My Italian friends, Davide and Filippo, and I hired a taxi in La Paz and visited several nearby places including the remarkable, savagely rain-eroded landscape around the Muela del Diablo. We saw no other tourists and only a couple of local people. We climbed as high as was safe on the Muela itself and were treated to fantastic (in several senses) views, including this, when the late sun highlighted one of the area's remarkable features.
Apologies for the lack of recent posting. I've been travelling away from Internet access, and even when it again became possible, it wasn't easy. I'm now in Salta in Argentina, scared by the expense of the place (especially after the cheap and wonderful Bolivia) and rushing to get to Patagonia where, among other things, I trust I'll be able to stop bleeding money by camping :^(
All content © 2011 Pete McGregor
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8 comments:
Breathtaking.
wf: tater. Well the potato is a new world vegetable.
Good to know you're still around!
I find it very difficult to 'see' this photograph - so dramatic and alien that I can only interpret it as a sort of pattern.
Every good wish for Patagonia, and especially for the camping.
Wow! I agree with RR. It's devilish hard to make anything recognisable of it.
The darkest area keeps shifting so that sometimes it's in front of the light area, sometimes behind. And there's no sense of scale, but I guess from the written context that it's vast.
My first impression, and one that keeps insisting come back to the forefront, is that of peering through the entrance of a hellish, gargantuan cave studded with stalactites and stalagmites, with a fiery wall far beyond. I, too, am trying to get a sense of scale of the place... the vegetation does it to some degree.
It's like something from Mars or beyond...
See, I look at this and 'see' Van Morrison's song "Into the Mystic" ... "Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic" ... Sorry, that's just me.
Kia ora koutou/Hi everyone, and thanks for the comments. This is interesting — as far as any photo can be a straightforward representation of what was in front of the lens, this is close, yet I'm fascinated it's causing some difficulty. For me it doesn't, but of course I saw the actual scene; I have to look hard to recognise the problem. That being said, what attracted me apart from the astonishing light (as if the huge feature had been deliberately spotlighted) was the composition, the forms, the almost abstract nature of what I was looking at. In a perverse way, I'm almost glad it's difficult to see as a "representative" photograph ;^) I don't have the time to discuss the general issue, but I'll just point out that no photograph of a three-dimensional subject can be "literal" or truly representative — even the so-called 3-D photographs and films are presented in a 2-D plane.
If you do want to see it as literal, the scale, as Miguel points out, is probably best identified by the vegetation — those bushes in the bottom left are thorny shrubs ranging from about 50–150 cm high (very roughly — I'm working from memory).
I'm in Córdoba now, waiting for the night bus to Mendoza, after a relatively comfortable 13 hour, mostly overnight bus journey. Looks as if I'll make it to Patagonia pretty much on my original schedule after all :^)
That this is on the same planet that I am, and at the same time, seems wild to me. A view I have never even imagined!
Robin, the landscape did seem other-worldly, and its proximity to La Paz added another dimension of surrealism.
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