The other-worldly Salt Flats

Thursday, June 30, 2011
Uyuni, Bolivia
Our train got into Uyuni at about 3am on Monday morning. It was freezing cold, probably well below zero with the wind chill. And we had to walk to our hotel (Hotel Tonito) lugging our heavy backpacks with us. A quick check-in and it was off to sleep before our our two day trip to the salt flats a few hours later stating in the morning.

Uyuni is a dusty, quiet town founded in 1890 as a trading post and has a population of around 10,000. It reminded me of some small US wild west town from the last century. The main industries are tourism for the adjacent salt flats and a military base. The salt flats (Salar de Uyuni) are the largest in the world, covering some 4,000 square miles. At an altitude of ~3,700m, the salt bed forms an enormous, completely flat, white plain stretching as far as the eye can see, mainly salt but also many other minerals. It is all that remains of a sea that filled the entire plateau up to Lake Titicaca but has evaporated over the course of millions of years. There are also other types of scenery such as geysers, volcanoes, and rock formations.

After getting up for breakfast (a buffet for Bs50) a few hours later on Monday morning, it was a case of packing an overnight bag and being ready to depart in 4WDs by 10am. The itinerary for the rest of the day comprised the following:

- The "Train Cemetery", containing the remains of important train machinery dating back to 1890 - the remains of the first train that ran in Bolivia and supposedly, trains that were robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I wasn't sure why some trains had Physics equations painted on them. Uyuni was an important railway junction between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

- A visit to the salt factory at Colchani, where the salt was dried, iodine added (to reduce thyroid problems), and the resultant salt packed into 1kg bags. People working in the factory faced a reduced life expectancy due to inhaling salt dust. Market stalls were set up outside the factory with tourist trinkets but this time all made of salt, eg. key-rings, ashtrays, salt animals, etc.

- A first venture onto the salt flats proper, the salt was piled up into small pyramids waiting to be taken to the factory.

- Lunch in a salt restaurant (salt walls, tables, chairs, etc) comprising a llama chop which was as tough as a piece of leather and rice. We also had time to make our first attempts at hokey pictures using the lack of perspective in the salt flats - this proved much more difficult than expected!

- We then spent a long time making our way to our overnight hotel, again made from salt blocks. This involved a slow journey through a huge, shallow lake formed from rainwater from a few months previous which had not yet fully evaporated. The salt flats are so large that it can take hours to get from one place to another. Also, the scenery is mostly just endless white salt plains and you end up falling asleep as your intended destinations gets slowly bigger and bigger. We were treated to one of the strangest sunsets I had ever seen (although we did not stop to take photos, the only half-decent photo I had was taken through the salt-encrusted glass of our moving 4WD vehicle and was barely adequate). The sky was a kaleidoscope of colours, a sort of rainbow-cum Aurora Borealis effect. It was really strange. There was also a conventional sunset of which I did manage to take some photos after we stopped at the hotel as the setting sun hit the salt flats and the surrounding mountains turned various shades of red and orange.

In the evening and nights in the salt flats, it gets very cold - it was supposedly below -10 degC during our night at the hotel, although when I ventured out in the evening to snap the sunset, it felt much colder with the windchill. In fact, it was so cold that when I went to the toilet, my piss nearly froze before it reached the pan. After our evening meal, a group of us end up staying up until around midnight and must have gone through 11-12 bottles of wine, just for some internal warmth during the night of course. It was only the fact that the guy that we had to buy the wine from had gone to bed and we ran out of our alternative sources that forced us to go to bed. I slept fully clothed during the night, including hat, since it was so cold in the hotel. No salt central heating here. The four single blokes (me, Peter, Nashy and Mike) were sharing a dorm room. I was the last one drinking and hence, last to go back to the room and bed. Peter woke up in the middle of the night screaming like a girl, and Mike was worried that I had come to the room drunk and got into his bed by mistake. I'm not sure where this reputation of crazy drunken antics came from but obviously, it was misplaced (really!).

On Tuesday, we had an early wake-up call this morning, supposedly to leave the hotel at 5.30am to catch the sunrise. However, someone was late (we think she spent too long putting her make-up on) so I don't think we stopped as many times as we would normally have to take photos of the sunrise. It was probably the best sunrise I'd ever seen (sunrises tend to be much less dramatic from a photography viewpoint than sunsets in my experience) - the sky a bright orange-red below the cloud cover, the colours reflecting off the surface water of the salt flats. As the sunrise approached the sky turned to orange, then yellow. It was bloody cold though, well below freezing with the biting wind chill, and it was a case of dashing out of the vehicle for a few snaps before your fingers dropped off.

Our first stop of the day was Fish Island, a pretty long drive away. Located in the centre of the salt flats, it is a hilly outpost which was once under the lake and is covered in petrified coral and cacti up to 10m tall and surrounded by a flat, white sea of hexagonal salt tiles. The cacti grow very slowly at rate of ~1cm per year. Most of us hiked to the top for views of the surrounding salt flats. Of course, there were a few hilarious photos taken of inappropriately positioned cacti and for once, it wasn't me who started taking them! We also drove to Tunupa Volcano for pictures, saw some flamingos in the surrounding waters and had another opportunity to practice our skills at taking imaginative photos utilising the lack of perspective. I was getting the hang of taking these now and preferred to be taking the photos rather than starring in them. Finally, we visited the "Salt Flat's Eyes" - places where water below the salt flat bed bubbled through to the surface, the water was cold but bubbled because it contained trapped air.

We arrived back at Hotel Tonito in Uyuni at about 3pm and in the evening, had pizzas in the attached restaurant, Minuteman - supposedly the best pizzas in South America and also the highest pizza restaurant in the world. I had a 40cm spicy chicken pizza - I'd like to say I ate the lot but had two pieces left which were put away for me in the fridge for my bus journey the next day. After that, it was another wine night, only spoiled when we were unexpectedly told that the bar had closed at 10pm! If we'd known that, we would have stockpiled a few extra bottles. An early night then.

On Wednesday, we had a longish, uneventful public bus journey to Potosi which left at about 10am and took about 5-6 hours through the dry, dusty landscape of Bolivia.
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