Today was the first of a three-day tour through the Salar de Uyuni and surrounding desert altiplano.
Salar de Uyuni has been on my dream list for a long time, ever since some friends of mine posted their photos on the surreal moon-like landscape of the salt flats many years ago. I booked this tour knowing a few things ahead of time: I’d be heading into the middle of absolutely nowhere, with freezing cold nights, hot merciless sun during the day, and few creature comforts. But I was really excited to go. Because, having been there, I can tell you that the Salar de Uyuni is among the most unique and strangely beautiful places in the world.
Shopping in Uyuni town
Our tour didn’t start until noon on the first day. So, after breakfast at the hotel, I headed into the small town of Uyuni with some of my tourmates for a bit of last-minute shopping and prep.
We walked up the few blocks to town, stopping at the ATM for some cash (there are none in the desert, obviously). We found the small, ill-equipped grocery store and picked up some snacks for the road; there’s food on the tour, but it’s more of the eat-to-live variety than anything else, and there are long hours on the road in between meals. We browsed at the small market, and in the ubiquitous handicraft shops. I bought a small shoulder bag with llamas on it to store a bit of extra stuff, since my small daypack wasn’t quite up to the task of everything I needed to pack with me, and I’d be leaving my big pack behind in Uyuni town. Whatever; it only cost around 15 bucks, and it’ll make a good souvenir.
At around eleven, we headed back to the hotel to get ready for departure. Destination: Salt!
Home in a 4×4
At noon, four 4x4s showed up, each with a local professional driver. We split up among the four cars, which would be our homes for the next three days.
Since we’re sixteen of us plus a guide, we had an uneven number, so one 4×4 needed to take five people. Geraldine, Koen, Ellen, Isla and I drew the short straw, and ended up with the only car with a back third-row seat. Of course, that seat was tiny and cramped, so we agreed to switch off and rotate seats. I started off up front next to the driver, Orlando, who spoke no English, but I attempted a bit of halting conversation with my rudimentary Spanish. Mostly what I learned about him was that he liked to play his music, which consisted mostly of remixed songs in twenty-second clips off of some German dance radio station. We listened to about as much of that as we could stand before asking him if we could plug in our phones and play music off of them instead. He indulged us, though he did switch back to his music quite a bit.
It was a bit difficult with only a Spanish-speaking driver to understand everything we would see over the next three days. Sam offered some basic info at each stop, but it was really top-line; she’s a tour manager, not a tour guide, and she’s not the most verbose person in the world. Alessandra told me later that, due to her being fluent in Spanish, she was able to converse with her driver and get a ton of history, background and info about each place we visited. Unfortunately, the people not in her car missed out on some of that. It’s one of the frustrations of travelling to a place where I don’t speak much of the language; I can always manage, but I lose out on some of the richness of the experience. But alas. It was amazing enough that it didn’t mar things.
Where trains go to die
Our first stop was right on the edge of Uyuni town. The “train cemetery” was a former train repair yard back in the early steam engine days, when silver and other minerals were mined in Uyuni and transported by rail to Chile and beyond. Whenever a train would break down, it would come here, and many of them were unable to be repaired and just stayed there.
Today, the trains are mostly rotted out and covered in graffiti. And though it sounds like a case of tetanus waiting to happen, tourists can climb onto, into and over them and take cool photos. If you like trains, history, or just cheesy photos, it’s a fun place to spend a half hour or so.
Into the salt flats
We made a brief stop at the town of Colchani, where the drivers had lunch. Sam advised us not to eat there, so we just browsed the souvenir stalls a bit and killed time until we were ready to go.
As we drove along, the landscape started to get white. Nope, it isn’t snow. It’s what we came here for: lots and lots of salt.
The Salar de Uyuni is the largest and highest salt flat in the world. Stretching for more than 10,000 square kilometers, and at an altitude of over 3,600m, it is a huge expanse of white hardened salt. Formed from prehistoric seas that used to exist in this area, today, the Salar is a mineral-rich expanse that contains old islands, desert, and miles and miles of salt. In the dry season, like now, it just goes on for brilliant miles and miles. In the summer rainy season, pools of water collect on the salt, giving it a “mirror” effect that I would’ve loved to see — perhaps another time in the future.
We first stopped at a monument where the Dakar Rally comes through the salt flats. There were a bunch of flags from different nations of the world there, so we all took photos in front of them. Well, all except the Swiss, who couldn’t find their flag. (If you’re reading this and you’re from Switzerland, and you’re considering visiting the Salar, bring a flag along, eh?) I found Canada’s flag easily, as it was among the largest and most prominent.
Dinosaurs, ninjas and beer bottles
Then, we drove a bit further into the middle of nowhere, where there were no roads and the drivers seemed to be making it up as they went along. They found us a deserted spot with nobody else around, and we spent the next hour and a half or so out there taking all the cheesy photos that you pay money on these tours to get to take.
See, the flat white salt plays tricks on your eyes and on your perspective. By positioning people and objects further or closer to the camera, you can get all sorts of optical illusions. It’s like Photoshop, only live. We had brought in a number of props for the photos, like toy dinosaurs, beer bottles, pocketknives and so on. The drivers and guides all know all the tricks, and they helped us have some fun taking lots of great pictures and videos. See below for a sampling, though some of the best ones ended up on other people’s cameras and phones in the group, so I’ll post them later.
Cactus island
The salt flat used to be a prehistoric sea. And in that sea, there were prehistoric islands, some of which survive to today. After the salt flat, we visited Isla Incahuasi, otherwise known as Cactus Island. Which, as it sounds, is an island completely covered in cactus.
The cactus plants only grow about a centimeter a year. Considering some of them stretch to over five meters high, you can do the math on how long they’ve been there. Suffice to say, a long time.
Isla Incahuasi is a bit creepy, with all the cactus plants everywhere and nothing else. I could easily imagine it as the setting for some horror movie. We hiked up the twenty minutes or so to the top, again being reminded of the humbling effect of altitude, Then we snapped our photos and hiked back down. Nobody had any run-ins with the cacti, thankfully.
Sunset on the Salar
At that point, it was late afternoon and the sun was low in the sky. Sam asked us if we wanted to head directly to our night stop, or stick around for a few minutes to watch the sunset. Naturally we voted for the latter. So we watched the sun disappear over the horizon from the base area near the island. It was pretty spectacular.
After that, we hopped back into the cars and the drivers took off for another hour’s drive or so towards our evening stop. I should mention that there aren’t really any roads in the salt flats; the drivers kind of make up their own routes, sometimes following each other convoy-style, and sometimes taking staggered routes to avoid the dust trails from the cars in front of them. It’s tricky driving, even during the day. At night, it becomes near-impossible. Orlando was a pro, though, and got us there safe and sound.
A night in a salt hotel
You’ve heard of the Ice Hotel near Quebec City, right? Well, how about a Salt Hotel, made entirely out of the one thing they have loads of in these parts? Yep, our stop for the night was the Jukil Community Lodge, in the tiny community of Santiago de Agencha, and it was lodge made of salt. Everything — the dining room table, the beds, the footstools, even the floor — was made of the stuff.
Jukil is actually a project funded by Planeterra, the foundation run by G Adventures. They supported the renovation and opening of the lodge by the local community, which provides an additional stream of income. Most of the community here is dependent on agriculture, namely growing quinoa — the other thing they they have an abundance of here. But it’s so dry that some years even in the rainy season it hardly rains at all, and then there’s no crop and, hence, no money. Tourism is fairly recent here, and I hope that it remains responsible and sustainable and run by the local communities. I shudder to think about the salt flats all developed by international interests and full of high-rises and hotels. I hope that never happens. But I digress.
We arrived at the surprisingly comfortable Jukil Lodge around 6:30, and were offered hot tea to start with, and shown to our rooms, which were in individual salt huts for two, three or four people. I bunked in with Gabby and Geraldine. The huts were actually quite posh, compared to what I’d been led to expect on the salt flat tour; we had running water, electricity, and comfy beds with tons of blankets (though it was cold so I was grateful for my rented sleeping bag and thermal liner, nonetheless). Heck, we even had hot showers, which I was *not* expecting, but appreciated nonetheless.
Dinner was very tasty — the delicious quinoa soup that they serve everywhere in Bolivia, followed by llama for the carnivores and a veggie alternative for the rest of us. We ate in the main salt lodge, and then tucked in for showers and sleep. There isn’t much to do in the salt flats once the sun goes down, but we were so tired that it didn’t matter and we pretty much fell straight to sleep.