There's no shortage of amazing things to see in the Andes of southwestern Bolivia.

Flamingos, strange plants, mud pots, lagoons, bizcachas, vicuñas and of course my favorite, giant cacti.

Join us as we trek across the highest desert in the world.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.

And by Arizona State Parks.

music The Bolivian desert reaches well over sixteen thousand feet in elevation.

That's too high, dry and cold for most people to live and for most plants and animals.

It's an inhospitable place.

But still hardy travelers come from all over the world to see the vast array of natural treasures there.

I love the place because it's the world's highest desert.

My friend Argentine archaeologist Axel Nielsen has lived there and studied for the last twenty years.

The cold desert of Bolivia gets more extreme the farther southwest we go.

There are no towns, no villages, and we see almost no people.

In the region where Bolivia, Argentina and Chile meet, there are about a hundred lagoons, which are all located about fourteen thousand feet.

These are all closed basins because the water doesn't drain to the Atlantic or to the Pacific Ocean.

And these are very young basins which were formed during the uplift of the Andean Cordillera or the Andean range.

The fact that they are closed basins tells us that this is very young landscape.

Eventually, if we wait several millions years, all these closed basins will work or cut their way all the way to the ocean.

I know there are three different species of flamingos out here but boy they're sure hard to tell apart.

I think you have to look at the color of the legs.

Okay.

This one's got red legs.

That's gonna be the James.

The James.

Also the beak is yellow and black.

Does that still make it James?

Yes.

Or Andean.

They also have the same color of beak.

All right now here's one with yellow legs.

What's that one?

That's gotta be the Andean.

All these lagoons have very different contrasting colors.

Some of them are light blue, black, others are red, bright red or green.

This depends on one hand on the minerals that are dissolved in the water, the composition of the minerals.

Another reason for these colors are algae that grow in some of these lagoons.

So I understand they eat basically just microscopic stuff from here.

You know I think it's mostly diatomes and algae.

We can't even see 'em but the algae then would account for the difference in the color of the water.

Yes.

I think that's why when it's more windy, the colors come out more bright.

It brings the algae to the surface.

Yeah, they sort of move them somehow.

They are very shallow.

In fact they are in the process of drying.

You can see several levels of terraces, you know, up the shores of most of these lagoons.

Most of them don't go over one meter deep.

This is three feet deep.

Flamingos are also a big attraction for tourists.

They come from all over the world to photograph them here.

I can see why.

First, they're so exotic.

But they're the only color here other than the white and the brown of the landscape.

So they're especially spectacular in this setting.

Yeah, because of the color contrast now.

The desert of southwest Bolivia is the highest in the world.

We know it's a desert because there are very few plants around and the little precipitation they get comes in the form of .

snow.

It's very high here, it's very cold, it's very windy.

I need to hold onto my hat.

My global positioning system tells me that our altitude is over fifteen thousand three hundred feet.

Our physical activity up here is very limited because the air is very thin.

When we see the vast, wide expanses of the high Andes and then we see the healthy vicuñas we have to wonder.how in the world do they survive.

To find out, we have to get down on the ground.

If we look very carefully, we see that they're little grasses almost invisible from driving.

The vicuña with it's specialized mouth can eat these little tiny pieces of vegetable matter.grow, flourish, and produce the finest wool of any animal in the world.

Another animal hardy enough to live up here is a rodent that looks like a rabbit that people say tastes like chicken.

It's called a bizcacha.

For millenia it has been a staple of the diet of nomadic peoples who pass through during their brief summer.

Yeah, there are a lot of them in these rocky areas.

Woah, look.

Not only biscatchas live in these rocks.

This is yareta.

Oh, this is the great yareta.

Yeah, look at this.

And it looks like moss.

This is not moss.

This whole thing is one plant.

I can reach back here and feel the back of the plant and it's a relative to celery believe it or not.

But its downfall is these little white dots which are their resin ducts.

They look like little pearls under a magnifying glass.

But they make it resinous, hence it's a very, very good firewood and that's its downfall.

In fact at the beginning of this century all the copper mines in the Atacama Desert used yareta as the main fuel.

So they depleted, all these mountains were covered with yaretas before.

So they, you know, they took them out.

So this is just a little remnant population here?

Oh, yeah.

Those are very rare now.

So the llama herders used this for something else besides firewood?

Yes.

When they come back from their caravan trips to the eastern valleys, they prepare a mildly alcoholic drink based on this and give it to the llamas.

They get drunk and sick.

That's the way they get purged.

Yeah, that's the way they get purged of all the bad weeds they would have eaten along the road.

What's neat about 'em is you look at 'em, if you look at the little white spots on it, it looks like a pearl.

And that's the resin.

The yellow spots here are actually the flowers and low and behold they look just like a yellow flower.

This is not a moss.

This is a flowering plant.

And this whole thing is one plant.

And studies suggest that these may be the oldest living plants in the world.

It only grows a millimeter a year and we can see that this one is probably at least two and a half, three meters wide which means it is probably at least three thousand years old.

They may go back as far as the end of the last ice age, one plant, which they could be ten thousand years old.

You know yaretas grow only between forty one hundred and forty five hundred meters altitude in the high Andes of Peru, northern Chile, northern Argentina and Bolivia.

They're found nowhere else in the world.

It's now an endangered, protected plant.

Fifty years ago we would have burned the ureta to warm our hands while waiting for repairs.

It was so cold while we were filming that the radiators froze.

It's very cold in the high Andes and it's no fun when vehicles break down.

Sometimes not just one vehicle breaks down but two vehicles break down at the same time.

And maybe both of those vehicles have frozen blocks.

But that's part of life in the Andes.

It's only fourteen hours to the nearest town.

While we are stranded and hoping for repairs there's plenty of time to contemplate our surroundings.

Here on the plains in the high Andes it sometimes looks as though there's nothing but hundreds of miles of gravel.

These little pieces of rock that are of volcanic origin.

How do plants possibly grow here?

Ah-hah!

If you lift up a handful of this old volcanic rock, drop it and look beneath, what we find is soil.

The wind constantly blows away any soil on the surface so the rocks stay on top.

But underneath is a layer of very rich volcanic soil and when the rain does come, the plants will grow like crazy until the freeze comes and they die back.

It's all part of the rather clever ecology that has been worked out over fourteen, fifteen thousand feet in the high Andes.

A day later we traveled nearby to a site where there was a two thousand year chronicle of people visiting.

But their purposes were quite different from ours.

This is the Inca ceremonial site of the Conquevor.

We're near the border between Bolivia and Chile.

And at fifteen thousand six hundred feet by the way.

Well, that is right.

And this is one of the largest Inca ceremonial complexes in the entire empire.

Now I always associated the Incas with Peru.

Well, that's right.

The Incas had their capital, the capital of the empire in Cuzco in the mountains of Peru which is seven hundred kilometers away from here.

Five hundred miles.

Yes, just about.

And you know for the sacrifices, they had to send the sacrifice victims, the nobles, the priests, the servants, all these retinue walking from Cuzco, which would have taken them two months perhaps to get here.

And this is just the bottom of the ceremonial complex.

Actual, there are several sites.

As you go up this mountain, which is six thousand meters high.

That's over twenty thousand feet then.

Yeah.

And there on the top is the shrine where they would sacrifice the victims.

They must have been awfully important for them to put in all that work.

Yeah, they call the ceremonies the capacocha , you know, and they carry one of them each time a king died and they had to elect a new one, you know.

So they felt like the order of the empire was in danger.

So they made these sacrifices to please the gods, you know, to get their help to maintain the order of the empire.

We're following the Inca road that comes into the plaza through this gate and then comes out and goes all the way to the top of the conquevor.

During our research here, we found fragments of all these large vessels used for containing chicha or maize beer.

Did you find them here?

Yes, we did.

Imagine that they would have to haul all those vessels with chicha all the way here so they would share it with all the people that attended the ceremony.

And that doesn't grow anywhere within oh, a hundred miles or so at least.

No, not even that.

These buildings were used by the nobles and the priests that came for the sacrifice.

You can tell because the architecture is very well taken care of.

It's pure Inca architecture.

Did they have roofs on them?

Yes, they had, probably had straw roofs.

This place was not occupied all year round.

I mean this is too high for any one to live.

I don't blame them.

Yeah, so all these buildings were built only for these ceremonies and were occupied only for a few days.

And not every year.

Only when those special occasions occurred?

Exactly.

So this may have happened you know once a decade or every other decade, only.

The last ceremonies took place here before the fall of the Incan empire.

That is five hundred years ago.

I was just thinking, it must have looked amazing with all the Incas in their costumes.

Yeah, wearing their colorful textiles, their feather headpieces.

There are similar shorings in all the tall mountains of the Andes.

The Incas worshiped the mountain spirits.

They thought they brought them the rain and humidity and prosperity in general.

This is one of the highest in this whole region.

Above Laguna Verde more than three miles above sea level, the highest point on our journey, the earth comes alive and reveals its soul.

A lot of ancient peoples thought that geyser places like this were connected to hellóhellfire and brimstone.

And I think in a way they were right.

Really?

Well, it certainly feels like we're walking towards the entrance of hell here.

It is a volcanic area.

Yeah.

I think we're standing in the middle of a great volcano crater here.

Yeah, and there are hundreds of volcanoes if you look in every direction up to probably twenty thousand feet high.

Hundreds and hundreds of them.

All this activity started like thirty million years ago when the Andes began to rise.

The plates from the Nazca Plate banged into the South American Plate, went underneath and the friction from that makes for magma coming to the surface and BOOM, you get these hundreds and hundreds of volcanoes.

Over a period of what, maybe fifteen, twenty million years.

Now here's, oh that's a little bud potting.

It looks like some child's modeling clay in there.

Yeah, that's right.

I bet you can cook here.

The Andes are still growing.

Probably, if most of the calculations are right, about the same rate as our fingernails.

Now that's scary.

So in our lifetime they'll probably grow a couple of feet.

You can think about these volcanoes as chimneys that are sort of relieving all this pressure that is kept there by this pressure between the plates.

Man, does this place have the stench of sulfur.

Yes.

It's really hard the lungs, hard to breathe.

Subterranean waters that get super-heated and they love to dissolve sulfur especially.

They'll make their way up there and that what looks like steam is actually, can be super-heated sulfur.

And man, it'll carve the hide right off your hands.

It's sulfurous or sulfuric acid either one.

You will have all these stories about falling in the geysers, you know, and getting all burned.

Are they true?

Oh, yeah.

I think so.

I think this is a pretty dangerous place.

Perhaps that's the reason why pre-Hispanic people didn't get even close to this place.

There are no archaeological remains in this area.

This is one of the most seismically active places in the world.

There's an average of three seismic movements per day.

Although they are not very intense, they are constant.

So they are constantly shaping the landscape away.

On top of this hill are a bunch of rocks that don't seem to have any business being here.

But if I look a few miles away, I see a huge volcanic crater.

When that crater blew, whenever it was, a hundred thousand, a million years ago, it sent vast blobs of magma, liquid magma up into the air.

And as it cooled it formed these big rocks, they came bursting down and landed here and are what volcanologists call bombs.

The first European visitors, Spaniards, who came here in the 16th century were prospectors, grubbing for precious metals.

They realized that geologic activity might mean pay dirt.

This is the mining town of San Antonio Lípez, which became the mining capital of the Spanish colonial administration at the decline of Port of Sea.

It's at fifteen thousand five hundred feet.

The mines of San Antonio de Lípez were never developed into a second Potosí because this place is too high.

It's two thousand feet above Potosí.

This means that there is no agriculture anywhere in this region.

These are all pastoralists, which also means that the population densities are very low so they didn't have any labor to exploit to work in the mines.

Spanish documents from the 17th century refer to the pastoralists that live in this region as semarones, wild Indians that cannot be forced to work.

And I think this describes very well the character of pastoral life.

These people are very independent, they don't like other people to tell them what to do and, you know, they will hide escape, do anything like that to avoid any kind of imposition or authority over them.

Even when this town was abandoned over a century ago, people in the whole region referred to this as Lípez and recognized this place as the center of power of the entire region.

Nowadays only a few herders come here in the summer to graze their animals on the hillsides around this place.

Some bizcachas live here and a few vicuñas.

As we drive through a valley on our way to Potosí, we drop down five thousand feet.

Here I feel as though I'm back in the Sonoran Desert even though the altitude is still eight thousand feet higher than at home.

So a cactus growing this high needs to have protection for its growing tip, which is vulnerable to destruction by frost.

This Oreocereus does it in a weird way.

In addition to these vicious spines, it puts out this wooly stringy stuff that is very tough and is twisted in a way that makes it like fiberglass insulation.

It's a very effective way here in the Andes of a plant protecting itself from the frost that may come any night of the year.

Here at nine thousand feet in the Bolivian Andes it looks pretty much like the desert of the southwestern United States.

There are a lot of people around here, a lot of livestock, and mesquite trees.

Although here they call it algarroba.

Somebody has hacked off a branch here, taken it home to cook dinner for tonight.

There's a little sap that comes out of here.

If you make a hole, the sap runs out, you collect it, you can eat it.

And in spring this tree will produce thousands of pods which people eat and livestock love.

In spite of these vicious and malevolent spines this prickly pear plays an important role in the life of the people of the Andes.

In springtime it produces a red fruit called ayrampo .

Women gather the fruits and mash them and they use that red juice to dye their textiles producing a brilliant scarlet color.

As we look down on the canyon bottom from above, we can see that some of these spiny trees leave a fair amount of shade.

That's called the canopy.

It's an important part of this habitat.

Another important plant in this habitat is this huge Echinopsis .

It's a cactus of the central Andes and gives gobs of delicious fruits for native peoples.

It's not like one of its cousins that produced hallucinogenic sap.

The biggest columnar cacti grow up on the slopes rather than down in the bottom.

That way they don't run the risk of getting too much water and have their arms fall off due to waterlogging.

At thirteen thousand five hundred feet near the top of the valley is the mining town of Potosí.

Still cold but inhabitable and located near unimaginable riches.

I was sixteen when I began here in the mine.

Now I am over fifty five years old.

To extract this silver the young boys who work in the mines receive eight to ten bolivianos a day, which is a little more than a dollar.

Older miners who are more skilled, have more experience, receive between twenty and twenty-five bolivianos a day which is about three dollars to three dollars and fifty cents a day.

In the first three hundred years of Spanish rule, forty thousand tons of pure silver was extracted from these mines.

During colonial times eight million people died extracting all that silver.

Nowadays only ten to fifteen miners die every year.

Tradition has it that this Indian was traveling with his llama caravan and he passed the bottom of the mountain and he had to spend the night there.

So he lit this fire to cook dinner and to keep himself warm but in the morning he found that all the rocks around the fire were all pure melted silver.

That'd be fun.

I'd go for that.

Yeah.

So the thing is that this was such an important source of silver that Potosí the town only thirty years after it was founded it was the third largest city in the world after Paris and London.

How about that?

It's also the highest, still is the highest.

I don't think that changed.

You know the silver they extracted from here was enough to put Spain as the most powerful country of the world for two centuries.

Imagine that.

Look at the color.

It's called the mining torch up there.

Well a lot of the colors are a result of the material brought out from inside the mountain.

Yeah.

I think they're not getting much silver today.

I think it's mostly lead.

And tin's real important, isn't it?

Yeah, lead and tin and a little bit of silver.

But it's not what it used to be.

Life in the Bolivian Andes is not easy and travel isn't either.

But if you can make it here, you'll have a chance to see flamingos, volcanoes, the most rugged landscapes anywhere and holes that go into the center of the earth.

In the desert there are plenty of things to avoid but nearly everything is drawn to a river.

For solitude.

To make a living.

And especially to survive.

But as people have known for thousands of years, a desert river can be a bit tenuous.

music Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.