21st - 27th Oct - Mad Dash In Bolivia (Witching Heights & Salt Flats)

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Due to our close proximity to Bolivia we decided to make a dash for the Uyuni Salt Flats, this is something that Claire had been mad on doing since seeing all the amazing perspective photos on other peoples blogs, and something I wasn't really that bothered about to be honest. After eventually giving into the my ladies persuasive arguments we jumped on a luxury tourist bus and made our way around the shores of the majestic Lake Titicaca. Three or four hours out of Puno we arrived at the first destination - Copacobana "Her name was Lola.... She was a show girl" no, no, no - different place, Barry Manilow would never have coined a song after this one horse town. We disembarked the bus, got our papers signed off by the officials, walked over the hill through the array of locals offering their wares for sale at the side of the road, got our papers stamped for Bolivian entry, waited for the bus to come through border control, re-boarded and away, as simple as that. The bus route took us around a great swathe of Lake Titicaca's shoreline, its gigantic proportions make it look like the sea stretching out to the horizon, and all the time you are travelling through scene after picturesque scene of local folk caring for their livestock on the country slopes or tending their crops - beautifully serene.

We journeyed a further seven hours or so until we finally hit the outskirts of La Paz. Looking out of the bus windows night was fast approaching and we were staring at what looked like an impossibly large stadium of lights below us as we skirted the upper roads around the Bolivian capital, the cities urban sprawl creeping up the enclosing mountainous edges giving the illuminated impression of a super-mega bowl. La Paz lays claim to being the highest capital city in the world at a nose bleeding 11,811 ft, and as the bus wound its way around the rim of the city we could see snow capped mountains all around us to testify this status. After a long weary day on the bus we summoned a taxi and were shown to a very desirable hotel in the heart of Calle Lineres, a district that is famous for its "Witches Market", locally referred to as "El Marcardo De Las Brujas" - wooo! This was one of the other reasons we hopped the border to come here and staying so close to this curiosity was a bit of a bonus, however we would have to wait until the following day to see the delights this witchy woo place had on offer. With night upon us we booked our tickets to "Salar De Uyuni" or the "Uyuni Salt Flats" which wasn't going to depart until then the following evening (moan, groan, another nightbus!), which conveniently left us a whole day to explore La Paz's answer to J.K. Rowlings mystical Diagon Alley.

Following a great nights slumber we rolled out of the hotel and wandered the undulating cobbled streets towards our goal, nothing weird so far amongst the merchants stalls touting the usual assortment of hand crafted trinkets and woven woolen textiles. First signs... incense or something similar burning on a dish outside one shop, lots of weird looking effigies stood in lines frogs, snakes, humanlike shapes made of clay or stone, then another shop and then another - we have found witches central folks. We wander with western amazement as we look upon these arcane remedies and medicines, boxes that contain what looks like pick and mix sweets together with feathers and crystals and flowers, bottles with charms and money wrapped up inside them, snake skins, baby llama foetuses hanging from hooks or stuffed in display racks, some with hair and some boiled bald and shiny, cat furs, frogs, mice, a human skeleton in a hoody, row upon row of bottles with god knows what in them. Strange to our eyes for sure but to the locals its just an alternative to Boots or Superdrugs the chemists. Moving into a new home? - why not bury a llama foetus as an offering to "Pachamama" or mother earth for good health and prosperity with the llama representing new life, it makes sense really. Similar offerings used to be made by us in the west years ago, we still hang lucky horseshoes above doors for instance, and you can find all manner of weird offerings in jars or buried in foundations of old houses or attached to rafters giving much a similar effect, we have just lost our connection with the earth and adopted a purely scientific fact based approach to our lives. The shops owners are more than happy to guide you around their wares explaining the properties of this or that and in and amongst the traders hidden from view, behind plastic sheeting or a stall are the mystics giving their readings to the local folk, we tried taking photos of the people but it isn't the done thing here, offering money didn't help either - you can take pics of the wares but not the people it would seem. The Witches Market is certainly an eye opener and definitely something not to miss out on whilst in La Paz, I even ended up buying a set of good luck charms and I'm not even into all this hocus pocus, firmly believing that "luck is for losers", an item can't effect the outcome of such things can it?


After a great day exploring the witches market we headed back to our hotel to prepare things for the next leg of our Bolivian adventure. The crazy itinery is as follows - that evening we are to board a luxury nightbus and journey north towards the town of Uyuni, the following morning we will be picked up and taken for a brief one day tour of the salt fats themselves, on return to Uyuni town we will then board the returning nightbus to La Paz. A bit of a mad dash I know, but we hadn't really factored Bolivia into our travel plans until the last moment and what with the Inca Trail booked on 9th November, we were running around trying to fit in as much as possible before we fly back to Blighty on the 15th. So lets begin our delightful three days of travel shall we, our travel agent informs us to go to the main bus terminal where we will find our bus operator, wrong! We arrived with plenty of time to spare only to be told by the terminals customer services that our operator was down the road to the left somewhere, hmmph - okay lets go. After a bit of asking around we manage to locate our bus operator and hung around until they were ready to board, the signs look good as this is indeed a luxury bus with plenty of leg room, movies and even drinks & food are handed out when we are seated. We are waiting to depart when an official asks us for our passport details? You what? is our startled reply, we are afterall travelling within Bolivia and had no idea this was required, our travel agent had not mentioned it and we had seen him not two hours prior to setting out. The official starts saying things to the effect that without the passport we cannot possibly travel with them as they cross security checkpoints and we should have bought our passports to them for inspection. Open mouthed and shaking our heads, trying to contain our frustration at our inept travel agent (we did have plenty of time to sort this out had we have known) but now with ten minutes before departing, we are sat thinking what a right royal fuck up. Well luckily for us the tour operator decides to throw caution to the wind and allows us journey on the proviso that we supply our passport details post event (yeah right), but we agree that we will and we get on our merry way at long last - woo hoo! *wipes forehead of sweat*

The journey starts well, the seats are nice and comfortable, the night encroaches we are watching Bruce Willis in his latest outing as Lt. John McClane in Die Hard 4 which fortunately has not been dubbed in spanish so we can understand the dialogue, the film runs it inevitable course and I'm yawning so it must be time for bed. Having travelled so many times now on night buses we have sort of gotten used to the fact that around the mountains you are gonna be swaying this way and that during the journey and after a while of irritablity I managed to get some shut eye. How long I slept, I 'm not entirely sure because all of a sudden I was up and awake and being thrown about like a rag doll, it was as if the bus had left the road and decided upon a short cut across a ploughed field - no shit folks, this was mad bouncy. Looking frantically out the window the moon shining down across a barren landscape nothing seems untoward, the toilet door begins to bang open and shut as the bus continues its dukes of hazzard style off-roadin. Basically the roads are rough as hell around these parts and its something we were gonna have to live with for the rest of our trip. With the possibilty of sleep firmly off the agenda we are left with bump, bump, bump in the night until dawn cracks on the horizon and we are finally deposited shaken and stirred at our destination at around 7am in the morning. Sleep deprived, irritable and dirty we are told that our ride out to the salt flat will not be ready until 10.30am which leaves us a few hours to kill in this little piece of civillisation. Fellow travellers are all milling around the same cafes and shops, sitting out the wait until go time, we find a cafe and get washed and spruced up in their toilets - i feel like a vagrant.

The local market is setting up so we decide to walk around a bit, filling the time as best we can before we are finally picked up by our 4x4 at 10.45am and taken out into the flats proper. We are apparently taking a couple of Koreans out to a hotel made of salt then rendezvousing with some other travellers at another location to bring them back from a three day expedition (so much for us having our own venture). First stop just outside the town we visited the Train Graveyard, which I found to be truly fascinating and I'm no trainspotter. Steam train after steam train, one behind another with assorted train track and twisted broken steel strewn about for good measure, made for some fantastic photos. We jumped on and around these rusting wrecks before hurrying back to our jeep and heading out to the salt flats proper. We set off at a good pace, visiting a small village on the edge of the salt flats before proceeding to the salt hotel where we disembark again and release our Korean's companions. This is quite an amazing place, everything is made of salt here which makes an interesting choice for a building material, I'm left wondering what happens in the event of rain - does it dissolve? but then we are in a desert area so I suppose it can't do that much damage. Apparently some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a giant prehistoric lake. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó Lake and Uru Uru Lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Uyuni. It really is a vast area of salty goodness and we hop back in the jeep and head off across it at speed. It's pretty but ultimately uneventful, in the distance is a dramatic landscape, the jeep is going at a fair pace, but due to the the scale of this place we don't appear to be moving anywhere fast. We stop off and attempt to take some photos of this desolate place, Claire & I are trying our best to mimick these magic perspective photos we have seen on this site and elsewhere, but the glare on the salt as the midday sun is at its zenith makes seeing anything in the viewfinder incredibly difficult, I wrap my hoody over my head and its still troublesome. It's taking longer than we realised to get the photos we want and our guide is grumbling about having to meet up with these other folk for lunch, we start protesting that we didn't pay to be a ferry for other people and that we only have the day to do our stuff before heading off this evening. We begin to realise the travel agents and tour companies in Bolivia are not really offering the same sort of service we have had in other countries we have visited so far - a bit of a shame really. After our driver grumbles some more we decide that we have to do as he says and go pick these other travellers up and have our lunch as they have planned for us.

An hour or more of journeying in this white abyss and the dramatic landscape we viewed from afar has finally materialised into a massive volcanoe and a ranch of sorts in the middle of this barren salty wasteland. The houses are stone built with grass thatch and there are herds of llamas roaming the sparse pastures, we also glimpse some flamingos wading in the salt water pools nearby. We meet the fellow travellers who soon inform us that they themselves had been left behind by the tour operator the night before which makes us feel that we haven't been that hard done by after all. They had been on the three day expedition so weren't really that fussed about what to do next, but as we are only on a one day tour with time being short and having so much to see, we feel a bit anxious that we are not seeing much and instead are running around picking people up and dropping them off. We eat our lunch and jump in the jeep together and head out towards Cactus Island, which is a rock covered with giant cactuses, we stay here a fair while and manage to get the pictures we are after and finally jump in the jeep and head back to town as the sun is begining to disappear once more. The salt flats are quite an amazing place and it would have been alot better to have a few days here but with time being of the essence and another nightbus ready to take us back to La Paz that evening we had to make do with a frantic day in the salt white wilderness.

Thats just about it, we had another jumpy bumpy ride back to La Paz on the nightbus, there is actually a train from La Paz to Uyuni, something that we unfortunately found out too late, and would recommend to anyone interested. We got back to La Paz to find our hotel had been taken over by an outing of school kids who ran around and generally made alot of noise, something that you don't really need after three days of splintered, sketchy sleep. We had one day resting before getting the bus the following day to take us back into Peru and to Arequipa. More stories are to follow... so until next time Adios Amigos 😊

NB - I have actually arrived back in the UK now and will endeavour to get in touch with all you folks asap - so watch out, I may be coming to bore your socks off about my adventures....

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Photos

Flash Traveller
Riding new technology in the salt flats

Incense & Effigies
Welcome to weirdness

Potions & Lotions
Christ knows what they are all for

Skeleton In A Hoody
With mice and tails in a box - nothing strange to see here

Dried Frog
I didn't ask

Pick & Mix
I think you chuck this assortment on a fire... I may be wrong

Hairy Scary Llama Foetus
Bury one for good luck in yer new abode :o)

Cat Skins
Anything goes

Engines Apart
She canne' take no more captin!

Salt Crystal Patterns
The salt creates slightly irregular natual geometrical patterns across the blank expanse

Salt Eyes
These little pools of hubble bubbling salt waters - are named the 'eyes'

Hats Off
This hat is tiny