Laguna Colorada is a lake the colour of dried blood on the high plateau of southwestern Bolivia, 4,278 metres up in the Eduardo Avaroa reserve, barely thirty-five centimetres deep, dotted with white islands of borax, and waded by three species of flamingo at the same time. The red is two things: rust-coloured mineral sediment stirred through the water, and microscopic algae that flood it with pigment when the sun is strong, so that the lake goes from brick to crimson through the day. The white patches drifting across it are not ice but borax, a mineral salt that crusts into islands and ridges along the shore and has long been dug from the plateau. The flamingos are why the reserve exists: James's, Andean and Chilean flamingos crowd the shallows together, sweeping their bent bills side to side through the red water and stepping slowly across the mineral flats, and they avoid competing by filtering food of different sizes from the same water. The James's flamingo was thought extinct until a colony was found here in 1957.
The lake is a stop on the three-day 4x4 route between the Salar de Uyuni and the Chilean border, a road through a landscape of volcanoes, geysers and coloured lakes where almost nothing grows. The time to be at the shore is dawn, before the wind wakes, when the shallow water lies dead still and doubles the flamingos and the far volcanoes on its red surface; by midday the wind is hard and the lake is chopped to pink. Behind the shore a low rise of bare, windblown altiplano looks over the whole lake at once, the red water, the white islands and the pink lines of birds. The flamingos breed here in the southern summer, from November to April, when rain lifts the water and the chicks appear on their cone-shaped mud nests. Nights at this altitude fall well below freezing in every month. Laguna Colorada is a lake that looks like a wound in the plateau, and the birds that live on it are the rarest of their kind.