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Published: December 26th 2006
Well, it's the time of year to wish everybody a Happy Christmas and New Year, although sitting in Santiago in 32 degree heat, it doesn´t feel as Christmassy as it does at home. Whilst we imagine eveyone at home spent the build up to Christmas cozily eating and drinking in pubs and front rooms, we have had 2 epic journeys (for very different reasons) and an awesome trip across the Salar de Uyuni into Chile. We have seen some of the strangest but most spectacular scenery possible, crossing salt flats, vividly coloured lakes filled with flamingoes and passing smoking volcanoes before heading into parched desert. We are now staying with Penny, James, Isobel and Henry and are really enjoying being around old friends in a cool family atmosphere for Christmas.
Our fears of not being able to leave Santa Cruz proved unfounded and a much smaller than expected demonstration never looked like sparking a revolution. So it was back on the road for us! Stopping in one place for a month must have made us stupid as we forgot the complete unreliability of Bolivian buses. The predicted 6 hour journey to Uyuni, the gateway to the salt flats, inevitably turned
into a extremely painful 10 hour marathon arriving at 4am. The road was extremely bumpy and having got seats at the back we spent a big proportion of time being thrown up in the air. My arm, which although out of plaster is still extremely painful and unuseable, felt like it was being rebroken everytime the full weight of the back row lurched it against the window. Nosi also managed to attract a snotty faced child who became obsessed by her iPod. Sitting on her lap, he bizarrely bypassed the music for "Beginner´s Spanish". I then had to endure a bumpy, snotty night of him joyfully shouting 'uno, dos, tres....' and similar beginner Spanish phrases into my ear hole. I can see exactly why his mother made no effort to retrieve him and reckon he can count himself lucky that the windows in the bus were stuck shut or he would have spent a cold and lonely night on the roadside.
Tours across the Salt Flats of Salar de Uyuni are notriously badly organised with bad food and regular breakdowns of vehicles. Luckily the tourist information in Uyuni has set up a database of best operators. So after 4
Isla del pescada
An oasis of volcanic rocks and giant cacti, some over 1,200 years old. hours sleep we booked ourselves onto a 3 day tour ending in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. We proved to be very lucky with the company Emprexa, as our jeep and driver were great and the group of 7 proved to be very entertaining with an uncanny ability to locate beer sellers in the most unlikely of places. This proved quite fortunate as the nights in what could loosley be called hotels required a large amount of booze to induce any form of sleep. The beds must have been got second hand from a local brothel and sagged to unbelievable proportions in the middle with matresses so thin that you woke with a wire imprint in your back. The sheets had probably not been changed for years and there was no pillow to be found. There was something that could have been dried mud in my bed but I couldn´t say for sure after decided it was probably better not to look.
Still, being tired in no way diminished the greatness of the scenery. The area is initially pretty barren to say the least but then you suddenly find yourself driving through a plain of salt that stretches
for miles in every direction and it's pretty special. The salt flats were formed by a huge salt water lake drying up, just leaving the salt behind. In some places the salt is 8 meters deep and looks very similar to a snowy plain in the middle of the desert. In the middle of the flats there is a small, rocky island "Isla del Pescado" covered with the biggest cacti that I have ever seen. Sitting on this baking hot island and looking out over what seemed like endless snow I felt like I was witnessing one of the most surreal sights of my life. It takes about 4-5 hours to drive across the plain and we met a few people who said their drivers just fell asleep at the wheel. Luckily the selection of 80´s tunes on Nosi´s iPod meant our driver remained alert, if slightly pained, throughout. We passed smoking volcanoes and huge mountains that shimmered with up to 7 different shades of brown and yellow. Then there were the lakes......
There are various lakes dotted across this barren landscape and they range in colour from really vivid reds to yellows and greens. The different colours are
Blown away!
Joe at the Laguna Colorada caused by different minerals in the water reacting with different weather conditions. The colour in the green lake is worryingly caused by an abundance of arsenic. With the exception of the green lake which unsuprisingly supported no noticable life forms, the other lakes were covered with huge numbers of flamingoes. There was a beautiful contrast between the pink of the flamingoes and the reds, blues and yellows of the lake. At the Laguna Colorada at 4,800 meters, the wind was so fearsome that we had to try and shelter behind any available rocks.
On the final day we drove through more beautiful mountains, shimmering with different colours, before reaching the most bizarre area of geysers and bubbling mud. It looked like something out of a Star Wars movie as these pools of bubbling mud belched out clouds of gas. The ground around the holes is cracked and fragile an you have to be quite careful not to fall foul of a crumbling edge which would plunge you into the 200 degree mud below. The tour finished with a quick trip to some hot spings where any tired aches could be washed away before heading over the border.
I
Very broody!
Nos and Henry have really enjoyed Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia but crossing the border into Chile did feel like reaching civilsation. The road literally instantly changes from a bumpy dirt path to a modern paved highway. We spent a night in San Pedro de Atacama, gorging on a feast of good food and wine and washing in hot water! Rumours that toilet paper could be flushed down the toilet however, proved to be unfounded. Christmas has been lovely, spent in Santiago with Penny and James (friends from home) and their kids Isobel and Henry. They have been so welcoming and being in a family atmosphere has been a really welcome change. The downside of this is that Henry and Isobel are adorable and my wife is now more broody than ever. If only I could stop her singing
"Henry, Henry Horse,
Henry is a Horse of Course" !
To be honest Chile doesn´t go in for Christmas in a big way and the shops and public transport have been open throughout. Christmas here is celebrated on the evening of the 24th. Laura, who we have met on various occasions on our travels and who now feels like an old friend, came over
and we had a fabulously indulgent dinner, drinking till 4 in the morning. A rather drunken Santa managed to perform his duties before we all crashed out. Penny and James were then up 3 hours later with excited kids running around. I lay in bed with a crashing hangover thanking my lucky stars that I wasn´t having to entertain excitable children. I truly admire their energy but they looked rough the whole of the next day and only the´'hair of the dog' booze up at a friends BBQ seemed to revive them.
Felix Navidad to everybody and a Happy New year!
Love Joe and Nos XXX
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Mike (LUPC)
non-member comment
Happy Xmas.......
and a festive New Year to you both, seems like you're helping to set the world to rights at last (knew your talents were wasted at Procureweb Joe). Enjoyed reading all the tales on the blog. If 'Torchwood' (a spin-off from Dr Who) is anything to go by, you're FAR, FAR better off staying in deepest South America than ever coming back to Cardiff.