Picking up from Bolivia’s Siloli Desert: Flamingos, Geysers and Roads That Test Everything. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

Last Day in the Desert

The morning was rock formations — wind and water working over millennia on sandstone and volcanic rock, producing shapes that looked considered. A mushroom column taller than a house. A natural arch wide enough to stand inside with both arms raised.

Buzz found the Anaconda River winding through the canyon below — two figures standing on the rim, a third standing well back from the edge, the Nissan parked on the road behind them.

The desert had been saving its best work.

Cementerio de Trenes de Uyuni

Back in Uyuni, the train cemetery. Most of the locomotives date from the early 20th century — British-built, hauled in on a grand plan to turn Uyuni into a rail hub exporting minerals to Pacific ports, then abandoned wholesale when the mining industry collapsed and the lines were left with nowhere useful to go. They sit in rows on the edge of town, rusting at scale, stripped of anything that could be carried off and left to the wind for the rest.

Adjacent to the cemetery: a sculpture park made entirely from salvaged metal. Human figures, animals, and a full-sized Transformer in yellow.

Nobody explained it. Nobody needed to.

Return to La Paz

The return journey was a long day across the altiplano — abandoned mud-brick settlements dissolving into the plain, power lines running to nowhere, the salt flat still visible as a white stripe on the horizon long after Uyuni was behind us.

The driver, and the Nissan, remained at Uyuni and the guide was back behind the wheel of the car. He made good time. Through the stretch of road where the radar gun had appeared on the way down, he slowed without being asked, and said nothing.

He knew exactly where it was.

La Paz arrived the way it always does — suddenly, loudly, and from every direction at once.

Back to the Witches’ Market

Coming back to the hotel in La Paz felt like coming home — the altitude already familiar, the city already readable. After breakfast, we went back to the parts we’d missed the first time.

The gondolas got a full day’s use. From above, the city spread in every direction — brick and colour and chaos, the Andes rising behind it. When the wind came up, the cars whistled slightly, which nobody mentioned as a selling point.

We found Plaza Murillo — the seat of Bolivia’s government, congress on one side and the presidential palace on the other, the kind of square that has seen more history than it lets on. It was being cleaned. A person in a zebra costume supervised the pedestrian crossing. There are no road rules in La Paz that apply to pedestrians, which makes the zebra an act of creative optimism.

Back to the Witches’ Market. Janine considered a llama foetus. Declined.

Lunch was at the Witches Pub, which seemed appropriate.