The Salt Flats of Uyuni

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J:

Next up Holly and I headed to the Salt Flats of Uyuni. On the way down to Uyuni Holly managed to cause sufficient damage to the coach to necessitate everyone to wait half an hour for it to be repaired (NB interestingly, in Bolivia the word 'repaired' is roughly translated as 'botch job that will hopefully hold over until my shift has finished and it's somebody else's problem'). After we arrived we booked a tour and set off the next morning.

The trip involves taking a jeep out across the enormous plains and stopping at several areas of stunning scenery. We began at the train cemetery, moved on to wild, naturally sculpted rock formations, lagoons emitting deep shades of red, green, white and blue, and vast flats with nothing to see in all directions but the bright white salty floor. Our accomodation was basic (no running water!), maybe because it was made entirely from salt. The beds, chairs, tables and even walls were all saline. To test this (and also because I lost some weird Danish card game) I tried one of the walls. Definately salt. The best part of thye trip though was saved for the last day, when we walked through an otherworldly outcrop of muddy pools spouting plumes of thick, sulphuric smoke which was amazing to look at, if unpleasant to smell.

The whole tour seemed to have been arranged for the benefit of taking photographs. We only stayed in each scenic spot for long enough to take a few pictures, although it was amusing the relish with which some people took to this. We saw a couple of girls put such force into posing with their their stomachs in and chests out that they were in danger of slipping a disc. Other groups spent ten minutes arranging themselves and taking dozens of shots in a photo-shoot style, to no doubt later choose which picture best summed up the spontaneity of the moment. The salt flats provide a perfect setting to take photos with altered perspectives - sitting in the palms of people's hand and so forth. We tried a few inexpert compositions, but were completely confounded with the planning and preparation of some groups who had even gone so far as to bring props - plastic dinosaurs and toy elephants.

In an ideal world, before booking our salt flats trip we would have visited several agencies, asked questions, shopped around and found the best deal. What actually happened was that we arrived in Uyuni later than expected at 6pm (exasperated by Holly's vandalism, of course), only an hour before the tour operators closed. The english-speaking owner of our hostel had previously agreed to help us find a good tour, but when we arrived he was, naturally, nowhere to be seen and had left a cleaner in charge. We tried to explain our predicament to her and were duly met with utter incomprehension. We've been on such a tight schedule to reach Puerto Iguazú for Christmas that we had no choice but to go on a tour the following day from anyone who would offer us to it, so we pretty much went with the first company we saw. Big mistake.

As the trip progressed, it became clear that a number of the operator's promises were at best misleading, and at worst plain lies. We were told that although our guide spoke only spanish, we would be going with two bilingual English girls who would be happy to translate. As it turned out, our companions were a Danish couple we had previously met on the jeep back from Rurrenabaque, a Polish girl and an Israeli guy. When I say that my spanish was probably the second best of the group, I'm sure you can imaging how baffled we were for the three days. We were promised drinking water every day which never materialised - slighly worrying in one of the driest places in the world. We were also told that our driver was prohibited from drinking whilst on duty, a contractual obligation no less. This seemed superfluous since we were only travelling in daylight hours but on the trip back we saw the last of these promises broken when the driver stopped off to buy himself a beer for the journey. Oh, and it was only 10am by this point...

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