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Published: February 24th 2007
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Trains in Bolivia
Fast and more comfortable than buses... AND you get water bombed by little kids along the way. what more could you want? Wow! Bolivia is nothing short of incredible. We just spent the last 3 days in a jeep exploring the Salar de Uyuni and the National Park full of flamingos, lagunas, geysers and natural thermal hot springs. What an adventure!
It all started off with a visit of the railway graveyard where dozens of old locamotives, engines, cabooses and everything in between have been left to rust in the middle of the desert. Of course, being the childish kids we are we climbed all over them, took hilarious pictures on top of the cars and generally just ran around enjoying the hot sunshine and the blisteringly cold winds that swept across the plains.
The next stop was a small village... their entire existence depended solely on the production of 2000-3000kg of salt every day. We were shown the machinery (aka, the pìece of wood on top of a furnace) used to dry the salt, then the area where they add the iodine to the product... and then finally the pile of salt in the corner than gets put into 1kg bags and sealed with fire from a propane tank. All of the 80 families living in the tiny village worked
either in the factories, out collecting the salt from the plains, or in the tourist industry selling salt figures to the multiple numbers of jeeps that drove by daily on their way to the Salar.
A few minutes out of the town and we hit the end of the road. The Salar de Uyuni was a lake thousands of years ago... all that is left is hundreds of square kilometres of flat lands - and lots and lots of salt. We were told that the salt is actually 10m deep all across the old lake bed. We were right, we had hit the end of the road - a foot and a half of water had covered the plains and there was absolutely no track left... so of course, we drove through the water for about 3 hours!! What excitement - we even got to spy on people taking the salt out of the ground and loading it into the trucks to take back to the village... of course the salt would have been soaking wet, but they had piled into metre high piles days before and they just scraped off the top part to take back to the
city.
We had a couple stop to take pictures (more fun than you would imagine), and then visited the island of fish. Not named this because there were fish on the island at some point, but if you look at it from the air, it actually is in the shape of a fish. It was here that we climbed to the top to take a panoramic view of the Salar and then 33 islands (and volcanoes) that dot the horizon. Did I mention that we were at about 4000m above sea level and were DYING of lack of oxygen... I could barely make it to the top of the island!!! It felt like there was someone ripping my lungs out of my chest and then crushing them between their feet... it´s a good thing that we´re getting aclimatized now in preparation for our Inca Trail/Machu Picchu hike, or else we may be in trouble!
The first night we stayed in a village of a population of less than 200 people and more than 500 llamas. There was only electricity between 7:30 and 10:30pm... and sporatic running water. It was an adventure... but a bloody cold one at that! We
Babies and Carnaval
A carnaval parade that included pretty much every child in the entire city of Uyuni! thought we were going to die the wind was so sharp and piercing... the temperatures were well below zero! (haha, I know that really isn´t that cold... but you have to remember I´ve spent the last 3 1/2 months in very very very hot temperatures and it was a little bit of a shock to the system... and the wind probably made it -20!!). We ended up playing card games with the Brits and the 3 Brazilian kids on our tour (not really kids as they were all between the ages of 24 and 28!).
The second day was spent visiting the numerous lagunas, watching an active volcano, driving through kms of fields of quinoa, trekking over a salt flat and trying not to pass out from lack of air... chasing llamas, chasing almost everything as the wind was so strong it caught toques, gloves, cups, garbage and anything else and just flung it across the flats - we were definitely entertaining the drivers and guides as we clumsily ran after our things, tiring out after only covering less than 100m!!
Our second night was pretty horrid - if we thought that the first night was cold, we
Scrap yard
rusty ole scraps a´metal - yet strangely entertaining! were sooooooo wrong! It got to colder than -10 and the wind had yet to let up. We had been drinking coco tea (yes, made with the same leaves that cocaine is made from, but with NONE of the effects - it is a delicious herbal drink - or chew - that the locals use to stave off altitude sickness) and maté... which is the Argentinian tea served in Calabaza cups and shared as a communal drink. In our brilliance we decided that the tea wasn´t enough to keep us warm, so between the 7 of us we bought 2 26oz bottles of local Bolivian rum. Kind of tasted like vanilla extract - but mixed with the tea was a FABULOUS cure for the cold! We were all giggly, telling terrible jokes, having bed races across the hostal floor and trying not to pass out from the nasty fumes coming from the bathroom (one of the poor Brits had been taken with a serious case of the travellers´ runs and there was NO running water at the place!).
Waking up at 4am the next morning was NOT the easiest thing to do. We had luckily all slept in every
I´ll take THAT!
A little girl stealing our cameras... she must have seen hundreds in her lifetime! piece of clothing that we owned, so we didn´t have to get dressed, but leaving the warm bed to the cold darkness of outside was one of the hardest things I´ve had to do in months. It was well worth it though, as the view of the stars with completely unobstructed... the Milky Way appeared to light up the entire sky, we could see Draco and Orion and millions of other stars!
A half hour drive took us to the geysers - WOW!!! I have never seen so much bubbly mud in my whole life! At first I refused to get out of the car due to the fact that I was scared my hands would fall off, but the massive vents of steam and the sounds of boiling earth lured me in! The steam blowing out of there was over 180degrees - and yes, if I did jump in, I would have burned to death (we did a census, and EVERYONE had that same thought as we were standing on the edge watching the steam rise!).
The next stop was a thermal hot water bath. Oh yes, it was lovely! We skipped down to our bikinis and completely submerged
Engine in Train Graveyard
Richard, Andy, Lauren and MEEE on top of a train in the rusty old graveyard ourselves for as long as our driver would let us stay there. It was the first time since getting into Bolivia that I had been comfortably warm!
Our third and last day of the tour was pretty much just driving back to Uyuni, the town where we had started from. Lots of sights inbetween - more lagunas, rocks and mountains (that inspired Salvador Dali in lots of his works), many more llamas (which are SO cute, by the way!) and way too much desert!
The trip was incredible - would highly recommend it, but it´s not for the faint of heart - if nasty bathrooms, sub-par food and extreme coldness bother you AT ALL, you probably shouldn´t good... luckily none of us were high maintenance, and we had a fabulous time! I have hundreds of pictures to prove it!
Tonight we take a night but to Potosí where we´ll be visiting the silver mines... and then onto La Paz tomorrow night (hopefully, all things going as planned... we were supposed to leave for Potosi this morning, but all 5 buses sold out and we are stuck here in Uyuni for another day - not a bad thing,
Goin home
Full truck and empty piles of salt on the Salar as the Carnaval parades go by almost every hour and there are load of artisan stalls to help pass the time). After La Paz will be a visit to Lake Titicaca and the back into Perú for the Machu Picchu adventure. (and Mike! hehe)
Wish me luck with the altitude! Will keep in touch!
C
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Theresa
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sweeeeet
Hey Callie!! Glad things are still going well, I thought it was neat reading your journal on the salt place, because I saw the 'lonely planet' on the place, also in that same episode he went on this bike tour (Peggy Howard just did it and wrote about it in her blog) I can't remember how much it costs, but they supply bikes and everything and you go down this mtn. that is a huge rock wall on one side and a huge cliff on the other side, 1km far down at some points. Anywho, I just thought I'd tell you about that, cause it seems like something you'd do :P hahahaha. You may have heard about it already. Anywho, still stalking you and reading all your journals :P I love them, keep 'em comin :D cheers. Love ya :D