Mr Tony gets high, hangs around a bit and then comes down

In fact, the highest I´ve ever been - at a gasping 5,200 metres in southern Bolivia. That´s higher than Mont Blanc, and about 30 times higher than Cissbury Ring (which I still think is pretty high). I also got to the highest city in the world, Potosí (4,000 metres), and scrambled, squeezed and wheezed around the infamous silver and zinc mines. Hungry China has ensured that the miners here continue to make a good living. If working without respirators, in air so thin that they can´t breathe if they cover their mouths, doing eight hour shifts without food, and subsisting on fizzy drinks and lots and lots of coca, is a "good" living. Most can´t manage more than ten years in the mines and if they last that long then they won´t live beyond 50 - poisoned by arsenic and dust ore. It really was hellish (and strangely, they have shrines to the devil throughout the mines... but more on that another time).

Apparently Potosí is also in the Motorcycle Diaries but I don´t remember it. I did bring a copy with me to read on my travels, with the vague plan of following the route backwards, but then I gave it away to a girl in Nicaragua. Oops.

I also got pretty high in Peru. Started off at sea level at the incredible ruins of Chan Chan - an immense, sprawling, dusty expanse of crumbling walls and desert scrub, more like West Africa than coastal Peru. Apparently it´s the biggest pre-Colombian site in the Americas and the biggest mud city in the world. Pretty busy place too, with teams of workers toiling away, excavating and rebuilding. It looked like they might find the Lost Ark, and remembering what happened to those Nazis in the film I made a quick exit. After Trujillo it was Lima and then up again into the high Andes - Arequipa, Cusco, the gringo trail to Macchu Picchu, before crossing into Bolivia via Lake Titicaca (the world´s highest navigable lake, no less).

So two short, incredible weeks in Peru were followed by just a week or so in Bolivia - still following the Andes, through the Salt Plains of Uyuni as far as the Chilean border before doubling back to Potosí and on to Tupiza - a dusty, mountainous, frontier town straight out of the wild west. I spent my last day in Bolivia on a horse on the trail of Butch and Sundance. Realising that the site of their last stand was 110km away, and that my horse was more interested in the long grass than in taking me any further, I decided to head for Argentina.

Which is where I am now. In Córdoba, at a balmy 400 metres and outside the tropics for the first time since August. Summer is just beginning down here, and the town and people are looking pretty beautiful for it too. No surprise that Argentines are so arrogant (although a few did feign sympathy in the bar where I caught England´s sad demise on Wednesday).

Today´s mission is to find Ché´s family home. I´m pretty sure that the address is in the Motorcycle Diaries...


PS. Buenos Aires next, before my mission to Antarctica. Saw this on the news today - I nearly booked on the exact same cruise, until I found one for half the price. I leave next Tuesday. Fingers crossed that the straights are clear eh.