UYUNI SALT FLATS - VISIT TO THE LARGEST MIRROR OF THE WORLD

When planning our itinerary, we had been hesitating about travelling all the way down to the South to Uyuni, the chilly railway town, which is the jumping-off point for the salt flats, as it’s a long way from La Paz and our original main destinations. It was, however, very highly recommended by some of our friends and travel bloggers, as one of their most memorable destinations in South America. Hence we decided to give it a go, and signed up with one of the more reputable agencies, Cordilleras Travel, for the 3-day tour. Although this was not the most economical solution, we booked our tour in advance in La Paz at a travel agency to make sure we could go on a tour straight away when we arrived in Uyuni. Many people take the night bus from La Paz and try to book a trip starting on the same day after arriving in Uyuni at the crack of dawn. Although it is possible to save some money this way, you run the risk that tours starting that day with the better agencies would be fully booked, so you would either need to go with another tour operator or delay your departure by a day. With some of the less reputable agencies, you might get lucky and get just as good service; however, you could also be less fortunate and get stuck in an overloaded jeep with 7-8 people for 3 days in the desert. A few days before our arrival we heard some rumours from fellow travellers about a few days’ of cancelled trips due to the rain, resulting in a backlog of people wanting to go on tours – this was another reason to book in advance and guarantee our space. Later on, when talking to others in the same tour, it turned out that we had actually managed to negotiate well enough to pay a lower price than the others who made their reservation in Uyuni!

On our way to Uyuni we took a night bus from La Paz with Omar Trans, which has “cama” buses, meaning that seats are reclinable to almost fully horizontal position. It was not the same as a comfortable bed but it let us sleep enough to make the following day – and much more comfortable than an airplane seat. The journey was scheduled to be a 11-hour ride, arriving in Uyuni at 07:00am, well on time for the 10.30am departure of the tour. Hence we were slightly surprised at 05:30am when the bus suddenly stopped, the lights went on and an assistant on the bus shouted that we all had to get off the bus as we had arrived. Some who didn’t speak Spanish simply stayed on until we explained the situation to them. It was completely dark and nothing was open on the dusty streets of Uyuni, which is in the middle of nowhere in itself. Being close to the desert we started worrying that in the chilly night we would freeze to our backpacks in the middle of the streets. But then we happily concluded that business sense had made its way all the way down to Uyuni too, as there was a lady promoting her café on the streets, the only place open in the town, where she was collecting all tourists whose bus arrived early. It turned out that we were lucky that our bus had only beaten the schedule by 90 minutes, as some lucky people had arrived at 03:00am. So by the time we got to the café by zigzagging through the dark streets, the place was already packed with people busy with sipping their coffees and playing on their phones with surprisingly good Wi-Fi (for Bolivian standards)! The lady was making a fair revenue from saving all these people from the street and giving them breakfast - not even mentioning that prices in general in Uyuni are quite high, which locals blame on the distance and hence the cost of transportation from anywhere else in the country, so a breakfast was priced similarly to a fancy tourist destination. Probably not by coincidence, there was also a public shower in the same building, so we could take a quick shower before leaving this refuge when our travel agency finally opened.

We were in a group of 6 on the tour, the common size at better agencies so that there’s some more space in the jeep. This way one person sits next to the driver, three in the second row and two in the back row where knees hit the seat in front and it is torturous to spend more than 10 minutes. The agency suggested that we could rotate on the back row over the 3 days so that no one gets too lucky or unlucky, so we decided to start our rotation in the back and get the worst part over with and keep good memories of the end of the tour. We were in a group of three guys, two from the US and another from the UK, who were travelling together for a while, and a retired French lady, who was a slight mismatch with the rest of the group in age, area of interest and expectations about the trip - which caused us all some funny moments. As she didn’t speak English nor too much Spanish we tried to be the liaison in French which caused a chaotic combination of everyone trying to communicate with the guide in very broken Spanish, us doing our best with the lady in French so that she had someone to speak to, and then the rest of the communication among all the others in English.

Day 1: On the first day of the tour, on Valentine’s day, we started off in the train cemetery close to Uyuni where a few unused old train carriages were left rusting in the desert. The place would give a good scene for a western movie, and it makes a good playground for visitors.

The second stop, and the main highlight of the tour at the same time, was the Salar de Uyuni salt flat which is the largest salt lake in the world. It stretches over 9000 square kilometres, and it is practically a lake of more than 10 meters deep that is covered by a thick layer of salt crystals which can hold the weight of a car. The salt is also processed for consumption in the nearest village, Colchani. In the rainy season between January and April a thin layer of rain water usually covers the salty ground which creates a magical reflection of the sky and the surrounding mountains. Due to the surrealistic experience of having sky and clouds both above you and below your feet the lake is considered as one of the most extraordinary places in South America.

While we were making our Valentine photo, others were working on a clearly different type of picture in the background...

The salt desert is also where the 2016 Bolivia/Potosi Dakar rally will take place, so there have already been some signs of preparation in the desert at this fantastic location.

After leaving the salt lake the landscape started turning into a true desert with endless sand dunes and rocks as we drove on the (often improvised) dirt road. The occasional appearance of llama and vicuna herds escaping from the car and the vivid green quinoa fields broke the scene from time to time (we would never have guessed they could grow quinoa in this arid region!).

We also saw a suri, the local version of an ostrich. It seemed to be running from the growing black clouds accompanied by some lightning in the sky, that were the first signs of the coming storm that eventually reached us on the way. A heavy rain in the desert is a scary but at the same time very picturesque phenomenon. At about 18:00pm we arrived at our accommodation for the first night in a small dusty village with a couple of streets. As we were all covered in salt from head-to-toe from the salt flats we tried to wash it off before dinner. We started wondering in the meantime how basic accommodation the other agencies might offer if ours, which is one of the high quality ones provides such a basic place, with shared bathrooms and no handle on our room’s door. Just then, our guide started managing our expectations, warning us that the following day would not be in such a “luxurious” place but in a “a little more basic”.

Day 2: The second day was long and busy because we were doing most of the activities that are normally spread across the second and third day in the dry season. Now due to the rain, some of the “roads” were impassable, therefore, instead of the normal circling back to Uyuni on the third day, we would just be making an almost non-stop drive back having already visited the key sightseeing points. The first stop of the day was a set of fantastic volcanic rock formations in the desert, some of them had the size of a building. We then continued across the desert to visit five lagoons, each of them rich in bird life, mainly in flamingos that often covered the surface of the lake across the horizon. The water was shallow, below a meter in each lagoon and had high borax content (a poisonous mineral used for glass production) which coloured the water to white. The flamingos consume the microorganisms from the lagoons, and can find the spots where the water doesn’t contain any borax.

We had our picnic lunch with a fantastic view over one of the colourful lagoons, then continued our drive across the desert to further volcanic rock formations, the results of some eruptions of the mountains nearby. Some of these have the shape of a mushroom as the wind formed them over millions of years. The scene would make a good location for the next episode of Star Wars.

We were followed by storm clouds over the desert which made the scene even more dramatic. We made it to our accommodation by late afternoon, located in a row of stone houses in the middle of the rocky desert. Our expectations were so low at this point that it was a pleasant surprise! It was a hostel with dorm rooms, the bed mattresses placed on a bed frame made out of concrete and five of us all stayed in one room (the French lady kept referring to her contract stating she would be given a single room, so she was taken to the separate ‘hotel’, which we decided to skip, as we could imagine the facilities wouldn’t be much better either). Electricity in the village was between 19:00 and 22:00, so our flashlights came handy. We had no bathroom in the building either, so the few of us who decided to make the effort to get a bit cleaner (three out of five) had to walk about 200 meters in the sand and dust to a building which had a shower and offered it for public use too. We got some Bolognese (without meat) for dinner and some soup that showed a lot of resemblance to the one the night before, but we had a lot of fun with the group.

Day 3: At everyone’s pleasure we got up at 04:00am on the last night to drive across the desert to some steamy bubbling geysers at sunrise. It was extremely cold, we had to wear all our layers, but first the beautiful sky with sparkling stars above us, then the secretive view of the steaming geysers made getting up so early worthwhile.

While we had brought a hat and gloves for both of us in La Paz, I had left mine with our big backpacks at the travel agency since they forgot to mention we would have such an early start - luckily I could commandeer Szilveszter's. :)

By the time the sun rose we were on our way again in the jeep to a thermal bath which was a shallow pool of about 80cm with water temperate of around 40°C. What made this place very special was the surrounding – from the pool we saw flamingos up close and many other birds around us in the rising sunlight; it was also nice to warm up after a chilly start to the day.

After our last breakfast that we had next to the bath (finally a well-deserved pancake after so many days with rolls, butter and jam!) we continued our way to the last lagoon of the trip which is located near the shared border between Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, and is surrounded by dramatic volcanoes which are reflected in the water. Many people cross the border here to Chile and take the bus to San Pedro de Atacama. We felt very tempted to jump across for a few days as Northern Chile has so much to offer from the Atacama Desert to further geysers and national parks. However, we had to admit that rushing all that beauty in just a few days would be a shame, and we should rather give it the time it deserves another time. Hence we just hopped over to Chile for a picture, then got back to the jeep - now luckily with some extra space as two of our passengers continued to Chile - to get back to Uyuni in about 7 hours. We saw a furry desert fox (with an equally cute name, “zorro andino”) on the way and a beautiful oasis formed on the sides of a creek with abundant wildlife and herds of llamas, stretching over several kilometres.

Once back in Uyuni we connected to civilisation (and Wi-Fi) again and discovered that we needed to change our plans for the coming few days due to the upcoming referendum: the travel agency organising our jungle tour wasn’t able to bring us back from the jungle on the originally agreed day hence we had to change our tour dates and our flights. In the last few hours in Uyuni, that we planned to spend by having a nice hot dinner before our night bus back to La Paz, we ran to the airline office to find out our options and then to change our flights, called the travel agency (first on Skype, which didn’t work so we ran to a local telephone shop to try again) to change the dates of our jungle tour accordingly, and contacted the agency that organises the Death Road ride, a famous cycling road tour from La Paz across the Andes, which became our back-up plan for the day we gained in La Paz due to the changes in our tour date. We decided to book and pay online for this cycling tour (another thing to do in emergency from Uyuni before the agency closed) for the following morning, so that we didn’t lose a day, but this way we took the risk of potentially arriving to La Paz late if anything happens on the way and we miss our payed tour. We had 10 minutes left to have a quick shower before the bus, and just grabbed some cheese-filled empanadas on the street, the only thing that didn’t require any time to prepare, while running to the station with all our luggage on us.

We had another night on the bus, this time with even more interruptions than on the way there – we made an additional stop for more passengers to get on, with the lights on and the new passengers negotiating the price loudly, the driver announced an overnight break at 02:00am (naturally, switching all the lights on again), etc. All in all, we luckily arrived to La Paz at 04:30am, 2 hours earlier than scheduled, so we could easily get into the city, go to the closest hostel in the centre that we remembered from earlier, slept an hour in its living room and then joined the meeting point to the Death Road tour with a huge cup of coffee in our hands.