotels there which are built almost entirely of salt blocks, on a low bluff overlooking the salt flat. Flat is the word. Almost incandescently white until the sun sets, and stretching 70 miles to the western cordillera of the Andes, the crust is thick enough to support a vehicle's weight.
If you plonked the salar down in the middle of the English Channel, you'd be able to drive all the way from Portsmouth to Cherbourg
It gets bitterly cold at night. Fortunately, the hotel Luna Salada has central heating, and each bed has duvets which are a foot thick. I'm not exaggerating.
Over the last year, the UK press and media have begun to notice that the concentrated brine beneath the salt crust Salar de Uyuni holds some 50% of the world's resources of lithium.
Lithium is what they use for lightweight, high-power batteries, which we are told will be running the green cars of the future.
The Bolivian government (and in particular the populist president Evo Morales) are very keen that the Bolivian people, rather than foreign corporations and a handful of already-rich Bolivians, should benefit from the exploitation of this resource.
There's already a scramble among other nations to befriend the Bolivians. Japan, France, Brazil and Venezuela have all thrown their hats (or their entrepreneurs' hats) into the ring.
I noticed a few days ago that a Brazilian engineering group had been granted the concession to build a new road in Bolivia's Amazon lowlands. Maybe they're taking the roundabout route to having their feet under the table next time... To exploit Uyuni, Morales will need a new railway or highway - it's a hard place to get to.
As is Bolivia - landlocked, no direct access to the sea, and not always on the best of terms with its neighbours. Its isolation is one of the reasons it's still such a haunting place to visit.
Thursday 27 August 2009
Tuesday 4 August 2009
Guianas Trip
To commemorate the company's 30th birthday, in the late summer of 2010 Brian Willams (who was there at the start) and I are planning to run a couple of Escorted Group trips in "the old style".
That actually meant, in the old days, trips with a very minimum of advance planning, so clearly doing any preparation work done now in August 2009 already belies the concept...
Brian will be doing Welsh Patagonia, travelling westwards to cross the Andes near Trevelin into Chile and the Carretera Austral - the great southern highway. Construction of this road started just a few years before Journey Latin America was created. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carretera_Austral. Brian speaks Spanish and is a native Welsh speaker.
I'll be following a linear route through Venezuela's Gran Sabana to northern Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and back into Brazil. What roads there were in these parts in the early 1980s were compacted red-earth and certainly not all-weather. Things have improved since then, but there's a good a few ferries across the larger jungle rivers. I don't speak any Dutch, but I'm reasonably competent in the other four languages.
As the research develops into a plan, and the plan into an itinerary, I'll post updates - there may be a a few abandoned backwaters along the way, as my wish-list gets trodden on by practicality. CP
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
