Four volcanoes and a pair of shoes

 
I hate traveling without a mission so 'Operation Bolivia' was to get high...solo.

Volcano 1

Tunupa 5200m

Breakfast

Sits like a lighthouse on the end of a peninsula that stretches out into the Salar de Uyuni (the worlds biggest salt flat). If Carlsberg made viewing platforms. Start at 3880m, so that just leaves an oxygen starved 1320m ascent up an obvious, but dodgy at points path. Look at it this way – it's a smaller ascent than Ben Nevis* but at over 17000ft sure sounds impressive.

Volcano 2

Ollague 5870m

Straddling the Chilean and Bolivian border this is the most active volcano in the region. Active my arse, just looked like a small steaming kettle. Starts at 3701m, leaving a daunting 2169m ascent in one day. There's a path ¾ of the way up and a stretch at 825m above Nevis in a day, but surely achievable? Totally bottled it and left with my tail between my cheeks.
 

Off target on this occasion

Why? I arrived to hear the story from the border guards that it took their mate 17 hours and he was military. It would have involved a dark descent, on my own, in the middle of nowhere, without GPS and only the twinkle of lights from a few buildings around the border control for orientation. Eh...no.

Volcano 3

Cerro Rico 4824m

The baby of the bunch, with a total ascent of 734m which in our terms wouldn't even make it a Corbett**. Small but still oxygen sapping especially when tailing some young Colombian dude. It's the volcano mined for its silver by the Spanish so it couldn't be considered 'done' without entering a disused shaft. Fun until they started detonating dynamite - in an adjacent shaft. Vindaloo! 

Once full of silver

Combined with the lung incinerating daily 5's games against the miners, at over 4000m, this was perfect training for the big yin!

Volcano 4

Parinacota 6348m
Big yin was a three day dusk till dawn epic. 20 rolls, 8 tins of tuna, 6 liters of water, bag of coca leafs, biscuits galore and ½ kg of nuts – I must have been. The Kaiser 5's took me fully laden from the 4200m start to the 5100m base camp. Here I found out that I'd been given a £5.99 asda tent to spend the nightmare in. Truly unsure whether I was going to freeze to death, I woke up with a good frost everywhere my exhaled breath had touched.

The one on the left

Tuna'd up I headed up the obvious path, which turned to pure ash after an hour. I was making one step for the price of three so in essence it felt like climbing a three mile high sand dune whilst breathing into a plastic bag. Nine bleedin hours later I made the top. Grrrr.

Dazed and confused  - my best shot of the crater

And a pair of shoes

Three white stripes

We are here today to pay tribute to what have been one of my finest travel companions. The Kaiser 5's.

Everyone in the world knows this shoe, it doesn't matter where I turn up and ask for a game, they take one look at my shoes, presume I can play football and ask me to join in. Unfailingly they have provided that first impression of footballing competence, necessary for people to want to ask me to join their game.
In Bolivia, purely on the sight of them, I was offered to join a touring American Soccer team as they faced Bolivia's 1994 world cup side***. In France I made the mistake of asking for a game without them and I left in a hail of rocks - but that was probably because I had my sailing shoes on.

In their latter years and more relevant to the above they took me twice to over 5000m and I feel it was the tough volcanic rock that finally killed them. Two major stitching operations brought them life for another 3-4 months but the end was nigh.

It is for this reason I lay them to rest as the Kaiser 5000's.

The Kaiser 5000's. 2007 – 2012

*If walked from the pier at Fort William.

**Name given to mountains in Scotland between 2500ft and 3500ft.

*** Ok, I had just guided them down Bolivia's Death Road on MTB's, but they were serious.