When Suzie and I we were in learning Spanish in Cusco we had one somewhat strained lesson when Rodolfo, our frustrated and well-meaning teacher, tried to explain the verb "faltarse". He presented us with three pens, removed one and declared "me falta un lapizero". We looked blank. He explained that it meant "to miss". We subsequently formulated some sentences in response to the question "What do you miss in Cusco?" along the lines of "I miss my family", "I miss watching America´s Next Top Model", without quite understanding that a) we weren´t really using it properly and b) that it´s actually a very useful verb.

Since that odd lesson we´ve had a number of awakenings as to this verb´s usage. For example, when a bus starts to pull away from the roadside shop at which we´ve paused for a 3am loo break, one often hears "nos falta uno" ("we´re missing one person"). This didn´t correspond to what we thought the verb meant, but sometimes I think (and I realise that I may be making those of you that can actually speak Spanish twitch cringingly in your seats) that the word can also convey the other English meaning. This huge preamble is because I realised that I wanted to start this blog with this sentiment.....

"These last three weeks, yo he me faltado Suzie".

I have lacked Suzie these 3 weeks. But I have also missed her. I have lacked her in the way that you might lack (or falta) water when you´re thristy. And I am using this little verb, ´faltarse´ to convey probably more that it has the linguistic capacity to do so. But you can ask that of a language when you don´t speak it competently.

After those last few fateful sentences of the previous blog, Suzie got some news from home that meant she had to fly home the next day. We then had a hectic day in Cusco (when are our days in Cusco not hectic?) hunting for flights and talking about how strange it would be to see the HSBC signs in Heathrow airport, before wishing one another a surprisingly stoic goodbye in the taxi.

I proceded onto my 20 hour bus to the border with Chile, then crossed over to Arica. From there I was supposed to get a bus to San Pedro de Atacama to meet Will and Ben (Will is a housemate from Oxford who has been travelling with his friend, Ben, for four months), but discovered I had to wait until 9.30pm for the bus (it was then 10am). It also turned out that the boys were stuck in Argentina on the wrong side of the Andes, due to snow. However, these setbacks were actually NOT forerunners to a string of bad luck (thank goodness, touch wood) and within 36 hours I was sunning myself on the plaza in San Pedro, enjoying a glass of wine. The boys suddenly appeared from around a pillar, and from that point onwards my mum could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that I was now accompanied by two bigstrongmen on my travels.

Our first taste of the Atacama sun was in the "Valle de Luna", named so because it's thought to look like the surface of the moon. Whilst I admired the views of the stratified, multicoloured rock formations, the boys took videos of each other sandboarding (or rather, ´wiping out´). We watched a very lovely bright red sunset over the desert before heading back San Pedro town.

That evening we had booked onto a Lonely Planet reccommendation that read (somewhat hyphen-tastically) "Stargazers won´t want to miss the tour of the night sky offered- where else? In the middle of desert-nowehere - by an ace astronomer." This did not do the next 4 hours justice. The ´ace´ astronomer was a charming Frenchman (I know, something of a contradiction in terms) and his wife. They had rigged up 8 huge telescopes in the desert and directed them towards various astronomical phenomena for us to observe. These included Saturn, which looked exactly like those glow in the dark stickers kids have on their bedroom ceilings, and the formation known as ´the jewel box´: 3 distinctly blue, yellow and red stars in a vertical line. About 3/4 of the talk was mind-boggling information about the universe, whilst the other 1/4 was the astromer´s advice about how to woo a lady using the night sky. I was well and truly wooed, both by him and the glorious desert stars. But I was also freezing. Conveniently, the tour ended with a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

We only had a couple of hours sleep before we were up at 4am for our next tour, this time to the geysers high up in the desert mountains. The geysers are most active early in the morning, so we saw them gurgling and bubbling and spurting boiling hot water into the air. It was tempting to stand in the steam as it was SO COLD but we were warned vehemently against such feckless behaviour by our guide. He then sat on the edge of a geyser and fished out eggs boiled to perfection, and steamed milk. That was a good-breakfast day. Except for Ben, because he hates eggs.

The next stage of the tour was a dip in the natural springs, or "aguas calientes". This name was very misleading. Having stripped to our swimwear at a temperature hovering dangerously close to freezing, we jumped into water that was probably the same temperature your bath is when your fingers start to look like prunes. Unimpressed, we swam towards a bunch of people at the other end of the pool, and discoverd that they had discovered the underwater geyser intended to heat the whole pool. We muscled our way to the epicenter, only to be violently scalded by a timely blast from the geyser. Ben´s patience wore thin and he got out before Will and I. Later he told us that when he changed into his trousers his trunks, which he had momentarily left on a rock, froze flat. Will and I lingered, opting for scalding hot over freezing cold, until our guide threatened to drive off without us. We changed as fast as humanly possible before heading to the last stop on the tour, which was a tiny village offering little else bar some very nice llama empañadas.

After a day or two more in San Pedro we crossed into Bolivia and headed for the famous Salar de Uyuni. The transport of choice around these salt flats are teems of rather battered, but excellent, 4x4 jeeps. Ours was particularly excellent because it had a crack in the windscreen that looked like Jesus. The first two days were spent visiting the Altiplano lakes, which are quite astonishing as they are packed full of minerals (or, in some cases, toxins), meaning that they are vividly coloured white, green and red. Somehow, and god knows why they haven´t decamped to a less toxic and less bitterly windy environment, flocks of flamingoes feed on the surface of the water. When they open their wings to fly (usually away from us) they are as bright as a pink highlighter. We also climbed lots of rocks (I got stuck after one notably over-ambitious climb; Will had to direct me down), and pretended to be Salvador Dali (at the "Dali Rocks", named so not because he´d ever been there, but because they looked a bit like something he´d have painted).

On the morning of the Salt Flats themselves, our guide Edgar, who´s militant approach to sight seeing had previously made us feel like naughty school children, vindicated himself when he sped over the flats well before sunrise. This meant that we were the first group on ´Coral Island´, and the only ones to see the sun rise in its completeness. It glared bright red in the east, and turned the sky and the salt to dusty purples and oranges in the west. Viewed from our cactus-strewn island we, once again, were amazed at how surreal this continent can appear. Then I sat on cactus, Will made a cactus-man with his hat and sunglasses, and we ate pancakes.

After a good hour and a half of trying to take perspective skewing photos, we went to the salt musuem. Everything was made with salt. It was amusing. We waited whilst Edgar chatted to his mates, and played leapfrog. Will also decided that this was the perfect moment to blare "Igition remix" out of the speakers and dance like a black man. Our tour ended in the pile of poo town of Uyuni, in a train graveyard. This tourist attraction was really just an excuse for the Bolivians not to clear up their defunct machinery. Unfortunately, the rubbish piled around the outskirts of this godforsaken town could not be similarly trussed up with an audacious name. We spent all of about ten minutes there before befriending a friendly jeep driver to take us the hell out of the-ugliest-town-in-Bolivia.

Said jeep took us to Tupiza, which was allegedly the site of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´s final stand. We chilled out in this dusty town for a day before embarking on our next adventure: a 2 day trip around the surrounding scenery on horseback. Our guide was a child. An actual 14 year-old child. And the scenery was wonderful: towering red escarpments (a word borrowed, I have to confess, from Wikipedia) that stand like theatre flats: excellent outlaw-hiding territory. We lunched at a beautiful river under the willow trees, whilst our horses rested.

I think our horses themselves deserve a few lines. I unfortunately cannot remember the name of Will´s horse, as he affectionately renamed it a far less sanitary rhyme of "block-face". It was a bullsy, angry, but very fast and slightly grubby white horse. Will´s approach to horse-riding was "tame the beast", and he embarked on a battle of wills with his fiery steed. Ben´s approach was somewhat more laissez-faire. His horse, ´Speedy´, was very beautiful, but very slow and incommodious. We suspect this may have been because he felt bloated as it became clear he was suffering from an unforgiving and unpleasant spell of wind. This was until Ben fashioned a whip out of some grass, which finally made Speedy live up to his name. My horse was by far the best. It was, we think, called ´Hacer´, which means ´to do / make´ in Spanish. But notwithstanding not really knowing his name, we had an excellent relationship. He just did exaclty what I wanted, and was the fastest because he was the biggest.

When we reached the flat plains by the river, we raced the horses (I won, Will would disagree), which was wonderful. Until my saddle came off. This was terrifying. However, there were generally few injuries, bar obscene amounts of chafe. I had chafe on my shoulders and the bottom of my back from my rucksack, and Ben just had it everywhere it was possible to have it. He was a sad cowboy that evening. Until the boys discovered a Jackie Chan film that we watched, bizarrely, in our makeshift house in a empty village nestled amongst the dry mountains.

After a crazy night of partying in an empty karaoke bar (Ben sang a beautiful rendition of ´My Way´, which impressed the Bolivian clientele enough to buy him drinks) we made our way to Potosi on a smelly bus. Potosi was, once-upon-a-time, the jewel of the Spanish empire. Back then, it was stuffed to the brim with silver and was correspondingly the richest town in South America. It has now been bled dry, and it's wealth sits either over the Atlantic in Spain, or underneath it in shipwrecks whose ownership is currently being argued over in the international law courts. Nevertheless, the Bolivian people still work in the mines, extracting other minerals in horrific and completely unregulated conditions. Tourists flock to Potosi to witness these conditions, which is exactly what we did. They are pretty nasty: dusty, claustrauphobic, both very hot and very cold, and (my favourite part), aspestos-ridden. What surprised me, however, was that in fact the miners go to their jobs with a certain D. H. Lawrence-esque pride, or perhaps it's just dispassion. It's very much a "my dad, and his dad before him, worked in the mines and so will I and my sons after me". Life-expectancy after starting work in the mines? About 10 years. Not nice stuff. We did however get to wear fetching miners' outfits, put dynamite in our mouths and witness a mocked-up explosion: all good clean tourist fun.

Post Potosi we made our way to Sucre, where we really just ate and drank all day. We found a lovely cafe at the top of a hill with views over the city and tried to catch up on our diaries whilst sipping good coffee (finally!) and eating bruschetta (even though Ben hates tomatoes as well as eggs). The boys persuaded me, after their traumatic experience getting to Potosi, that the cama option (more expensive seats on the bus that recline fully) was the only way to get to La Paz. I acquiesced, and became a convert to lavish travel. We arrived well-rested in La Paz, and I in turn had by that point had persuaded the boys to do the one thing that I'd been wanted to do since my first visit to Bolivia: climb Huayna Potosi.

Huayna Potosi has acquired a sort of mythic status as one of the hardest climbs you can do as a beginner. It's main claim to this title it's due to it's height: it stands at an impressive 6,088 m above sea level, and apparently in the climbing world 6000m is something of a bench mark. Mont Blanc is 4,810 m; Macchu Picchu is 2,430m. Everest is a TERRIFYING 8,848 m. I really had no idea why climbing a particularly high mountain was a big deal, now I know it's because of the lack of oxygen (which now seems very obvious, but I guess I'd never thought about it). It does weeeeeeeird things to your body. Altitude sickness involves throwing up, headaches, and generally feeling like poo. On a lesser scale, being at altitude basically means you can't breathe properly and when you're climbing a moutain, you really feel the complete inability of your lungs to get the stuff it needs with each inhalation. Bearing all this in mind, we emabarked on the challenge armed with bags and bags of coca leaves- a plant grown and chewed locally in abundance to alleviate altitude sickness and stave off appetite- and Bolivian strength alititude drugs (ie, more than twice as strong as the reccommended dose in England).

The first day we were given our equipment and we practiced ice climbing with our pick-axes and clamp-ons, just getting used to how they feel. We climbed and abseiled down a vertical ice wall. It was good fun. That night we slept at base camp, in a tightly packed line of about 8 mattresses. The next day was less fun: we carted all of our equipment and water to high camp. For me this was really hard because, quite simply, I'm not as strong as everyone else on the trip (they were all men). Plus, for some stupid reason, I was also carrying 3.2 litres of water. I actually thought I was going to fall off the edge of the mountain. It was only 4km or so, but very steep uphill scrabbling over loose rocks. No me gusta. However, I made it to high camp in one piece, feeling quite (very) scared about the next day. We went to bed at 6pm that night, in a room that was absolutely packed with fellow climbers. We got no sleep, because there were some Germans farting and laughing about it all night. We were up at midnight, had breakfast, put on our gear and walked to the edge of the glacier to start our climb.

You climb Huayna Potosi in a three attached by ropes with a guide leading the way. The climb is steep, and slow because of the altitude. They expect you to take 6 hours to reach the summit. We however, were surprisingly fast as luckily we didn't suffer too much from altitude. I had a headache, but that was probably the worse of it. It meant however, that we had to take long breaks to reach the summit for sunrise as getting there too early would be both freezing cold and dark. The climb involved some proper ice-pick action up a near vertical section, just before the thin ridge which takes you to the peak. The views were, as we hoped, phenomenal. You can of course see all the lower surrounding snow-capped mountains, as well as La Paz and Lake Titicaca. Sunrise was glorious, and very welcome as by that point we were very, very cold. We didn't stay very long at the top as we needed to descend all the way to base camp that same day. The descent was lovely as we could see all of the ice formations that we had missed by climbing in the dark with only head torches to light our steps. We were soon at high camp, basking in the sunshine and eating soup. Then we changed to our normal hiking gear and trudged back down to base camp, tired but proud of ourselves (and our newly acquired "I've climbed Huayna Potosi" tshirts).

We have all felt a little weird in the aftermath. I have had some crazy side effects from the drugs: the tingling feeling of pins and needles, but in my face, whereas Ben and Will have just felt a bit worse for wear. And our thighs ache somewhat. However, we have treated ourselves, in a fairly ridiculously extravagant manner, to a night in the Ritz in La Paz to welcome Suzie back to South America. This is where I am now, writing this blog on the fastest internet connection I've come across in Bolivia. We had a fabulous night of champagne, caipirinhas and sandwiches in our Master Suite, slept in gloriously comfortable beds and showered in a beautifully hot power shower. Suzie has been presented with a silly hat, and in turn provided us with various goodies from England (Grazia magazines included!) We are now planning a day of sightseeing and an evening of French food (having already stuffed ourselves at the breakfast buffet) and await, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, for whatever next South America has in store for us.....