Bolivian salt flats & Uyuni (Bolivia) - Week 33

1st to 3rd May

And so the into Bolivia, another place we have been really looking forward to since planning our trip. We were starting off in perhaps the most incredible part of Bolivia too, El Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest and highest (3600m asl) salt flat.
So, a few quick stats to get the gist. It is 4,085 square miles which makes it 25 times bigger than the Bonneville Salt Flats in the US, or 7 times bigger than Greater London. 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a giant prehistoric lake. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó and Uru Uru, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Salar de Uyuni. Salar de Uyuni is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually.

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Bolivia. Lake Titicaca at the top, the green Lake Poopó and the white Salar de Uyuni.

DAY 1

Our trip to the salt flats started at 8am with an hour mini-bus ride from San Pedro de Atacama, through Chile immigration, back up the Jama Pass a little to the Chile/Bolivia border. After about an hour wait there (and our first experience of revolting Bolivian toilets!!), we finally got into Bolivia.

The Bolivian Immigration shack!

We then moved on to meet the jeeps and our drivers. After a suprisingly good breakfast of cheese rolls and coffee we got into our groups and pounced on the best condition jeep that seemed to be driven by some ancient Bolivian. In hindsight this turned out to be a good move...

Pablo, Pedro (driver), Steve, Lee, Kate, Katie & James

So we filled our cheeks with coca leaves for the altitude then drove off to the beautiful Lago Azul, blue from dissolved copper. Then it was onto Chalviri where there was a 30C thermal pool. We decided against getting our kit off as it was really cold but army boy Steve and Scouse Lee risked it.

We had a great lunch of llama meat and salad here and then we were off-roading through the amazing desert landscape in the 4 x 4. It was like nothing we had ever seen before but very much how we thought this part of Bolivia would be, vast openess with very little in the way of life able to grow.

Next up were belching geysers at Sol de Manaña. Lots of pools of bubbling mud and noisy gases. Typical Bolivian health & safety - the crust is thin as James found out when he sunk his foot into the goo.

After a good few hours of driving through the barren and surreal landscape we arrived at Lago Colarada, an enormous red (dissolved iron this time i think) lake where we would stay for the night. Now this was basic. It was very, very cold when we got there and were warned that the temperature reached -25º between 3 and 6am!! The accommodation was basically a barn with beds in (I think our group was lucky as we had a small room with comfy beds that warmed up quite quickly...). The door didn't even shut and there was a very drafty, enormous, plastic window. We were not holding much hope for a decent sleep.

Our accommodation, and the other jeeps showing signs of the strain already!

We sat down to eat a huge meal of soup, pasta and potatoes in every item of clothing we had in our bags and by 8.30pm, through lack of anything else to do and extreme cold, all six of us were ensconsed in our little room, still wearing every item of clothing, in our sleeping bags and under 4 blankets each. You couldn't move. It was very funny and Katie and Kate became hysterical with laughter for about 10 mins. Everyone was asleep by about 9pm and then wide awake again by midnight. We reckon we got about 2 hours of sleep each (oh, except for James who seemed to manage to sleep and snore practically the whole night).

DAY 2

Army boy Steve was out in -25º at 5.30am for the sunset which he somehow managed to miss and nearly caught pneumonia. The rest of us reluctantly got out of our beds at 7am for breakfast and we were on the 'road' again by 7.30am.

First up was the stone tree, created over thousands of years by the wind. It was round about now we became aware how important our intial jeep selection had been. Four of the five jeeps arrived at `the tree´, saw the tree and still the fifth one hadn´t turned up. Evetually it limped in after having it´s radiator fixed with a plastic bag. The driver was young and new to the trip so didn´t really know where he was going. Our driver Pedro (the oldest guide at 58 had been doing this trip for 28 years) told the new driver to follow him after we all set off again. As we climbed the hill we could see the other jeep disapear off into the distance the wrong way with Pedro frantically waving...

After a few hours of driving past little lakes with flamingos and more barreness we arrived at a little village for lunch. The village was suspiciously big for the middle of nowhere. They had a big school, a little army base and quite a few houses. They do raise llama but the rest of the money comes from drugs smuggling apparently, with most people in the village having a little hand in it! We waited there for a couple of hours for the 5th jeep, no sign of them but they had radioed in to say all was fine so off we went north. More lakes and emptiness until we arrived at Juluaca.

Little lads wanting to see themselves on the camara.

Lee plonking himself down next to some unsuspecting locals

The typical Bolivian back garden. Cool tanktop!

After many more hours at 30mph through llama filled valleys and past more flamingo lakes we arrived at Juluaca. Juluaca is on the Antofagasta (on the Pacific coast and used to be part of Bolivia until they lost a war to Chile) to Potosi railway. The trains trundle through taking things to the coast for exporting and imports back in. The trains are quite infrequent and so the place felt very eirie. Not so eirie that Katie stopped being silly!

And so finally onto the edge of the salt flat to our second night stop after 180miles at 30mph - a long day! The excitement of seeing the slat flat for the first time made up for it though.

DAY 3

The second night's accomodation was much better, hot showers and much warmer at 3600m asl, so feeling refreshed and excited we headed out onto the salt flats proper! Not much to say really. It´s an amazing sight, as far as the eye can see perfectly flat salt. You can see the curvature of the earth as you look to the horizon, and mountians gradually grow higher as you drive towards them! A very surreal place, and so perfect for making silly perspective photos:

After larking around taking photos we trvelled on to Isla de Pescado, an island in the middle of the flats with lots of Cacti on. Then on again to the Salt Hotel made entirely of, yep, you guessed it, salt. Next stop after in what seemed a random direction at 70mph with no landmarks for 45mins we arrived at the salt farms. The locals here dig the juicy top layer of salt (by hand of course, this is Bolivia!) into piles to dry before loading the piles into a lorry. We then travelled onto the little village on the outskirts of the flats to see how they dry the salt before bagging for sale. They used a flat plate of metal to put the salt on and put a fire underneath - wow!

A Llama.

So that was the largest and highest salt flat in the world. A very strange but beautiful place. The driver then took us onto Uyuni and the train graveyard just outside of town. It sounded like it was going to be a bit dull; looking at old trains from 1905 to 1957 but with the amazing bluness of the sky it made for a good picture opertunity.

The end of the trip. We found some accomodation next to the buses, bloody freezing again. Booked the bus onto Potosi and went for food; traditional Bolivian food - pizza. James needed to de-fuzz his head and so found a barber filled with curious on-looking bolivians as the bald European hairfluff of the o.10mm haircut joined the lush, jet black Bolivian hair on the floor!

Not my photos but this is what the salt flats look like at certain times of the year with a film of water above the salt: