Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 117 - Salar de Uyuni Traditional Bolivian recipe - Take 1 large, flat plain (about 4000 square miles) Add a few pinches of salt (about 1 trillion) Leave to bake under a hot sun for a few years (about 10 thousand) You're done, tourists will eat it up. The salt flats south of Uyuni are a remorseless sheet of crystalline white formed by the drying of a lake. Perpetually clear skies mean the sun bounces blindingly off the highly reflective surface and wearing sunglasses is a near necessity in this sterile emptiness. We stood outside the office where we had booked our three day tour awaiting our fellow tourees, people came and people went though two parents and their three boisterous children seemed to be lingering, how I prayed it it wouldn't be them. When our 4x4 did arrive it was preloaded with three girls and a boy of similar ages to ourselves, no guarantee of good times but a welcome start nonetheless. Darren and Dee were a couple from Ireland, Teresa and Sof...

Day 112 - Somewhere in the jungle A beast as elusive as the jaguar was our quarry. As rare too as the spotted cat in these modern times; we hunted for it in the rainforest. Three days and two nights we would spend on its trail, a search to test the body and mind to their limits. We chased the real, we sought a prize no less than 'The Authentic Experience™'. Not for us the comforts of a jungle lodge. Nor either the luxuries of meals thrice daily or bottled water in our bag. In fact there was no bag, only a mosquito net and a guide named Pedro. Everything we needed, food and drink and shelter would come from the forest. A casual, curious click on the 'Extreme' section of the Mogli Jungle Tours website was all it was. Alcohol is a substance of many abilities but I am ever astounded at the way it turns bad ideas into good ones, questionable into compelling. As another glass of red wine slipped down in a restaurant in La Paz far from the jungle my life suddenly became incom...

Day 103 - La Paz After a morning of syringe shopping and staring at baby llama fetuses in the witches market we relaxed over a pint in the self-appointed ´5th best bar in La Paz´. Notwithstanding the use of Comic Sans for signage and its Lonely Planet declared infamy as the worst cultural experience in the city ´Oliver´s Travels´ was an agreeable watering hole. Staffed by a Brummie named Kass we managed to find our way there on each of the eight days we spent in the capital. It certainly merited more visits than a nearby curry house who, close to closing time and after the promise of a sizeable tip, served us some of the most unpleasant Indian cuisine I have ever tasted.Convinced the bill we were given included the aforementioned tip we calculated our debt without an unworthy tribute and made a hasty exit. Two waiters dashing out into the street after us insisted that was not the case and we reluctantly coughed up the money (I would have happily coughed up the food). Our efforts to w...

Day 101 - Copacabana It may have fallen short of outright murder but manslaughter might have been on the charge sheet if we hadn't released the old man from his duties. An impromptu, rudimentary and seemingly insurmountable roadblock had seen us halted in a little tumbleweed town on the Peruvian-Bolivian border. Around 50 people stood in the road a quarter of a mile ahead of the ever-growing convoy of lorries and minibuses. I strolled under the dry sun to their fleshy barricade. Debate continued calmly and unhurriedly as the reassuring sight of a police car appeared in the distance. The crowd calmly and unhurriedly parted as if Moses himself was driving and reformed again behind the unfussed and departing officers. Eventually some maverick among our fellow passengers suggested taking the road around the unfathomable hindrance. And so it was we were deposited next to an wizened old Bolivian and his pedal rickshaw a kilometre or so from the border. How bad I felt as he struggled up ...

Day 97 - Puno I had to sympathise with the rodent as it stared up at me with a fixed grin. Back home it would have had a cosseted lifestyle. It would have been fed and shown affection and kept safe. And when it's time was up it would have been placed with care into a shoebox and lowered gently into a hole at the bottom of the garden as its (human) family looked on in a reverent silence. This guinea pig's life hadn't quite panned out like that. Here in Peru it was splayed across my plate, its bedding was fried potatoes rather than sawdust. But I must say that my sympathies receded as I savoured the pleasant, slightly gamey flavour and, with a little effort, the bones were soon picked clean. People have a passionate irrationality when it comes to eating something that could be a pet, witness the western horror for making dogs a dinner. Guinea pigs on plates don't elicit quite the same reaction as that I suppose but what I was doing could still move an 8 year old to tear...

Day 95 - Machu Picchu To look at Machu Picchu is to see a dream. I cannot say for sure it was the dream of those who built it, no-one can. But to me it is a dream of isolation, of insulation, even of inoculation from the cruelties of the wider world. At the absolute least it is my dream of a simple life not crazed by the fever of progress. Not a life where all too often my actions seem to lack purpose, all too often are wracked by doubt and despair. I want to eat, to sleep, to love without the unremitting analysis. A dream of switching off whatever part of my twisted consciousness floated up all those years ago to hover above me like some departing soul in a hospital ward. I used to disdain stasis feeling those who lacked ambition, had not the desire to drive themselves onwards and upwards were unworthy of my time or my employ. But perhaps they saw, even unconsciously, what I did not. That all we truly need in this life is something to do, something to love and something to hope for....

Day 92 - Cuzco After a dinner of chicken, rice and marmalade, a night's sleep made possible by barbiturates, a breakfast of dry crackers and 25 hours of solid bus travel we had arrived in the Inca heartland. If there are two things that Cuzco has in abundance it is tourists and rain. They pour into and onto the city daily, though given that it was low season there was fewer of the former and rather more of the latter. Ankle-deep torrents ran down the cobbled streets and cars drove great bow-waves over pedestrians and open shopfronts alike. Despite that and the heavy foreign presence, of which we were hardly in a position to complain about, the place was a pretty, pleasant place to spend a couple of days. I declined the chance to have my picture taken with an alpaca (similar to a llama) for five Peruvian soles and instead elected to pay ten to have one slapped between a couple of pieces of bread with fries on the side, tasty. Pizarro - dead now, Incas - dead then The few pack ...