PHOTOGRAPHIC TOUR OF THE BOLIVIAN ALTIPLANO. DAY 2

Day 2: what happens with the houses when their owners leave

In places like this - notice just in case - the bathrooms abound.

Sometimes the perspective changes everything.

The rock that looked like a surfboard is now an iceberg (and it has bubbles).

And again that reminder that in Bolivia everything is extreme: the colors (in what box of crayons find these colors?), The temperature (the hot sun by day, the cold moon by night), the space (in the Altiplano there is space, everything is empty space).

And the flamingos, here too, although this time more closely, more accessible, almost next door.

And sit and watch them. Spend hours watching the slow and funny movement of the flamingos, the independent life that their necks seem to have, the reflection that they project in the water.

The return of the vicuñas. Or our return to the vicuñas. Again these unbearable tourists with their cameras. Again they point us every time we move an ear. One can not make a quiet life, these gringos appear and look at us as if they had never seen a vicuna.

In the background, as if not to forget the power of the Altiplano, a swirl of earth, a wind that spins millions of dust particles in the air and forms something like a whirlwind, a minimum hurricane.

After half a day of landscapes, something even better: a ghost town. This was not in my way the other time I came. It is that the other time was rainy season and the routes were other, by force.

There is something about ghost towns that attracts me too much. Maybe that voyeurism of wanting to spy on what was left of those people who are no longer there, who remained of that town that remains but is no longer.

We peek into a window. There are things inside, everything is still there, as if its owners had left suddenly, they would have disappeared from one moment to another. We enter, we can not not enter, we can not not stir, we can not not read the letters of a century ago that we found abandoned inside a suitcase. The correspondence is personal, yes, but what about the letters that no longer have a sender or recipient?

When we left, after a house review that was not in the itinerary, a group of dogs looks at us. They are the dogs of the soldiers who now live here, next to the ghost town, in domes that look like desert. "They were lucky they did not see them, but they would have thrown them," Alberto tells us. We had luck.

That night, a bubble show at the salt hotel. The first bubble show of this hotel of salt?