Bolivia (Uyuni-Potosi-Sucre) Aug08

Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, is a populist, a man of the people. He has huge support from the bulk of the population - the indigenous people of the Andean highlands, Quechua or Aymara-speaking; from which group Morales himself is drawn. But in August 2008 he had set himself on a collision course with the governors of the eastern/lowland states. The issue was mainly(and still is) the huge tax burden imposed by the government on the oil-producing areas, particularly the wealthy city of Santa Cruz.

The implications of this for us were that, although Rodrigo was confident that we could get through to Potosi, he was very pessimistic about the onward leg to Sucre. Several anti-Morales roadblocks were in place, and there was no getting past them. It was conceivable/possible/likely that we'd have to retrace our route from Potosi back overland to La Paz, instead of making a connection with our booked flight from Sucre.

We opted to risk it. There's a new road (mostly the old one being greatly improved) being built from Uyuni to Potosi, and several of our staff had said that it's not just a road journey, it's a tourist attraction in its own right.

The road out of Uyuni climbs straight into the hills, following, crossing and recrossing the track-bed of the old railway to the silver and tin mine at Pulacayo. Behind us there's a panoramic view of the salar, in a landscape made even flatter by the cloudless sky and noon-day sun.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/1814/

Pulacayo is a revelation, a time-warp from a century ago, with the rails, rolling stock, turntable, engines and locosheds sharing the only road into town. A battered sign proclaims that this is the very railway which Butch and Sundance held up and robbed in 1908.

Versions of the story abound: Pulacayo's is that the mine owners themselves hijacked the payroll and miners' (pittance of) wages, and laid the blame on the two Yanqui bandits who were conveniently in the area. Sadly for modern-day Pulacayo, the most widely held view today is that it was not a railway, but a mule-train that was robbed, and that it was closer to Tupiza, to the south, and the bandidos ended up in the cemetery in the tiny mining town of San Vicente.

The old/new road onwards is proceeding apace. There are regular encampments of bulldozers and graders, and tiny communities which were once on the route are now bypassed (albeit an all-weather bypass), unless there's a bridge or a gorge which dictates the route. There are cuttings which slice though several million years of pristine sedimentary rock.

The only roadblocks are official traffic-control ones - yellow dungareed and hardhatted road workers (both men and women) with lollipops slow us when there is heavy plant crossing. There's almost never anything coming in the opposite direction.