There on the island of heavens our journey departed, I was continuing the trip to the South of Bolivia without my companions.
But of course, not quite – I was sharing the car with a Basque who always shew coca leaves, a French girl and Swedish family which has warm relations with South America as they adopted a boy 15 years ago from Bolivia.

We follow our ovely guide Augustino to the heights Sof alar de Uyuni region.  Through the open window I confess the lifeless  landscape of the moon, with only some grass crawling.

I lose the sense of reality. Volcanos, stones that look like trees, colourful lagoons, beaches of salt…

Pachamama can be seen as deathly beautiful. I am 360-degree surrounded by flat mysterious mountains, the peaks are strewn with sweet icing sugar.  Between the mountains there is a lagoon, stretching out, bordered by white beaches of salt reflecting on its mirror smooth surface where some elegant flamingoes in their pink robes slowly walk around.

And then something turns upside down. There seems to be so many flamingos in the lake, or not – the lake itself is red! There’s like ice hills coming out from the see of red, the ground is white.

Thunder is the air. Wonderful contrasts. I could almost see the long legged horses and elephants from Salvador Dali’s paintings and soft clocks are floating down the hillsides. As if time does not exist. As if this is not planet earth.

Everything around the sizzling of magic. Salar is the region, where people still believe in spirituality of nature. Across the country there are mountains or the stones of magic , here the locals give to apu (mountain spirit)  sacrifices. The smoke of the ceremony comes from different plants sprinkled into the fire, such as Santiago, San Pedro (in this case they did not use cactuses as psychedelic drugs), San Juan. Of course, today there is a doctor in any of the small mountain village, but local people still look for help from the side side  of Pachamama.

Augustino think it’s all very logical – for example, accidents, tornadoes often happens around here. Then the thing that caused the accident is the wind. It is therefore necessary to seek treatment from the wind. The patient with the shaman climbs up the mountain and they makes generous donation to the wind. When they have luck, they will improve soon.