BY HORSE
I find horses incredibly frightening. Inexplicably, I ride horses whenever the option becomes available. It just seems like the thing to do. In Tupiza, it's a fantastic way to see the surrounding countryside and costs less than $3 per person through Hotel Mitru, so I shook off my usual fears and climbed on.

It was actually significantly smoother than my last ride—in Egypt, across the slippery sands of Giza. This ride was mostly flat, allowing the horses to occasionally break into a gallop with only mild panicking on my part. It was actually great fun, but since I tend to carry quite a bit of vintage camera equipment with me at all times, anything above a trot worries me a bit.

The landscape was just as gorgeous as we expected—deep red eroded fins, rolling grey and green hills, arches and rocky dry riverbeds. It looked like cowboy country. Each turn was more beautiful than the last, leaving me terribly disappointed to find I hadn't brought enough film. Our three-hour ride included the Devil's Door, El Cañon del Inca, and the facetiously-named Valle de los Machos, the most phallic rock formations I've seen since Cappadocia.

Our very young and extremely petite guide Luis turned out to be more of a horse handler than a true guide. Hemmy, who speaks Spanish beautifully and doesn't hide her reporter's nature, fired question after question at him about the landscape and the village, with the response 90% of the time being "I don't know." Still, we weren't riding horses to learn anything. Gallop on!

BY JEEP
We had better luck with our jeep guide Mario, who was more than just a driver. The two-hour jeep ride cost about $9 through Hotel Mitru, and covered Quebrada Seca, El Cañon dos Duendes, and Toroyoj.

Quebrada Seca is a dry riverbed surrounded by beautifully colored mountains. Mario told us that during the wettest months, when it rained hard, even hailed, and the water level rose high, the riverbed always dried out quickly...thus the name "seca."

We noticed a great deal of trash marring the view of the lovely rolling hills. Mario sadly informed us that there was no system in place to properly dispose of trash in Tupiza, thus the locals simply dumped it in the beautiful riverbed.

Next we parked near a dramatic red-fin doorway and walked in the desert-hot sun until reaching the Canyon of Ghosts. It GLOWED red, with every boulder, every wall, appearing to be formed of smaller red stones. Mario simply called it sediment, but I've never seen it in such large chunks before. Plate-shifting had created the peaks all around the canyon.

Toroyoj, our final stop, was essentially a park, featuring a picnic tables, a soccer fields, and willows arching over a small stream. Calling it a park doesn't really justify it, however, as it was still filled with striking eroded red rock formations rising against the deep blue sky...just like everywhere else in stunning Tupiza.

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