It wasn’t only flamingos that I saw on the Bolivian road trip. The landscape blew me away; ‘surreal’ is the word most often used to describe it. And Dali-esque is the other. Driving through the desert, even the relentless dust couldn’t keep my spirits down. From wind-sculpted rocks to lime green moss, through tufts of yellow shrubs ending up in torched mountain peaks, we drove over dusty off-road trails to silky lagunas Colorada and Verde and scabby fumaroles at the Sol de la Mañana geyser, to the southernmost tip of Bolivia, oh-so-close to Chile and Argentina.

Birds and animals roaming free was a beautiful sight and a warm fuzzy feeling.

And some man-made sights – a train cemetery outside Uyuni, a church in the mining town of San Cristóbal, alpaca yarn in the market.

I spend the night at Tayka del desierto a simple hotel in the desert, whose only flaw was that their floodlights prevented me from making any decent star trail photos. The following morning, we drove to the famed Laguna Colorada where I left a piece of my heart behind, with the flamingos, in this vast lake where I was the only human around for an hour (not counting the driver who chose to relax in the car in the parking lot).

Bolivia gave me access to exit and reenter Peru, to make my work permit application. The process is now complete, the foreign travel ban is lifted, and I can wander this continent for a year at least.