The Eyes of The Desert

Today we take another tour, this time to the various incredible lagoons in this oasis in the desert, itself a kind of phenomenon in this, the most arid desert in the world.

The lagoons are hardly any less phenomenal, and not just because of their incongruity, rippling quietly in an expanse of dry, salt encrusted, dust. The first is known as the 'salt lagoon', the water being so salty as to allow even the fattest tourists to float, gingerly on its surface. We eagerly tear off our clothes and jump in. Well, we wade in actually - because the thing about the desert is that things are either boiling hot or freezing cold and the water, at this time of year, is definitely in the latter camp.

Now the lagoon itself, the sun casting a bright path across it, and the surrounding landscape being more than awe inspiring to gaze out at, cannot be overstated in its beauty, and it is very, very much worth making the effort to come here.

But there's a few of those travellers truths I like to go on about, exposing the practical realities behind those glossy magazine pictures of beautifully, evenly tanned couples in skimpy swimwear, strolling hand in hand through sun drenched water, or floating, eyes closed, so relaxed as to be apparently half asleep, (but beautifully, poisedly so) on the hospitably obliging cushion of water with which nature has so thoughtfully provided them.

The fact is the water is very very cold, and requires quite some heavy breathing and gasping to gingerly lie yourself down in. Secondly, apart from at the very edges, the bottom is hard and lumpy, beautiful to look at, but walking on it requires concentration, using the lumps like stepping stones, or painfully stubbing your toe on them. You are not so much strolling gracefully as wobbling about with your arms out, staring fixedly down to enhance any hint of a double chin you may be growing and flailing a little, every now and then toppling backwards to land with a splash and a gasp in cold water.

Because really the double chin is the key here. The problem is not the lagoon, it's the version of you that is in the lagoon. The trouble with stunning landscapes, is that you tend to sort of project yourself into them, and the you that you think would go best in the picture is one that aligns most closely with the models in the tourist magazines, usually rather uncomfortably far from the truth, and this disparity is particularly enhanced with the necessity of removing your clothes.

I survey my rather paler, since leaving South East Asia, body, which seems to quiver a little under my gaze, as if to deliberately enhance the wobbly bits. The 18 year olds who seem to form the majority of our fellow bathers swan about in mismatched bikinis, squealing and running and looking like an advert for the 'after' picture in one of those bikini diets you get in the cheap magazines.

The fact is, floating is not actually very flattering. Your bottom tends to sink a bit, causing your tummy to poke out over your bikini bottoms, so that the overall effect as you shiveringly survey your goose pimpled flesh as you float, is really not especially picturesque.

I think, as I notice myself noticing this that it is a strange irony that it is the beauty of such places that throw into such stark contrast the beauty or otherwise of yourself as a part of it, with the ultimate result that you spend more time literally, navel gazing, than you do actually looking at it.

I make a mental note to get over it. And as it happens, our guide takes a picture for us as we are walking back out towards him and by some amazing quirk of fate or his timing, the resulting photo does actually look a little like those hand in hand models, striding through water. I mean, it's not exactly a scene from a Bond film, but it's actually OK.

Thankfully, and luckily for the actual scenery of San Pedro, which is getting a bit too little attention, we get dressed (after a teeth rattling cold shower to wash off the salt deposits (we look like a character out of a book I had when I was young, who got covered in flour at a flour mill)) and move on to view two more lagoons.

We end the tour at a much bigger lagoon, populated by flamingoes, though they are tiny, secretive dots at the other end, and we will see them more clearly when we travel over the Bolivian salt flats later. It is beautiful, the mountains behind it exquisitely reflected in it, and we drink pisco sours and eat crisps in the manner of starving animals, while the sun travels down behind one mountain range and the moon rises over the other, which are course a stunning dusky pink by the last reflected rays.

In between this and the salt lagoon, however, is my favourite part, the 'eyes of the desert'.

And wow. They have such a great name, it would have been hard not to be impressed anyway, and I would have been perfectly happy with a couple of dingy looking puddles. As it is the eyes are two large, perfectly round and deep holes in arid desert, filled with water.  It looks as though somebody has dropped a large boulder from a very great height to make a crater, and then filled it with a hose. It doesn't seem possible that these could exist in the desert. And maybe they don't. The fact is that look exactly like an imagined oasis does in films, when the main character has been stumbling about for weeks, parched and desperate. Only we have been sitting fatly in an air conditioned bus for about half an hour, along with a cool box containing cocktail ingredients for later. We may look like dying desert wanderers, crystals of salt in our hair and drying on our lips, but suffering we most certainly are not.

Ergo, I suspect that the eyes of the desert are real.

But that's the only proof I have. Frankly its rather more likely that we collectively imagined them, that they could possibly be real. Having said that, we do spend a while having photos taken of ourselves reflected clearly in the perfectly mirror like water. We'll just have to see. Maybe when the pictures develop they will show only two idiots standing alone in an arid desert.

It's a real shame we use digital cameras nowadays, it was so much  more romantic when you had to wait to find out that someone wasn't there, or that the ghost of your long lost great great grandmother suddenly decided to inhabit your frame...

I do apologise for the whimsical nature of this post. Sometimes I find that the landscapes we are seeing here are just too crazy to be looked at normally, and its difficult to capture on film or in words what they actually look like. In the end I can approach it only in metaphors, which gets tiring for readers and which always appear very different depending on who it is imagining them. 'They are red rocks', I say, but it doesn't do them justice, 'they tower above us like guargantuan, red faced giants', I say, and it works for me but nobody else is any the wiser. So I apologise to the beautiful world I am visiting, for failing to describe it, or even to look at it properly. And to anyone reading this who really, actually wants to know. Go there. That's all I can really advise. Save up. Save up and go there and see. It's more possible than you imagine. And more impossible than you can believe when you are there.