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Published: August 25th 2010
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We then drive onto the flats and our driver Gonzalo finally gets a smooth surface to drive on and out here, there are no roads, the only guide he has is the mountain ranges in the distance and the sun. We stop a little way in and marvel at the endless mass of salt, so bright white it hurts your eyes to look at. Wilbur explains that many thousands of years ago, a lake like Lake Titicaca would have been here - except that it was a salt lake and at some point it dried up and left behind a 100m deep, 1,100 square kilometre salt desert. Perfectly flat, and it is one of the driest places on earth. There are never any clouds above it and it is drier than the Sahara Desert. The salt feels like ice and looks like snow and is surprisingly cold given the heat of the sun. Our 4WD hardly makes an impact it is packed so tightly. Because of the dryness, it cracks in perfect symmetry.
We take pictures and move to the exact centre of the salt flat where there is a large island, known as [i[fish island - not sure why
- it is weird to see an island in the middle of a desert. The island is covered with huge cactus trees, the biggest of which is over 12 metres. The cactus trees are a stunning contrast to the surrounding white salt. We walk all the way around the island to see the great views of the salt flats and of course I walk very slowly and take the short route as I feel quite ill at this point. Despite my illness I am awestruck by this landscape. The male cactus trees have on trunk straight up while the female ones branch out. I found one that looks like a giant hand. Once we do the lap of the island, Wilbur and Gonzalo set up lunch for us - a sprawling spread of sandwiches which I can’t bear to look at let alone eat. I have a bit of potato and a sip of coke and I am done.
Feeling shocking Wilbur says our hotel in
Tahua is north of the flats so we can skip the rest of the day so I can rest at the hotel and hopefully fit more in tomorrow. I am happy with this.
What I didn’t realise was the Wilbur and Gonzalo were busy planning an alternative tour for tomorrow as the road gets way too bumpy to take someone as sick as me. We get to our hotel at 4pm in the stupidly run down town of Tahua. Our hotel is nice but is surrounded by desolate places. I sleep for a couple of hours before getting dinner of llama chops and mashed potatoes. I eat a tiny bit and doesn’t like how greasy it is either and doesn’t eat much. I got to bed at 7pm and wake up 13 hours later feeling much better - the trip can go ahead as planned which is great.
Feeling much better, I eat some toast for breakfast and even some scrambled eggs. We get ready a little early for Wilbur, so we spend half an hour exploring the village of Tahua, which is on the edge of the salt flat. The main plaza has a lookout and we walk around the dusty streets watching dozens of school kids carry their back packs into the local school. Men and women are working in their yards, which are only fenced in by a small
Our mud brick accomodation
Built into the side of a rock! row of mud bricks, seeing to their animals and crops in their mud brick fortresses, it is hard to imagine what they must think of all the tourists passing through their very simple and poor world. I wonder if they know what our way of life is like. What conveniences we have, and whether they even want them.
Wilbur is ready and we head back to the salt flat for a closer look and to take some great perspective photos which Wilbur and Gonzalo love doing. Wilbur often takes photos like a tourist on the trip and says that it is different every time he comes on this tour. We had perfect weather today. We drove south all the way across the salt flat and then I realised why we needed a 4WD. The road was sand dunes for a while before becoming a very undulating and rough road through the valley. The landscape was completely barren. We hit a small town where we had lunch, while Wilbur and Gonzalo set up lunch, they let us spend 15 minutes walking around the town. We only needed two minutes. It was a completely desolate dustbowl with absolutely nothing of note
to see. They had set up lunch in what seemed to be somebody’s house. I think it was and we were using their dining room table. Wilbur called it a BYO restaurant. It was weird. I ate hamburgers and drank a whole can of coke. Gonzalo noted that I was a completely different person today. I was very relieved that I had recovered so well and they did not have to make alternative plans for the tour.
Of course no 4WD tour of Bolivia is complete without an automobile incident and it was at this desolate little town that we had ours. In Uyuni, Gonzalo attached two large plastic tanks of petrol onto the roof racks of our 4WD as there are nowhere to get petrol anywhere further south than Uyuni in Bolivia. During the bumpy ride to lunch, one of the petrol tanks on the roof had sprung a leak. Pretty soon the stench of petrol made its way through the 4WD. Gonzalo got on the roof and identified the hole in the tank, was able to fill the actual petrol tank of the 4WD with it but then needed to stand the tank up on the roof instead of laying it down so that it did not leak. Whilst at first he was worried, half an hour later he was happy that the tank was secure and we were off on the bumpy roads again, occasionally stopping to double check that the tank was still on the roof - had we have lost it, we would have been in massive trouble.
We drove a few more hours, stopping to take photographs of the mountainous landscape and at one point to observe the impressive rock formations. We pushed on to the tiny village of
Villamar to our hotel, the only one in the town, which is built into the side of a rock to protect it from the high winds in this area. The owners were lovely but this hotel was a complete disaster. The bed was on a mud brick base and was hard as a rock, the bathroom feature supposedly was hot water. I don’t know if it was hot but I am pretty sure it had passed through a dead llama before it came out the tap. And they had the nerve to charge us for bottled water! Dinner was roast lamb which was actually OK, although proceeding it was a very flavourless soup, just some water with vegetables thrown in. The husband and wife team that ran the place tried to make things comfortable for us, stoking the fire which was nice considering we were the only people staying there. As they couldn’t speak English we get some more Spanish practice trying to have a conversation with them. I was still not 100%!w(MISSING)ell so we get another early night knowing tomorrow would be a big day with an early start.
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