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After a trek down to the Amazon basin there was an unfortunate reality to face: what goes down must come back up. Unless you feel like a really, really long boat ride to the Brazil coast. The Andes loomed and beckoned once more, but this time the sky was to be the limit, literally and figuratively.

Progressing not only back up into the mountains but south along increasingly decrepit roads into the middle of the South American continent, the Andes now began to truly soar to staggering heights, culminating in an amazing region known only as "The Altiplano". This area is an enormous, windy plateau sitting predominantly in the middle of Bolivia and is sometimes referred to as the Tibet of the southern hemisphere.

The Altiplano is an absolutely otherworldly realm, devoid of all but the most slow growing and hardy of vegetation and home to nought but a few special animals including Flamingos, Andean Foxes, Vicunyas and the ridiculously cute Viscachas. The landscape is as close as one could get to experiencing life on another planet: there are small lagoons where the water takes on incredible colours due to combinations of minerals and plankton, there are furious geysers spewing sulphurous steam into the sky, there are both sleeping and angry volcanos with marvellous striations of metallic oxides throughout and amongst it all there are fossils and calcified remains of ancient coral reefs dessicated long ago when the whole area was thrust out of the ocean.

If you are not interested in geology before you visit the Altiplano, you will be after. It's irresistibly fascinating and such a stark contrast to the jungles of the Amazon just a few hundred kilometres away.

Visiting such a place however comes at the cost of something very precious to you: Oxygen. This rather important gas is in scarce supply in the Altiplano and it's absence is very much noticed. The disappearance of air first became really noticeable at La Paz, the inglorious and polluted capital of Bolivia, perched on a gaping chasm resting at 3,500 metres high. It is here that the true fitness level of many a tourist is very quickly exposed.

From La Paz the altitude extends to the magnificent Salar de Uyuni salt flats, a bizarre region of endless white, perfectly flat terrain that extends as far as the eye can see, creating the perfect environment for all number of "wanky" perception of depth photos. These flats mark the beginning of the upper Altiplano where the salt flats begin to ascend into truly dizzying heights, culminating at a pass of 5,000 metres. This is Everest base camp territory and officially in the "now it's serious" category of altitudes.

Strange things begin to happen up here. Firstly anything pressurised or sealed will pretty much explode when opened, be they drinks or toiletries. Secondly, computer equipment can start to fail randomly, normally at the border control office. Lastly, Oxygen completely packs up its bags and goes down to sea level.

No matter what you do, you will be out of breath doing it. Stretching? Out of breath. Getting up too quickly to go to the bathroom? Out of breath. Drinking too big a gulp of water? Out of breath. Thinking too hard about something other than breathing? Definitely out of breath.

There are even higher places in the world sure, but compared to somewhere like Nepal, the ascent here is just so damned rapid. You can easily climb to 5,000 metres in just a few days and as a result people can get seriously ill, sometimes leading to death. Guides for trips into the Altiplano are well aware of the dangers and are trained to look for the symptoms but this is a very remote place and help can be very far away. It seems so odd that such a seemingly easy to overlook problem was actually one of the most difficult and perilous parts of this entire journey.

The ancient and traditional local solution to dealing with altitude sickness is through liberal consumption of coca leaves: the same variety used to make cocaine. You can buy cocaine 'energy bars' here too, but they still aren't legal: even in Bolivia, so coca leaves will have to do.

You can drink the leaves in tea, but this is small fry. The real method is to gradually add more and more leaves to your mouth, between your teeth and gum until you have a soggy green mass sitting in your mouth. To this you then add a strange type of rock made from a cross between mineral lime and ash of potatoes that brings the true alkaloid potential of the coca leaf out. The ash is best wrapped deep in the leaf ball as it has a tendency to anaesthetise any part of your mouth it makes contact with, giving you a speech capability varying somewhere between Sly Stallone and root canal recipient. This ball of coca leaves sits in your mouth for an hour or so, releasing it's altitude fighting happy chemicals, at the end of which you begin to see the Matrix and your breath smells similar to a pet store.

The coca leaves work pretty well overall but unfortunately the problem is you can't eat and sleep at the same time. I can't impress upon you how scarily horrible the feeling of trying to breathe here in your sleep really is. In the middle of the night you regularly wake from your sleep with a strange feeling of suffocating, from which recovery is difficult. No matter how deep the breaths you take are, the Oxygen just won't come and people can very easily have panic attacks making it even worse.

Of a night, the Altiplano also becomes deathly cold so wrapping up is essential but there is something very special about the night here. Due to the altitude and the fact there is never any clouds here, it is one of the best places on the planet to stargaze. In one night, away from the lights of the camp I personally saw 14 shooting stars in one night, more than I think I have ever seen in my life in total. The sky is so luminescent that the stars alone light up the ground and the Milky Way becomes a deep blue line across the sky. There are numerous observatories throughout the region for this reason and it is a prime location to find intact meteorites. The peace and solitude that can be found in the stars in such a place is worth the trip here alone.

On the opposite side of the Altiplano, towards the Pacific Ocean, the mountain ranges plunge down into Chile and into another equally incredible area of the world: the Atacama desert. This is the driest place on Earth, with some areas never recording a single drop of rain. The landscape here is an absolutely alien one, a barren skeleton of what once was a thriving environment. It's a desolate and unforgivingly harsh place that, even in spring, you can only explore in the cool of the afternoon or early morning. Come the middle of the day the sun scorches everything in this place to a cinder. It's no country for crazy tourists.

The journey through these deserts both high and low was definitely something else. Something out of this world. There is scenery here that cannot be compared to anything and it's bewildering to explore, like so much of the South American continent. But the altitude is really is a killer and it's not something any sane person would want to experience twice I would think. It's nice to have gone, but it's important to know when to leave and return to that sweet, sweet, thick and lovely mantle of Oxygen we all know and love.

Oxygen, you're the best! Let us never part ways again.