Salty Salar

We took an overnight bus to Uyuni, Bolivia to meet a tour of the Salar de Uyuni.  Together with a Swiss couple and two English girls we had met we headed out on our tour with our trusty guide, Gwaldo.  The morning was cold, the windows on the bus had frozen but inside we enjoyed heat.

The first stop on the tour, which is essentially 2.5 days in a 4WD driving around the Salar, was at the train cemetery. This was awesome.  All the trains are from local mining and salt industry cargo trains.  Thus part of Bolivia, famous for silver mines is essentially the fabled land of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid.  Then we drove out into the salt field, a vast, blinding, white field.  We saw salt mounds, salt hotels, buildings mad out of blocks of salt, and cutting fields.  The landscape was out of this world.  It was so cool.  In the distance there were the shadows of volcanoes and mountain ranges, but at the horizon, the glare off the salt was so strong, it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the sky began. (sound like forest gump?).  For lunch we hung out at an island covered in large candelabra cacti.  Gwaldo made us lunch of BBQ chicken, rice and veggies. After lunch it was a long drive across the salt field and then an arid, dusty, red dirt, desert. We stopped occasionally to photograph wildlife, vicunas (deer), llama, and alpaca and to take photos of the desert landscape.  That night we stayed at a very basic hospedaje. Luckily, our layers of clothing and sleeping bags kept us warm during the just below freezing temperatures.

The next morning we started out just after the sunrise.  The landscape was more of the same, beautiful rolling red desert hills.  At one point in the shadow of an active smoking volcano we got out of the car to wander around a lava field.  Around mid-morning on our drive the landscape shifted to dry tundra.  We came upon a few lakes, icy and crystal clear with Flamingoes!  The flamingoes were super pink from eating the plankton that feeds off the mineral rich water.  Seeing flamingoes in the wild was awesome.  After lunch we drove further east and south.  The landscaped changed again to yellow sand as we reached the highest elevations.  We stopped to photograph rock formations that have been eroded by millennia of wind and sand.  The rocks are called, Dali-esque for there liquid acrobatics. The day if riding in the desert ended at a red colored lake, red because if the color and density if plankton in the water.  We spent the night playing cards an yahtzee with our tourmates.  At 4700m the night was freezing cold, about 10 degrees below freezing.  We were warm and toasty though with enough layers of clothing and our sleeping bags.

The third morning of the tour, we woke up before dawn to get to the geysers.  The geysers are a little more like sulfur vents than old faithful, but in the light if the rising sun, the landscape of sulfur steam and craggy, rocky formations it was beautiful.  We hung out for a while listening to the bubbling and burping sulfur pools and standing amidst the blowing steam.  Next we went to a hot spring where Jon was the only one brave enough to get out into the cold air and go into the hot spring.  It felt great and I definitely felt like the desert grime of 3 days had washed off. Once we left the hot spring we headed toward the Chilean border.  Just before the crossing we visited lacuna verde, a green colored lake from the high concentrations of copper mineral.  At the border we said goodbye to our driver and together with our British friends waited an hour in the middle of nowhere for our connecting bus to San Pedro de Atacama.  This was probably the coldest we had been in the entire 3 days.  Eventually the bus arrived and we went through chilean customs and immigration in San Pedro.