Salar de Uyuni-Part 1

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Day 36-11th October

This will probably be a 3 parter, prepare yourselves!!

So we arrived in the town of Uyuni at 8am. Uyuni is such a strange place, if it wasn’t for the salt flats, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t exist at all. However when we arrived, Maritza, the representative from Expediciones Empexsa, the company we had booked our tour with, was there to welcome us and take us to the office where we would pick up our jeep.

First impressions weren’t great to be honest with this company. They were friendly but it seemed very disorganised. We were meant to leave at 10am, but in fact we didn’t leave until midday, and no one really let us know why. Also, we actually ended up doing the tour with a company called Blue Line as they had spaces in their jeep and there weren’t enough of us to fill a jeep on our own. We’d be warned this might happen, but it was still irritating at the time and we hoped it would work out for the best. If it didn’t, we’d be complaining on our return! We also had to repack everything as we were only allowed to take one big rucksack between us and our daybags. This meant leaving lots of things in the Expediciones Empexsa office, which we weren’t thrilled about but didn’t really have a lot of choice!

So after not the best start we climbed into our jeep, our transport for the next few days. Our guide was called Philippe and seemed nice, although he spoke no English. Fortunately for us, the other 4 passengers were Peruvian girls who spoke English. Excellent, it might be ok then! Philippe finished loading the jeep and we headed off.

Our first stop was the Train Cemetery, a strange place just outside of Uyuni where there is an area full of old steam trains. These were dumped here when the mining industry collapsed due to mineral depletion in the 1940s and have been there ever since. It’s really odd to see all these trains slowly rusting away, but also pretty cool, we climbed all over the trains and took lots of pictures.

We then headed off to a tiny hamlet called Cochani, right on the edge of the salt flats. There is a small market there, purposely for all the tourists. There were a lot of items made out of salt! We ended up buying a small tile with an Incan design on it, to add to the house collection. (It’s getting pretty big!) After wandering around a bit, Philippe called us to lunch. This is when our tour company failed us again. Not only had they put us with another tour company that we had not chosen, they failed to tell Philippe that Ellory was vegetarian! Something we had repeated several times as we really wanted to make sure Ellory could eat! (Strangely enough). So lunch was quinoa, tomatoes, cucumbers....and pork. Poor Ell. Thank god we had Spanish/English speakers with us, between us we explained to Philippe that Ellory was a veggie, Philippe asked us why we hadn’t mentioned it, to which we replied that we had told the company about 5 times and they’d said it was not a problem! Bless him, he was very cool about it. Told us not to worry and that he’d make Ellory vegetarian food for the rest of the trip. We were relieved it was sorted but bloody cross with the original company who screwed it up!

So after that drama, we headed off to the main attraction of the day, the Salt Flats themselves. The bit I was most looking forward to. They didn’t disappoint! As we approached, we could see islands in the distance that appeared to float. We eventually worked out that this is because they are in the middle of the salt flats, most strange! Salar de Uyuni is approximately 12000 sq km, and it truly is enormous. All you can see it white everywhere with a dazzling blue sky above it. It is also famous for the fact that because all the ground is white and flat there is no reference point so you can create some pretty cool perspective pictures. We had a go, but to be honest we weren’t very good! However we did get a couple as you can see. We then headed off to Isla Del Pescado (Fish Island), which apparently is shaped like a fish, couldn’t see it myself! To explain how this island is here I’ll have to waffle a bit about how the Salar de Uyuni was formed, so forgive me for a bit. Salar de Uyuni is part of the Altiplano which was formed during the uplift of the Andes. The Altiplano used to be a huge ancient lake called Lake Minchin. When the entire area was lifted this lake dried out, and left two ‘normal’ lakes, and 2 salt lakes, Salar de Uyuni being the biggest. This random Fish Island in the middle of the salt flats is the top of an ancient volcano which was submerged during the era of Lake Minchin. These days it is entirely covered in cacti and it is really something to see this random island in the middle of all this salt covered in all these cacti! We decided to pay the small fee to walk on the island and have a look around. To be honest, apart from cacti there is not a lot else, but the views from the top of the island over the Salar de Uyuni are spectacular and some of the cacti are nearly 1000 years old, which is pretty cool!

After this, we headed off to our place to stay for the night, the Chuvica Hotel de Sal, yes that’s right, the Salt Hotel. The distances are so vast, that although it appeared the edge of the Salt Flats wasn’t that far away, in fact it was nearly dark by the time we reached the hotel. We bumped up this mad road up a hill to this building at the top which looked like it was made of concrete. The girls started asked Philippe, “why isn’t it made of salt, we were told it was made of salt!” And it was, believe it or not, the walls, the floor, the beds, tables, chairs, everything. Well, the toilets weren’t! But most of it was! It was really cool and definitely a novelty experience! It is a very basic place, one toilet to 30 people, no shower and no heating. We’d been warned that it gets cold at night and we had hired sleeping bags in Uyuni, we were very glad we had because as the sun went down, the temperature plummeted. The jumpers and hats we’d bought came in handy too!! Philippe served us tea, coffee and biscuits when we arrived and it was just the thing to warm up. However, we started thinking about how nice it would be to have something a bit stronger to end our first day. To our delight, the Peruvian girls were thinking the exact same thing and they asked Philippe if there was anywhere we could buy alcohol. Originally we’d been a little gutted that we were the only westerners on the tour, however it was now really working in our favour and the girls were really friendly. Philippe was happy to take us somewhere to buy drink, so we got back in the truck and drove down the hill to the maddest ‘off licence’ I have ever seen in my life. It was a tiny concrete hut, with no windows and no electric. We chose our wine by torchlight! 2 bottles of red wine later we headed back to the Salt Hotel. We then proceeded to be the envy of all the other groups as we sat there before dinner, quaffing wine, eating Pringles, chatting away and shrieking with laughter, yes, we were definitely the rowdy table!

Philippe then served us a dinner of potatoes, veg and roast chicken, Ellory had a bubble and squeak kind of thing instead of chicken which he said was very nice! Someone then turned us selling more bottles of wine (must of known we were there!), so we bought 2 more. Our theory was, it was flipping cold, we had to keep warm somehow! That done, we decided to turn in for this night and settled into our surprisingly comfy salt beds, they came with lots of blankets and combined with our sleeping bags and blankets we were pleasantly warm and drifted off to sleep with ease, happy in the knowledge that it was all working out. Ralph and Fiona, we’ll briefly thank you in this blog for this fantastic wedding present, however there is more to come so you’ll get a big thank you at the end of this tale!

Love liz xxx

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Photos

Einstein Train
this is einsteins equation for thermodynamics... on a steamtrain, geeky graffitti rocks (Ellz)

Newton Train
this is newons law of motion... on a steamtrain, geeky graffitti rocks (Ellz)