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Published: October 20th 2009
Glad to finally been able to have a sleep in, we rocked up to the office of Andys Salt Expeditions with great expectations for the tour that we had finally been able to book, since the strike in Uyuni ended at 6pm on the previous evening. We were glad to see that we had a 80 series Landcruiser, as it would be more comfortable than the older vehicles that the company uses, but were disappointed to find out that our guide could not speak any English. Having an English speaking guide with only 6 passengers max in the vehicle were the 2 main criteria for our selection process and we found out that both of these requirements were not to be met, as we were loading up our luggage. They wanted to fit a cook in the vehicle with us, even though we were explicitly told that the cook would be located at the hostal that we were to stay at. The company made a compromise and let the cook ride with another vehicle that was going on a 2-day tour, as they had extra seats and she was required to cook for them as well. So that was nice to
have our space back, but it was going to be very difficult with our guide, as his Spanish was fast and he was to talk about all sorts of interesting geological and sight specific information that we would only be able to just grasp the meaning of, to translate for everyone else in our vehicle. To make matters worse, the guy who signed us up for the tour got annoyed and said that we were accusing him of being a lier when Nat, Tina and Dan went to talk to him about our guide/driver not speaking English. Since then, he ignored us at every sight that he saw us at during the day with his group and also ignored us at the hostal during the evening, when we saw him there, even though Dan tried to reconcile with him. So the start to our tour was not a good one, considering we paid extra to go with this company.
A Brit named Ralph and a Japanese girl, named Chica joined us on our journey, who we soon became friends with over shared snacks in the car. Our first stop was at the train cemetary just outside of Uyuni. We
saw many old steam trains and carriages. It was interesting to go up inside the rusted engines and try to guess how they worked. Not much further up the road, we stopped at Colchani, a little town where they mine a lot of the salt from the salt flats. There were little stalls selling all the handicrafts that we have seen previously, with a few new items made out of salt. I am not sure who would like to buy a little salt llama, but I am sure there are people out there who could be interested. Our guide didn't really tell us where to go or what to see, just how long we had to wander around. We realised afterwards as we drove by that there was a little museum that we could have gone to, but I suppose it really is luck of the draw what guide you get. Our guide was a nice guy, but not overly enthused about telling us stuff, but maybe that was because he didn't think we would be able to understand him much.
Our next stop was along the salt lake. Workers had gathered the salt up into small hills for
later collection. The depth of the salt was only about 12 cm in this section, but apparently further up where we were going to drive, the salt got up to 1 m deep. After a few corny photos standing on the salt hills, we stopped at a salt hotel, that was made of salt bricks, which had salt brick table and chairs outside for us to sit at. Whilst we waited for the cook to fry up some llama meat for lunch, we mucked around taking crazy photos of us on the salt plane. We tried walking into a Pringles tube, jumping around and we took a photo that looks like giant Dan is about to stand on a miniture me. The cook served the llama with some quinoa grains and a cabbage salad. Dan and I tried a bite of the llama, that looked and smelled like beef steak.
After driving on a bit further after lunch, the driver stopped for us to check out the hexagonal shapes that formed along the salt plain when the water that usually sits on the plain in the wet season evaporated in the dry season. More zany photos later, we continued
on to Isla Incahuasi, a small island within the dry salt lake, where amazingly straight cacti grow. Apparently, they grow 1cm every year and we saw a 950 year old cactus that was quite tall. There was an older cactus (1250 years old) there as well, but it died in 2007 and we could see it starting to rot at the bottom. We were also lucky to spot a suri on the island. It is a bird that looks exactly like an emu, but the one we saw appeared to be a bit smaller in height.
We were early for a sunset, but decided to wait the 40 minutes to see the sun go down at 6:30pm before continuing onto our salt hostal for the evening. We waited in the car for most of the time, as it was so cold outside due to our high elevation. We stayed at Hotel Samarikuna for the evening. It was another building built using salt bricks and what appeared to be a salt based morter, although the building was much longer in length than the small building that we encountered at lunch time. It was surprisingly warmer inside than out, although our
salt brick beds still had 3 heavy blankets on them to keep us warm.
At dinner, a traditional style dish was served to the group. It had bits of frankfurter sausage, boilied egg, potato chips, onion, tomato and meat pieces that looked like a stew. We had to tell the cook that we are vegetarian and she apologised as she was never told about our eating requirements. She went back to the kitchen to make us a meat and egg less version of the above.
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