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I did manage to put down a few paragraphs in the last few weeks. They’re not up to much but I’m sick of wrestling with them, so in order to get these monkeys off my back I’ll present them in their rough form and hope for the best.

The Argentine lad who rented us bikes in Salta described his country’s northern neighbour, Bolivia, as “exotic”. I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time. I am now. Argentina is another country. Bolivia is another world. It’s the South America you think you should read about in the books that consistently make the top 100 lists of broadsheet cultural supplements, written by men with Spanish sounding names and internationally recognised literature awards. It’s distinct and “real” in the rather patronising way travellers (myself included) sometimes have of classifying the authenticity of their experiences – as if your experience of Brazil or Argentina were any less grounded in reality for having hot water, good roads and punctual public transport.

But the atmosphere is different here and not just because of the altitude. It’s haphazard and chaotic in a soporific kind of way, like the movement of bees in a smoke-filled hive. Things are constructed in a mend-and-make-do fashion. They get busted and break down but are fixed in the space of a few hours like grandpa’s shovel. It feels like the whole place is held together by eight-gage wire and bailing twine. And that’s not a criticism.

Despite Bolivia’s relatively recent recruitment to the list of South American countries the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade doesn’t feel compelled to terrify visitors into avoiding, it’s already pretty well established on the tourist trail. Mainly this is because it’s an oasis of cheap living on a continent of affordability. It’s where you go in South America when you’re long on time and short on money.

That’s not to say that there isn’t heaps to see and do here. It’s just that other places in South America are easier to get to and get around. And it doesn’t have any beaches.

The country’s biggest tourist draw card is the spectacular Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, which sits amid an astonishingly barren but beautiful stretch of the Andes Mountains. A four-day, four-wheel-drive tour of the region will set you back something in the region of $100US, which is incredible value provided you’re getting what the agents are showing on the tin.

We’d heard mixed reports about the quality of the salt flat tours, with some travellers complaining of drunk drivers and inedibly bad food. One rumour doing the rounds told of a couple of English girls being abandoned in the middle of the altiplane desert, which prompted us to adopt a don’t-pay-the-ferryman approach to reimbursing the tour company for their services.

The fact our tour was delayed by a day due to a general strike by cabbies and bus drivers protesting for the right to get behind the wheel while drunk was slightly concerning. But we needn’t have worried. As well as being a paragon of sobriety our driver, Bernardo, was a superstar and possibly the most cheerful bloke on the planet. His ready and frequent laugh fell somewhere between Woody Woodpecker’s manic cackle and the delighted chuckle of a small boy who has just done something wildly inappropriate and gotten away with it.

Alongside being Bolivia’s most cheerful chap, Bernardo was also a hell of a bush mechanic, repairing punctures and replacing shock absorbers in the time it took us to see a sight or eat a lunch. I lost count of the number of times we returned from taking photographs to find the little bloke’s feet poking out from under the vehicle, a happy little song drifting up through the engine bay. A few moments later he’d be up and dusting himself off, with whatever minor problem he was working on fixed and buttoned down.

He’d often be so preoccupied with his vehicle that he’d miss his lunch, something we always felt guilty about and compelled to rectify through the provision of snacks. On day two, after suffering a couple of minor mechanical failures, Bernardo worked through the lunch-break to make the vehicle fit to complete another five hours of hard driving. When we got back to the car we asked him if he’d eaten anything for lunch and, as was the usual custom, he claimed that he had. It was clearly a lie and as soon as we were on our way Alan reached for the enormous packet of assorted biscuits he’d purchased before departure and started handing them around the car.

The first two times the bag came around, Bernardo showed considerable restraint, taking just one or two biscuits. By the third time the packet came forward his urge for sustenance had clearly outstripped his urge for courtesy and he grabbed a fistful and walloped the whole lot past his grinning gob, letting out a muffled “muchas gracias” as a cascade of crumbs fell down his shirtfront.

It was just about the highlight of the trip until two days later, when handing around a bag of coca leaves. For the sake of my mother, I will take this opportunity to point out that coca leaves are legal in Bolivia and while they are the base ingredient for both cocaine and a number of prescription painkillers, they offer only a mild stimulant effect when consumed in leaf or tea form and are considered by the local people to be a pretty effective means of curing everything from altitude sickness and stomach aches to accidentally burning your eyes out with a curling iron.

The preferred technique for coca leaf consumption is to de-stem the leaves, shove a handful in your cheek, nibble off a bit of catalyst (basically bicarbonate of soda or something similar to stimulate saliva flow) and suck on that bad boy until it looses its structural integrity or your face goes numb.

Surprisingly enough, despite his frequent exposure to high altitude, Bernardo suffered a bit from altitude sickness, so when the coca leaves did the rounds he became what can only be described as very excited indeed.

He was like a little kid eating chocolate buttons at a friend’s birthday party. Great handfuls of leaves disappeared into his mouth and his cheek swelled as if he’d developed an ulcer under a bad tooth. When Alan temporarily withdrew the bag from between the front seats to extract a few leaves for himself, Bernardo’s hand probed and groped the vacant space until the bag’s return.

Bear in mind that while all this was going on we were travelling along a corrugated dirt road at speeds approaching 100kmph. The provision of stimulants to those in charge of potentially lethal machinery is generally frowned upon but I’d happily do it again to get a repeat of the moment when, cheek pouch limit reached, Bernardo turned to me, fixed me in a wide eyed stare and let out a long, satisfied “mmmmmmm” before turning his attention back to the long road ahead.

Language is overrated.

What a smashing treat it is to go barrelling across the top of the world, a massive wadge of coca leaves in your cheek to ward off the symptoms of altitude sickness, a gormless smile plastered across your numb lips. The otherworldly scenery is absolutely stunning and I won’t try to describe it. I’ll post up some pictures when the bandwidth allows.

Sadly, I get the feeling the place is already wrecked in a man-destroying-the-things-he-loves kind of way. It pains me to say that. In more ways than one.

The first reason is that I think it’s true. The tracks are potholed, dusty and corrugated but they are extremely well trodden. In a place which is partially marketed on the offer of solitude and isolation there’s precious little of it on offer. A bank of 4x4s lines every sight to see and the ground is littered with rubbish. On the second night of our trip I went outside to watch the sunset and counted 18 tourist vehicles parked up outside the newly custom-made dorms. At least 60 people must have been staying in our village alone.

We’re about ten years away from a five star resort and spa being constructed next to the insanely impressive slat flats of Uyuni, which will offer rejuvenating salt-pack facials and coca leaf enemas between day trips to the mountains and lagoons that punctuate the high planes. But who am I to say that’s a bad thing?

And that brings me neatly to the second reason it pains me to say the place is losing its appeal, which is that saying that makes me sound like the kind of pretentious bore who sits in hostel common-rooms wearing cargo trousers and canvas shoes, telling everyone who’ll listen about the best technique for sleeping on a ferry and how they’ve been travelling for 900 years with only 600 grams of luggage. Any person who’s spent more than a few hours in a hostel will be familiar with this grizzled, backpacking cliché. You’ll find him lurking in the kitchens and hovering over the PCs waiting to swoop on an unsuspecting novice to regale them with tales of previous adventures, the punch line of every story being: “But that was ten years ago… It’s ruined now of course.”

Twat.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson