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Published: January 21st 2009
Wee Si on a Huge Jeep
Obligatory Salar De Uyuni weird-perspective photo Bolivia has just kicked Peru´s arse!
So, after the madness that was La Paz we headed to Sucre for a few days for some chillaxing. Its a beautiful, quiet enough town, called by the locals La Ciudad Blanca or The White City, as all the buildings are whitewashed and are topped with Tuscan-esque terracotta roofs, with lots of beautiful colonial buildings & churches set around the main square, and tiny narrow cobbled streets to wander. Having said that, the we couldnt actually get into any of the museums or churches as they all seemed to be closed all the time, except for one, which was the Museum of Human Anatomy, which I thought would be interesting but was actually just a tad weird - cross sections of various organs (fine), foetuses in jars (freaky) and a load of ´models´of various bits & pieces that frankly looked like they´d been made by a load of 6 year olds let loose with play dough after some pretty hectic nightmares!
Just outside of town is Parque Cretácico, where you literally can go back in time and look at real dinosaur tracks, dating back about 65m years, that were unearthed by workers at
the local cement factory about 25 years ago. There are thousands of dinosaur footprint impressions, some as big as 80cm in diameter, from about 250 different individuals. They think they are from species like the T-Rex, Brontosaurus and Triceratops. Basically, 65m years ago, South America was flat, quite flooded by the surrounding oceans, and giant fresh (& salt) water lakes existed in the middle where they assume the dinos used to come to drink. The surrounding earth was very soft and the climate very rainy - great conditions for the preservation of footprints in the mud. They were covered by layer upon layer over time and mineralised. The creation of the Andes forced these layers into nearly vertical positions that were eventually uncovered by the workers at the cement factory. You can see the tracks criss-crossing this huge vertical limestone rock. At first it doesnt look like much, but you can actually make them out pretty clearly with the scope and you can tell if they were walking or running, in which direction, alone or in groups, parents and kiddies! Unfortunately no skeletons have been found at the site, but we are hoping to get to see the largest dinosaur
skeleton ever unearthed, which is in a museum in Patagonia somewhere! Okay, nerd-attack over and done with!
Next stop was on to Uyuni to visit the Salar de Uyuni, these huge salt flats, reminants of ancient lakes (see ref. above!) that are apparently a must see in Bolivia. I didnt think it sounded that exciting to be honest, but as its on the gringo trail & our route into Argentina, and everyone says its amazing, we figured it would be rude not to. The 10 hour bus trip to Uyuni town itself took us through this amazing landscape that wasnt quite mountain, wasnt quite plains, wasnt quite desert, but sort of a mixture of all three. There were some bleak, bleak areas, others with amazing rock formations & smallish canyons and other lush areas where llamas grazed. There was nothing for miles around, but you´d see these stone walls everywhere, like you´d find in the west of Ireland, so the land obviously belongs to someone. You´d pass ruins of old cottages and some isolated new ones, and you´d wonder who in the hell would and could live out here, and what in gods name do they do?! Finally we
arrived in Uyuni, having only gotten bogged down in the ´road´once. It really is in the middle of nowhere and you see all the town has to offer in about 5 minutes (its only museum was closed - theme?), but its not such a bad place to while away a day while waiting for the Salt Flats tour to begin.
Our tour operator Expediciones Lepiz were crap for various reasons (overcharging, promising water that didnt materialise and lying about the type of accomodation & broken down jeeps - dont book with them), but I think most of the operators are of roughly about the same calibre. When things eventually sorted themselves out and we got a proper jeep and got on the road, the tour was great, mainly due to the spectacular scenery. There are usually six tourists per jeep, but we were lucky and only had four, David, from Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina, and Moe, a cool wee South Korean girl. Our guide, Bernardo, only spoke Spanish, so we missed alot of what he had to say unfortunately, but he was very nice and definately made an effort. And he knew where he was going which was a
bonus. We met two Belgian girls whose guide/driver was only 17, couldnt drive a four wheel drive, had zero information and kept getting lost! So, it could have been way worse!
We did the three day tour returning to Uyuni and on day one you visit the salf flats themselves, stop one being to the Train Cemetary just outside of town, where old steam engines, some about 100 years old are just sitting there rusting away. Its sad and cute at the same time. Then it was on to the salar itself. Well, the landscape is amazing - blinding white as far as the eye can see, as as your jeep speeds along, the sunlight catches the salt crystals and it shimmers and sparkles like diamonds. The salt is quite a few metres deep, I think, and is hard and crunchy to walk on, a bit like hard-packed snow. The workers here who mine the salt have it really tough. They work in the blinding glare, covered from head to toe to protect themselves, and rake the salt into big 1m high mounds to dry it out. They can apparelty rake about a tonne a day, or 8 mounds,
which will earn them a massive 100 Bolivianos, which is about $14. (That´s a lot considering two thirds of the population live in extreme poverty and on average earn only a few dollars a day). The salt desert expands for 12,000 square km and on the horizon moutains shimmer like islands on a tropical sea. After lunch at a now illegal salt hotel (there are legal ones outside the boundaries of the flats) we drove to Isla de los Pescadores or Incahuasi, which is basically this huge rocky ´island´in the middle of the salt flats that is covered in these massive, ginormous cacti, one of which was 1000 years old, if we read the sign correctly. The most amazing thing for me though was that this island appears to have been an ancient coral reef, presumably from when the sea inundated the land and/of left behind huge salt lakes, you can see a coral archway and even make out the shape of what looks like modern mushroom and brain corals. Ive been trying to find more info on this online but I cant. We took some silly cactus photos (ah, ye have to) and drove through the salt flats to
Wuffums!
Cute n´ drooly! San Juan (Now, this is the arse end of nowhere!, we thought. Erm no. They had a shop that sold wine).
The second day was spent in the volcanic zone and visiting lots of different lagunas. It was like being on the moon or another planet altogether, Mars perhaps. Deserty plains of different colours - reds, browns, yellows, oranges, greys - with hundreds of ancient volcanoes on the horizon, weird rocky outcrops, some of which were probably old lava-flow, others just huge isolated boulders sitting in the middle of nowhere, which probably landed there when some ancient volcano erupted and flug them far and wide. Sometimes the terrain is sandy, sometimes its so rocky, you feel like the jeep is only just about making it over the tracks. We saw one smoking volcano, Volcan Ollague, which apparently hasnt errupted in 15,000 years (again, I may be misinterpreting our guide here!). Looked due to me! And also the ´Stone Tree´ one of the weirder rocky formations. Our tour took us southwards by various different lagoons, which are a variet of colours due to mineral deposits. The lagoon tour culimates in the magnificent Laguna Colorada, which is an intense orange/red colour,
due to the organisism living in it (brine shrimp?), and has what looks like ice-bergs floating in the middle. These are in fact borax islands (Bolivia is a country so rich in natural resouces that its incredible how poor it actually is). The highlight of these lakes is not the colours or even the mild sulfuric odour, which we know Simon loves, but the hundreds of pink flamingoes live there. There are three species - Chilean, Andean and the rare James species. I must have taken 79 million photos! It was really cool to see them in the wild. Well, I was excited. Simon was concentrating on getting poo off his shoe, which we think may not have come from the llamas. On the second night we actually did stay in The Arse End Of Nowhere, with the wind howling around us or maybe it was the local kids ´playing´instruments and ´singing´for a few Bolivianos! There was zero alcohol to be had at all. Actually, the wee dude on the panpipes was alright.
Day three, we were up at 4am, to visit some geysers at sunrise. Well, that was incredible and so worth the early start! Our driver floored
it over the desert to get there before the sun crept over the horizon, and we watched through mists created by hissing geysers and steaming mud-pools, as the sky turned from blue-black to orange-pink. We were at an altitude of about 5000m now, and it was jaysus baltic! There was even frost on the ground. We so had not dressed appropriately for the occasion at all and my hands nearly fell off! About half an hour down the road though, we warmed ourselves up nicely at some springs. It was not even 7am, the light was still low and the hot water forcing its way up through the ground, meeting the frigid air, caused a haze to hover over the water. We wondered if it was wise to strip off all our clothes, given the likely risk of frostbite, but said, fuck it, we´ll never be here again, and belted into the little pool they had kindly built for the gringos to wallow in. Oh, it was heaven. The water must have been about 30 degrees. There was one crazy older German woman who was swimming around with her boobs out though, which was a bit odd. Getting out and
getting changed was great craic, as you can imagine! After a nice hot cuppa, we headed off to Laguna Verde, which is surprisingly a green lagoon! Behind it sits a huge vocano, that Ben & Jo were going to climb (summit 6000m - eh, forget it!). The lagoon is reflected perfectly in the green water, and its quite beautiful. There is, among other minerals, arsenic in the water, so nothing can live in the lake. The landscape around looked like the moon, with loads of rocks that looked like ancient lava-flow. We dropped Moe off at the Chilean border, and then had a long, long drive back to Uyuni. The trip was an amazing way to end our time in Bolivia. We did stop briefly in Tupiza, which is Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid territory, which we planned to hike, but I was sick, so we missed out on that unfortunately.
Then it was on to the MOST arduous border crossing in the history of gringokind into Argentina! Aaagghhh! Only six weeks left to go! I cant believe the time has gone so quickly, but we are going to try to give it total socks in Argentina, and
make the most of it. I wonder will it top Bolivia for our favourite South American country?
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BerLM
Bernhard & Liza-Marie - South America
Sounds amazing!
Sounds incredibly cool! Can´t wait to get there ourselves at some point! Don´t stress, you gonna love Patagonia as well. Some incredible scenes to see and the food is gorgeous. Loads of cheap wine! Hope to see you guys along the way. B&LM