The Salt Flats, Sunsets and Shooting Stars

I'm getting rather behind with this blog. It's Tuesday 19 June today, and I went to Salar two weekends ago. Hopefully I can remember it accurately.

It was a long awaited trip. I'd had it penned in my diary since my first day with TAPA, when I managed to persuade Ximena to let me plan some time off to visit the salt flats on the condition that I write an article about it, and that we keep it a secret from the rest of the volunteers and director Daniela. Not much of a penalty really. We'd had a look on the calendar and decided that if I made use of the public holiday of Corpus Christi, on 7 June, I would only need to take one day off to do a full four-day tour.

Although I'd have been happy to go alone (I was kind of hoping to group up with some Israeli men...), I'd been half-heartedly suggesting to selected others that they take time off and join me. I didn't really think anyone would be able to, so I was very glad when Jack told me on the Monday that he'd managed to rearrange his Friday classes for Wednesday, which was "The Day of the Teacher", or in other words a day off for teachers. Having done very little research (I'd learnt my lesson from planning for La Paz last weekend), we left on Wednesday afternoon by bus to Uyuni via Oruro. The first bus was fine, if a little hotter and smellier than usual, but the second leg was an overnighter in a very shitty bus along one of the bumpiest roads I've ever experienced. We had to spend a good 10 minutes when we arrived searching for our things at the other end of the bus among the snoozing campesinos and their big bundles of God knows what. We'd been warned it got cold, so we'd taken our sleeping bags on board, and sure enough, by the early hours of the morning ice was forming on the insides of the windows. After a sleepless night, we arrived into the frigid, sleepy town of Uyuni at sunrise.

At 6.30, nothing was open in this tiny little place. We considered following the advice of the Lonely Planet and camping out in the office of the bus company for a while and taking advantage of their gas heater, but it was full of locals doing the same, so we decided to take a wander into "town". Before long, tour agencies were beginning to open their doors and agents were wandering the streets looking to prey on unprepared travellers. This suited us well. Under the premise of shopping around a bit, we accepted several invitations to come inside agency offices and take a seat in front of their gas heaters whilst they gave us their spiel. There's not a great deal of variation between the agencies, and we were to discover that most of them grouped their tourists together to fill the jeeps, but we knew we wanted to leave that Thursday morning on a 3 or 4-day tour that perhaps incorporated a bit of exercise and ideally in reverse so we got the long day of travelling out of the way first and had more time on the salt flats at the end. After seeing what numerous agencies had to offer, we we torn between a 3-day tour in reverse and a normal 4-day tour that included climbing a volcano. Over breakfast, in a deserted hostel canteen, we decided on the latter. We took a quick shower in another of the hostels (we weren't confident of having another chance for the next four days), had a quick wander round the market, and bought water and snacks, and then we were off. As we should have expected, the two Argentinian girls and two American guys with whom we shared a jeep, had booked through different agencies, but it didn't really matter.

First stop was the train graveyard, a strange place near the edge of the salt flats where a dozen or so old trains lay rusting. Jack quite liked it; Dad you'd have been very excited by it. I suppose the old wrecks did make for interesting photos. It didn't take long in the jeep before we were on the salt flats themselves. It was almost too soon to appreciate. We spent half an hour trying on daft hats in the artesan stalls and climbing the mountains of salt that had been piled up near a salt processing plant before driving to the middle of the Salar. We had a bit of time next to a field of evenly spaced-out pyramids of salt shovelled up to allow the salt to dry, each of which was surrounded by a perfect square of shallow water reflecting clearly the bright blue sky and fluffy clouds. We stopped for lunch at the Palacio de Sal, a hotel constructed entirely from salt, in the centre of the flats. The place is amazing; we didn't go for more than two minutes without a "wow" or two escaping our lips. Standing beneath a bright blue sky on a perfectly even, frozen sea of brilliant white salt stretching as far as the eye can see is a surreal, otherwordly experience, and difficult to describe. As we walked, the salt crunched satisfyingly with each step, and tinkled magically when shards were dislodged with a little kick. Inspired by photos taken by previous visitors that we'd seen (mainly on Facebook), we took advantage of the illusory landscape and attempted several perspective photos. I hung in miniature from Jack's finger, a tiny version of Jack stood on my shoulder and whispered into my ear, he held me in his hand, and we both sat in my walking boot. At one point, an aeroplane landed not far from where we were. Eating was an odd distraction; each time I looked up from my plate I was amazed anew by the incredible landscape. One of the Argentinian girls made the inevitable joke: "Is there any salt for the chips?"

It took several hours to reach the little hamlet where we were to spend our first night, across miles and miles of seemingly endless salt, which dries in curious perfectly tesselated hexagons. The hostel was, as described, very basic: metal beds, with blankets (thank God) but no heating, and only with electricity for about two hours between 7pm and 9pm. We headed out, well-wrapped up, past the herd of llamas and/or alpacas grazing near the hostel and the smelly pink flamingoes doing their thing on the water at the edge of the flats, to see the sun set over Salar. As the light faded, the sky turned from blue to pink, purple and orange, and the sun cast its vivid colours over the mountains in the distance and across the sea of frozen salt. All was reflected in the still water at the edge of the flats. It was beautiful. After dinner (including welcome bowl of hearty soup), we put on even more clothes, grabbed our torches, and braved the cold again to see the stars. Clambering over the stepping stones was a little trickier in the pitch blackness, but it was worth it. The night sky was not dark at all but twinkling with millions upon millions of stars, and it didn't take long to spot a few shooting stars. The Milky Way was unmissable; a broad cloudy smear across the sky. We lay on the salt for a while, gazing up, before the cold became unbearable and we got numb bums and had to go back inside.

Jack woke me up in the morning as my phone alarm hadn't gone off to wake me up in time for sunrise, but we made it outside before the sun had arrived from beyond the horizon. Although not quite as beautiful as the sunset, it was impressive. That morning we set off to explore Volcano Tunupa at whose based we had camped. We wandered into a cave in the mountainside where several shrivelled but well-preserved mummies sat curled up, before hiking up to a viewpoint with great vistas over the flats. This, apparently, was "climbing the volcano". We managed to hike a bit further before we had to return, but the terrain was less than ideal, involving trampling over very spiky and very painful hardy little shrubs. Waiting by the jeep, we thought we'd have to interrupt our philosophical discussions about animal rights, religion and such like to send a search party out for one of the Americans, who had gone off to hike up the volcano on his own, but he eventually turned up fine. We drove off across the salt flats again, this time to the Isla Pescado (Fish Island), a name I never quite understood as there were no fish to be seen. Rather, it was a rocky mound in the middle of the even white salt flats covered in giant San Pedro cacti. Entrepreneurial Bolivians had set up a shop, toilets and a restaurant, and planted a giant Bolivian flag on the top. We hiked round the mound and took a few more perspective photographs before our time was up and we had to board a different jeep and meet our new crew and travel buddies. The guide and cooks were much the same - slightly grumpy and not very talkative. We were now sharing a jeep with two middle-aged Austrian women, one a teacher and the other an executive, a friendly short-haird Hong Kong girl and a very quiet South Korean guy, both in their early 20s. We drove off again towards the little village of San Juan, amusing ourselves with a game of i-spy and taking photos through the windows of the Bolivian army who seemed to be doing training exercises in the middle of this barren nowhere.

San Juan is a cold, windy, brown-grey village which claims to have 1,000 inhabitants but surely can't be home to more than 200. Somehow it feels remeniscent of the wild west; I expected a Bolivian cowboy to swagger out of one of the houses into the street and say, "Oi, gringo, this town ain't big enough for the both of us". It really wasn't. We paid a visit to the tiny museum there, and in the eerie twilight explored the strange tombs of fossilized coral in which ancient mummies had been preserved, huddled up as if sheltering from the cold. Despite there being no more than about 4 streets in the place, we managed to get very lost on the way back to the 'hostel'. We were entertained during dinner (soup again, but this time a bottle of wine to share) by a group of local boys of perhaps 10 years old playing various musical instruments and singing poorly rehearsed songs. Bored, Jack and I headed out to find the bar featured in a well-read leaflet that had been thrusted into our hands on the way to the museum, advertised as the most happening place in the vollage. It took a fair bit of finding, and we were the only visitors that night. It was worth it for a few glasses of the vino caliente (hot spiced wine) and to hear the proprietor warble to Bolivian tunes on his Andean flute. It was cold that night.

The next day we drove through desert landscapes, fascinating rock formations and stopping at beautiful but austere lakes, snapping flamingos and vicuñas. One stop was at the famous Arbol de Piedra, or 'tree of rock', surely one of the most photographed rocks in South America. Dutifully, we got photos of that too. We stayed that night at the shores of Laguna Colorada, or 'coloured lake', so called because the algae in the water often makes it appear bright red. We watched another beautiful sunset, but the night was even colder than the previous nights, so even with twenty layers on we couldn't stay outside watching for shooting stars for more than 10 minutes. With six people in the dorm, the night was just about bearable. We had an early morning start the next morning, leaving the hostel at 5.30am, in order to reach the geysers just as the sun was rising. Despite the rotten-egg stench, standing in the sulphur-infused steam from the ferocious pools of boiling mud and water was actually quite pleasant given the freezing conditions. Not for the first time, I was reminded of Iceland, except for the absence of any safety cordons to prevent sleepy visitors wandering straight into these hellish holes in the earth. On we drove up to another lake, at the shores of which was a naturally heated bathing pool. Silly me had forgotten to pack my swimming costume, but Jack was brave enough to strip down to his trunks in the sub-zero temperatures and take his cup of tea down for a dip. He seemed to enjoy it enough for the both of us.

We stopped at several more lakes en route to the 'bus stop' for the bus to Chile, where we lost the two Austrians and the Hong Kong girl, but gained a lovely Swedish girl with green hair called Boel. She'd been studying in Val Paraiso, in Chile, and now had two weeks to travel round before returning home. She spent the day asking us questions about where we'd been in Bolivia, and wrote down all our recommendations. I think we've inadvertently planned her entire two weeks for her, even down to which hostels to stay in. We had lunch in another tiny adobe town whose most interesting feature was the tail end of an aeroplane perched up in the rocks that overshadowed the village. We arrived back into Uyuni in the early evening, but because of problems with my phone we ended up having to stay another night. I'd left my phone in the hostel at Laguna Colorada, and it had been sent back to Uyuni with another tour guide. He apparently had four or five wives and mistresses, and although we knew he was back in Uyuni we didn't know which woman he was with. We evenutally arranged to have my phone sent to me on a bus the next day, but by the time we got to the bus station there were no spaces left in the bus back that night, unless we wanted to sit in the aisles (which we really didn't). On the plus side, it meant I could collect my phone in person the next morning, the promiscous man having returned home. So we had to head back to Cochabamba on Monday, and finally arrived back early on Tuesday morning. We opted for bus cama ('bed' bus) thinking it would be more comfortable, but far from it. Although the seats reclined a long way back, the base of the seats themselves were positively sloping, so it was a constant fight to stop sliding off them. I thought Lord of the Rings would make insomnia slightly more tolerable, but it cut out half way through. To top it off, there were two babies sat in the seats in front and to the side, who wailed frequently and whose mothers insisted on changing them during the journey to let us all smell what the inside of a Bolivian nappy smells like. Ah, Bolivia.