Salar de Uyuni

Rising for an early 8am start, we boarded our bus with high hopes of a great 3-day tour, culminating in the Uyuni Salt Flats of which we´d heard many glowing reports. It´s a bit of a lottery as to who you may end up spending 72 hours cramped in a 4x4 with, but the coach on the whole seemed friendly from the off so we weren´t too concerned.

With border formalities completed in a small shed in the middle of what appeared to be the midst of nothingness, we were put into a jeep with a young French couple called Marion and Sylvain. They turned out to not only be really lovely people, but also the saving grace of our trip as it transpired that our driver, Doro, could barely speak a word of English, and our Spanish by this point consisted of a bare understanding of basic terms and fluency in nothing more than menu reading and beer ordering.

So, we headed off to our first stop for breakfast at Laguna Blanca, and onwards to Laguna Verde, so called because of it´s green colour, caused by the large copper deposits found in it´s bed. All the of the lagoons we were due to see on the following days can be found sitting at the base of a one or a number of surrounding mountains, making for some truly spectacular scenery. In this case, the 6000m Licancabur Volcano loomed menacingly in the background.

As the journey began it was becoming increasingly clear that our driver was going to be quite entertaining. None of the controls on the dash of the 1980´s Toyota seemed to be functioning. How do we know if we have enough petrol Doro? "No problema" he replies. Er, Doro, there´s a really heavy smell of gasoline inside this car? "Si, no problema". Suitably impressed with his bothered attitude towards pretty much everything, we let him get on with the driving while we admired the views.

Driving over more barren terrain into the hills, we stopped for lunch at the side of the Laguna Polque, with it's small thermal pool and grazing birds. Refreshed, we continued up to a height of just over 4000m, frantically chewing Doro´s kindly donated Coca leaves to help with the altitude, and jumping out at the vile smelling Sol de Manana geysers. Here, the bubbling mud pools steam into the clear sky, helped along by the chilly winds and producing the kind of smells we´re only used to experiencing in hostels where morning ´dehli-belly´ has become part of normal life. For the the final part of the opening days journey, we skirted the edge of the bright red Laguna Colorada, spotting and then feeding a cute kind of wild fox, the Zorro Andino, as we went.

Our accommodation for the evening consisted of a shelter, something we had been pre-warned about, but still expected slightly more from. Entering our rooms, the stone beds sat menacingly, threatening a truly cold and sleepless night. After a fairly tasteless dinner of cold spaghetti and tomato sauce, and with the solar generator only powering itself until 9pm, we retired to our solid beds, and stole as many covers as possible from the vacant bunks in the vague hope it would aid our slumber. Predictably, it was a pretty tough night, with inside temperatures dropping to minus-five, and complimented nicely with Marion suffering from some altitude sickness. We wound her up the next morning about how she´d kept us awake and was ruining our trip, but in fairness, there wasn´t a great deal of sleep being found anyway.

Suitably groggy, we climbed back into our jeep the following morning, and headed into some of the driest and most barren land we had probably ever seen. By this point, we had discovered Doro´s desire for speed, and the fact that he kept glancing over his shoulder to check on the progress of other jeeps and seemed to be racing them at every opportunity, earnt him the new nickname of ´Schumacher´, which seemed to amuse him immensely.

Crossing the rain-devoid Siloli Desert, the dry earth stretched for miles in every direction, broken only by the odd rock outcrop or towering mountain. We stopped at the aptly named ´Stone Trees´, and passed a couple more Borax-wielding laguna´s before arriving at our lunch destination; a small town called Villa Alata. With it´s desolate streets and tiny stores, it was hard to believe that anyone actually lived there, and the lack of people seemed to back up the theory, until it was explained that most of the locals are out farming the land during the day.

Next, we headed up through the Valley of the Llama´s, where it was strange to suddenly be confronted with lush green hills and hundreds of the grazing animals. A packed local bus containing a number of tired looking faces crossed us on the way into the hills, treacherously weaving its way down the single-width dirt track with surprising ease. For many of the mountain dwelling people in the region, this is the only way for them to travel to the nearest towns for vital supplies. We stopped for water some 90 minutes further on, in the small village of San Augustin, where the shop-keeper had to literally be woken from her afternoon nap to open the store and serve us.

Our final stop on the second day was in the near-deserted town of Julaca, a run-down, dusty town, sitting just a few kilometres from the Salar de Uyuni. Cargo trains still run to and from here, although it´s hard to know why when there is literally nothing for miles around. Doro disappeared for around an hour, sparking rumours he was either having it away with the local woman who had earlier appeared with her baby, or was more feasibly having a nap after we'd commmented that he was nodding off behind the wheel some 30 minutes before. "No problema" obviously.

For the last leg of the day ´Schumacher´ was back in his element, racing some nearby cars to the overnight hostel stop on the edge of the Salt Flats. At one point he nearly ran one poor group off the road, which added some excitement to our final hour-long stretch. The accommodation for our second and final night was much preferable and so after a good hot shower, a fairly reasonable dinner and a few highly competitive games of table-tennis, we were off to bed in preparation for our final morning at the flats.

Up at 6:30, and now at some 3,660 metres above sea-level, we headed into the flats. At 12,000 square kilometres, these are the biggest salt flats in the world, created when the rains stopped many hundreds of years ago and the water in the once huge lagoon evaporated to leave the one-metre thick hardened surface. Only when sitting in the peacefulness of the middle of the flats did we realise the true scale of what we were seeing. The blinding white salt stretches for as far as the eye can see, and on misty days, with compasses rendered useless, it has been known for cars to be lost in the expanse when the nearby mountains cannot be used as navigation markers. Tour companies now refuse to venture out in less than perfect conditions since a car-load of tourists and their inexperienced driver froze to death just over a year ago.

In the middle of the salt flats, we stopped at the Isla Incahuasi where giant cacti reside, some more than 1200 years old. It was possible here to climb the secluded ´island´ and get a good birds-eye view of the Salar. Driving onwards to Uyuni, we also stopped to see the Salt Hotel, now closed for guests but open as a museum, before finally heading into the Salt Refinement village of Colchain.

On the whole, three very bumpy and surprisingly tiring days. Definitely one of the true spectacles of any visit to South America, although we have to admit that we were helped greatly by being paired with some really good travelling companions who never tired of translating for us, and a driver with a bit of a screw loose. As he might say... "No Problema".

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