Chacaltaya, La Paz, Bolivia

"Chacaltaya," our guide Fred growls in heavily accented, punctuated English, "is 5400m above sea level and is a na-tu-ral viewpoint" . Ellen and I look at each other sidelong. We have booked ourselves on a tour to La Paz's valley of the moon (key word: valley), and this Chacaltaya mountain tour was just sort of thrown in with it. Now we are bouncing uphill, in the wrong direction, in a 9-seater minibus that I am amazed can even get up the traffic strangled staircase steep streets of La Paz, let alone up a mountain of any kind.

"5400m?" I whisper to Ellen. "That's almost 2km higher than we are now! How are we getting up there? By bus?"

As it turns out, yes. By bus.

Warning: the following video contains some mild strong language.

The road is worse than most of the tracks we saw on the salt flat tour and our mini-bus is totally unequipped to handle it. My knuckles are white with the force of my grip on the seat in front as both Ellen and I repeatedly bounce out of our seats and into the roof. A man steps out of the way as we pass, I watch him through the back window as he resumes his work. He is 'maintaining' the track by hitting it full on with a pick axe. Thank God this is the first bus ride like this we have had anywhere in the high plateau, but it has come completely out of the blue. 

As we cross the snow line I can see a building perched on the cliff edge high above us. 

"We can't be going up there. Can we? What is that place?"

Fred turns around from the front seat and bares his teeth at us. "The ent-er-ance is fif-teen. This is for the lodge, and for the driver." 15 boliviano equates to  £1.50 (at time of writing). Frankly I rather wish I was paying the driver a bit more.

The Chacaltaya lodge used to be the worlds highest lift operated ski resort, but that was almost a decade ago. Since then parts of the building have been closed, the rope pull has rusted up and become inactive, and perhaps most importantly the glacier that used to cover the mountain has melted away to nothing. Skiing is now restricted to a few winter weeks in the coldest years and less than a quarter of the original skiing area is safe to use. The lodge would already be long out of commission if it were not for the occasional bussed in tourists and some research funding from the university of la Paz. As it is the whole building is manned by one old lady who shuffles to unlock the door and let us in.

We traipse through the narrow entrance corridor, past a bare wooden planked room with a long table in it and straight out onto the mountainside again. In front of us the summit of the mountain is impossibly close. 300m maybe, albeit at a somewhat steep incline. Fred has already set off. The rest of us follow and 30 paces later it becomes apparent that there is no oxygen at all on top of this mountain. What are we doing? We are higher than we ever went on the salt flat tour and I am dressed to visit some interesting rocks in downtown La Paz. But on the other hand, there is no way I am not making it to the top of this mountain given that the bus brought me exactly 94.4% of the way. Both Ellen and I trudge our way slowly up snow coated gravel and stone and leave the lodge behind.

Victory. I claim minor, but very sweet victory. I can climb to the top of a mountain, all it requires is a bus. I can also make it to the top of Zugspitze in Germany where there is a cable car and the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland where there is a lift. That is at least three times I have succeeded in mountaineering which should be enough for anyone regardless of whether they managed to climb a mountain in Nepal or not. And the views in this case are just as spectacular as the other two. 

We did eventually make it to the moon valley, and after an hour walking around it didn't quite live up to our morning of not falling off a cliff edge. Sometimes the most spectacular places are the ones you never expected to end up in.