Plastic Flowers

Greetings from Potosi, the highest city in the world at 12,300 feet above sea level. The city was founded by the Spaniards in the mid-1500’s after a major silver deposit was discovered here. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, it has the best collection of Spanish colonial architecture in South America.

I was fortunate enough to get a car ride from Uyuni to Potosi with my tour company – only 3 ½ hours. The other option was an all day, 6 hour bus ride, which I was glad to avoid. Leaving Uyuni, a dusty crater of a town on the edge of the salt flat, all I could see were plastic bags stuck in the scrappy shrubs, at least one bag per, giving the landscape the appearance of having grown these black and white plastic flowers. Seeing this, I remembered what my guide had said on day one: that there is a plague that is upon all of South America – plastic. I told him it wasn’t confined to South America....

Even by Bolivian standards, the landscape on the drive to Potosi was stunning. We started in desert which looked much like the American Southwest, with pink-blooming cacti and tiny green shrubs, then into a lunar landscape of strange rounded hills in hues of green, purple and red (the whole area is chock full of minerals). From there, it was giant sand dunes, studded with thorny green shrub-trees and coarse grasses, before we finally passed into the red-rock barren landscape of Potosi. Almost of all of these various settings are marked by the tall, distinct forms of llamas out to graze (they are all domesticated).

Today I have a city tour to admire the architecture, then tomorrow I am off to Sucre, the capitol of Bolivia for one night before flying (thank god) back to La Paz.

Note: the photo shows my guide picking up plastic trash on the salt flat.