Another batch of Bolivia pic­tures, this time from La Paz. See below the fold for indi­vid­ual images, or click here for a slideshow.

Over the hol­i­days I was lucky enough to make a return trip to Bolivia, and over the next couple of days I’ll be post­ing some photos I took there.

The first set is from the south­ern part of the coun­try, where I vis­ited sev­eral places that might, were it not for the nig­gling ques­tion of their actual exis­tence, make it onto Joel’s col­lec­tion of Monday morn­ing imag­i­nary places. These included:

+ A train ceme­tery where the rust­ing ghosts of mining indus­tries past take their last rest, includ­ing one robbed by Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid.

+ The Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats, where campesinos dig salt by hand while tourists like me whiz by in Land Cruis­ers at sixty miles an hour.

+ Inc­ahuasi, a coral island in the middle of the salt flats with metic­u­lous bath­rooms and huge cacti more than 500 years old.

+ Laguna Colarada, a lake that takes its name from an algae that turns the water red when the wind blows. It offers chilly sanc­tu­ary to three species of flamingo and at least one small fox.

+ Vol­canic rock for­ma­tions with caption-​ready names like “The Rock Tree” and “The Lost City.”

+ An eerie play­ground of geot­her­mic activ­ity with scald­ing paint­pots and hiss­ing geysers.

To see more, click the photos below the fold, or click here for a full-​screen slideshow.

A couple of weeks ago, Joel wrote that “few polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties strike me as abso­lutist and unde­mo­c­ra­tic as that of a gov­er­nor appoint­ing a U.S. Sen­a­tor to office in the case of a vacant Senate seat.” In today’s Times Tom Geoghe­gan argues that the prac­tice (which I don’t like either) is actu­ally ille­gal under the 17th Amendment:

Gov­er­nors don’t issue a writ or start the machin­ery for a spe­cial elec­tion as the amend­ment requires, but instead fill the post for up to two years, until the next gen­eral elec­tion. This frus­trates the whole demo­c­ra­tic thrust of the amendment.

While this has been hap­pen­ing for decades, the cor­rupt nature of the prac­tice has finally become too obvi­ous to ignore in Illi­nois, now that the United States attor­ney has a court order to have the gov­er­nor bugged. Yes, the F.B.I. com­plaint against Gov. Rod Blago­je­vich paints him as espe­cially cor­rupt. But the fact is that a cer­tain amount of polit­i­cal horse-​trading is inher­ent if offi­cials, rather than voters, fill Con­gres­sional vacancies.

This is why the writ­ers of the 17th Amend­ment required spe­cial elections.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that Geoghe­gan, a labor lawyer and the author of sev­eral books I’m eager to check out, is a new can­di­date to replace Rahm Emanuel in Illinois’s Fifth Con­gres­sional Dis­trict. Kathy G, Hen­drik Hertzberg, and James Fal­lows are all Geoghe­gan fans; if you decide to become one too, you can get involved with his cam­paign here.

Given his fame locally as an agi­ta­tor for the apos­tro­phe rights of ter­mi­nal sibi­lants and abroad as a defender of my middle ini­tial, I would be remiss were I not to note that Michael Rob­bins has a poem in this week’s New Yorker. It must surely count as one of the strangest (in a good way) ever hosted by the pages of that august pub­li­ca­tion. For a cheeky inter­view with Michael about the poem that includes links to more of his work, see here.