All cities are sad in the rain, but perhaps none more so than Reykavik.

I was expecting some bright and modern architecture which was strangely lacking apart from two stand out buildings: the cathedral and the Hella Concert Hall down by the harbour.

The cathedral is almost Lutheran in its severity, built from what appears to be concrete.

The interior is incredibly plain and simple, though with glorious height.

The details are incredibly sharp and austere.

It also has the most gloriously over the top organ pipes and down to earth organ keys.

And down by the waters the concert hall certainly looks sharp, but with no sun to lift it, also a bit dour, maybe even dowdy.

And all set against slate grey waters.

Oh dear!

The reason for visiting Bolivia is the salt flats near Uyuni. Visit them during the rainy season and you end up with pristine pictures of mirror reflections. And very wet feet.

Visit during the dry season and you end up with endless vistas of white against a blue sky and sun so blinding you can’t actually see anything without glasses.

The views are so blinding that without a filter on a lens, you have to guess where the horizon lies and end up with ridiculously wonky photographs.

The tourist routine is fairly straightforward: fly down to Uyuni early in the morning an collect a four wheel drive jeep to take it out onto the “lake” of salt. Around the start point, the tracks of the cars are obvious.

But that soon changes. It becomes almost impossible to gauge distance as everything tends to blur into the white and of course at that altitude the sun is strong and blinding.

Originally a sea, the tectonic upheavals lifted it high and dry. Overtime the rains arrive, they effectively lift a layer of salt to the surface such that at it’s thickest, the rock salt is now almost 5m thick.

Underneath, there are rivers of cold water that occasionally bubble to the surface

Around the edge are the “islands” with the island of the moon in the middle.

Originally there would have been small farmers of the salt but mostly these have been replaced by companies on a more industrial scale. A few small holders remain, mainly for the tourist trade.

And there are the businesses that cut rock salt from the surface to make bricks for the various salt hotels set up for tourists.

The surface of the plain is broken into geometric patterns where the crystalline rock salt has come together over time.

Close to, the surface is a funny mix of almost cubes.

As well as the salt itself, we headed towards the main island, the volcano.

Climbing just slightly, and slowly because this is at very high altitude, we reach a series of caves where over the generations people have left their dead to mummify over time, essentially desiccating very very slowly because of the salt.

There were both male and female adults, plus some very forlorn corpses of babies.

Looking back down at the salt, it almost looks like clouds with mountains peaking up from below.

And down at the bottom, flamingoes and llamas.

And some small collections of salt for the locals.

Towards sunset and we head towards the centre to try to catch the changing colour of the plain.

And all totally silent.

For the next day we headed to some caves on the other side of the salt plain, where the petrified remains of coral caves have been discovered.

It is one of the freakiest places I’ve been inside, like walking around inside an insect or maybe an alien’s nest and just expecting any minute that something horrid will jump out and eat you.

And the around the corner to another set of burial caves and that strange mix of catholicism and something altogether older and darker.

The wild vicuna most certainly regarded us as interlopers.

And it’s difficult to imagine how they might survive in such a harsh environment.

In the middle of the plain is the island of the moon, with cacti taller than a man.

The only building material is the “wood” of these huge cacti, dried out and cut into planks.

It is almost impossible to capture the scale of the place, even knowing that the view below includes jeeps, something just refuses to accept they can be that tiny.

And lying above it all, that blue blue sky.

Some time ago, salt from the flats was shipped out of Uyuni by rail and when eventually that stopped, the trains were just abandoned and scavenged for scraps.

In a part of the world so incredibly dry, even the rust is slow moving so people are left with a train playground to scramble around.

The trains almost fall over yet somehow hold to their tracks.

And sooner or later the graffiti artists arrive.

The salt “farmers” have largely been replaced by bigger commercial concerns though one or two remain for the tourists.

Mostly though Uyuni is an opportunity to pick up your driver and guide, an orientate yourself to the astonishing salty flats.

Vast white plains of nothing, under the brightest of lights and bluest of skies, too painful to look at without decent sunglasses.

We have seen a number of floating villages now, notably on Tonle Sap but in many ways this was both the prettiest and the saddest.

Th islands are built of reeds that grow within the lake and must be constantly renewed and replaced.

The islands are tethered in case of storms and parked up separate to their original family groups. The communities would originally have used boats made from reeds also but now use modern boats with engines. Paying for the fuel for these takes hard currency, which is where their barter system with the mainland falls down and tourism cash steps forward.

Each island comprises a group of friends, grouped together to make a living. Each vies for the attention of any new tourist group and each responsible tour guide will try to share out the tourists between the islands.

Once there you get an explanation of how the islands are put together, before being presented with some crafts, usually woven, that are for sale. As always it’s better to buy something than simply donate money.

On our trip we met up with a relatively young group. Although education is compulsory to around 16, most kids marry young and have children so Norma aged 19 with her 1 year old Elizabetta was not that unusual.

With the money from tourism these people would not survive. The lifestyle out on the islands is not “real” in that sense and very different to the living communities deep on Tonle Sap who rarely saw tourists.

The villagers can live long lives though they tend to be vulnerable to arthritis and chest infections from living so close to the water. Obviously living so exposed to the sun tends to increase the chance of skin cancers also.

But it is a persistent life choice for much of the community, maybe in part because they are not as well educated or well accepted by the people living on the mainland.

After visiting the floating islands we made the trip to Bolivia crossing the border near the lake and visiting a couple of islands on the way.

It is remarkably difficult to remember that you are essentially on the top of the world, very high up, given how flat it all looks. For someone from the UK, altitude inevitably involves high mountains and valleys, not plains.

Our first stop across the border was Copacabana where a festival was underway with both the local priest and shaman busy blessing cars for the year.

The Virgin of the church, who was “black” ie. looked more like an indigenous person than most of the statues, is one of the more popular so the church was busy.

Though not as busy as a very jolly, quite young looking priest.

From there we headed out to the islands of the Moon and Sun to see some ruins and have a bite to eat.

These islands are said to be where the original Incas came from and where they made a pilgrimage to each year.

Hmm. Not so sure the spring of life was that exciting, certainly not as exciting as crossing over to the mainland on the barge.

After a long and tiresome ride complete with detour to avoid an angry protesting mob on the motorway, we arrived in La Paz.

Unlike European towns, the best housing is at the bottom of the valley to avoid altitude rather than the top, to catch the breeze and avoid pollution. We headed down.

The most unpleasant part of the trip to S America was a day long drive from Cuzco to Puno, lake Titicaca in the tourist bus.

The bus itself was large and comfortable enough, with plenty of stops along the way for the loo and to allow people to stretch their legs. As always, photographs within churches were not permitted which makes some of those stops a bit frustrating.

The ornate baroque 17th century church at Andahuaylillas was first stop.

But in many cases of course the outside of the building has it’s own interests.

Not to mention the roof decorations on the grooves of houses around and about.

We also stopped at an Inca settlement more obviously influenced by the Aymara culture, Raqchi.

The Inka site at Raqch’i was a primary control point on a road system that originated in Cusco and expanded as the Inka empire grew. It is located in a valley known for sacred sites. Most of the Inka structures are enclosed by a 4 km-long perimeter wall, but just outside it, on the Inka road that entered Raqch’i from Cusco, an enclosure with eight rectangular buildings around a large courtyard was probably a lodging house for travellers.

The complex of Raqch’i consists of several different areas each designated with a specific function. Some have noted that these buildings may have been for religious and administrative officials. Others speculate that these buildings, paired with the scale of defenses may have been used as barracks to house troops.

Nearby are approximately 220 circular buildings, likely used as storehouses, called qullqas

But it was the views along the way that were probably most interesting, from the scenery through people going about their business and even the political graffiti.

The change from the valleys to the high anti-plano was sudden and shocking.

But by the time we hit the pre-Inca museum at Pucara, we’d all had enough. If I was doing it again, this is the bit that I would throw some money at in an attempt to speed my way through.

Instead of which it dragged on for another four hours. Not even flamingos could cheer us up.

By the time Puno came into sight, we were all just too fed up to enjoy the view.

Aguas calientes, the town that grew up to support tourists visiting Macchu Pichu, is a bit of a dump. As a Brazilian woman sitting next to us on the train back to Cuzco said, “How can a place with so much money passing through, be such a favello, an unfinished slum?”

But with a morning to fill, we found ourselves balancing a revisit to the Inca site versus a gentle still around the hotel garden and being told of the hour long queues for sunrise, plus the likelihood of rain and fog, the garden walk won. Easily.

It was suggested that 6am would be the best time to see any birds and other fauna. We balked. In the end we decided to head off at around 11am and aim to enjoy the flora.

& although this was sold as orchids, turns out there weren’t many in flower

But we got lucky with some rare-ish birds such as the ‘cock on the rock” or Rupicola peruvianus,  a large passerine bird of the cotinga family native to  Andean cloud forests. It is widely regarded as the national bird of Peru.

And is a very weird thing to see indeed unlike the various tanager birds to be found.

Thankfully there were plenty of brightly coloured birds to be found even amongst the densest of foliage, helped by the gardeners putting out bananas and syrup feeders for the wonderful hummingbirds.

Which of course are incredibly difficult to photograph but very beautiful to watch.

In many ways the orchids were the least interesting of flowers, but it’s always strange to travel half way around the world and find familiar bedding plants such as fuchsias and begonias.

And of course, being warmer, wetter and lower, there were a fair number of bugs about and even some mammals.

And a lizard mid-moult hiding on a rock

And at the very back of the garden a rock face carved with some pre-historic glyphs suggesting it was a significant gathering place, long ago.

We made the right choice – the garden walk was lovely.

Machu Picchu is an iconic site, one of those places that you have seen the pictures and yet still find yourself shocked by it’s beauty.

It also highlights the frustrations of a visit to Peru for almost every tourist since of course it’s the one site everyone wishes to see. Around 6,000 -9,000 people visit the site each and every day, shuttled up the mountains from the town of Agua Calientas for a time slot entry.

In theory numbers are limited but no one on site has seen any fall in the numbers and everyone cites corruption as the reason. Once within the walls, with a registered guide, there is a one way policy effectively clockwise around the site, though you are allowed to re-enter within a set time on that day.

Yet the site is large enough of most of the people to disappear but of course the damage done is accumulative, the grinding down of the site by all of those footsteps.

So the line for the bus to head up the mountain starts early, for those people wishing to see sunrise over the mountains with waiting queues lasting almost two hours for the early morning at around 4am when the buses start.

When we arrived in town from the train the queue for the buses to the site were non-existent so we had a painless transfer from train to hotel to bus at around 11am. We were also blessed with incredibly good weather, sunshine and blue skies.

We had not booked tickets for the second morning, having decided to leave it until the weather forecast became clear. Mostly, people book two visits just in case of fog or rain but I was quite prepared to stand in the queue for a second set of tickets of that happened, and despite what you are told about restrictions on numbers, everyone who wants a ticket seems to find one to use.

Talking it over with our local guide, they also pointed out the problems with early morning visits to the site at this time of the year – fog. Mostly the mornings are grey and drizzly, with the mid-day sun burning away any grey for the afternoon. It would be a bit of a bugger to queue for two hours at some ungodly hour just to arrive to the damp grey of fog.

The site also highlights the limitations of what is known, or rather unknown about the Incas. They do not know why the site was abandoned, possibly just because of smallpox brought in to the town by evacuees escaping the Spanish. They don’t know why it was sited in such an inhospitable though beautiful spot at the very end of the valley.

So you wander around a town, built by a culture which had no money, only a barter system where every citizen owed it’s ruler 3 months of the year as work. There are no shops, just houses and fields on endless terraces, some peering down from the tallest mountain just in front of the town.

It is a mad place, madly beautiful but astonishing to believe anyone could rationally site their palace on top of a mountain so far from everywhere that it effectively just disappeared.

It is the detailing of the place that stays with me. The fact that the town is built on a geological faulting that is causing the site to slip apart ever so slowly yet the Incas managed to identify this slippage and build terraces that could cope with it.

It is the constant echo of angles, of the slope of the mountains being echoed in the slop of the roofs of the houses.

The trapezoidal doors, windows and niches in rooms built to slightly lean in on each other, to effectively increase their stability by existing in a state of constantly falling in on each other.

And everywhere around you, the constant shock of such beautiful scenery.

And llamas, always llamas.

Who is mad enough to put their terraces for growing crops at the top of a peak so high and so steep, looking down on Machu Picchu.

And in the houses, the clear stone supports for mezzanine sleeping areas that we saw still in use in a house in Ollantaytambo.

Maybe it isn’t the town ruins so much as the mountains that shock the visitor, but then maybe that’s why the town was built. Maybe it was just so damn beautiful that some local warlord had to live there.

Macchu Pichu is at the lower end of the Sacred Valley, and the only way in and out is walking or catching the local tourist train.

With limited time and tired legs, the train suited us fine and the views of the valley were amazing.

For the most part, the train follows the river Urubamba and the valley gets narrower and narrower.

And in the background the high mountains with the glaciers that store the water for people and crops.

And valley sides terraced by the Incas and still used to provide the food for the inhabitants.