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On the dusty, bumpy ride from Potosi to Uyuni the bus made one of many stops to clear rocks from the road. My eyes drifted upward from my book and followed the driver hopping from his door and walking outwards from the bus. Then they fixated on Jupiter.

Actually, no, Jupiter bears more resemblance to normalcy than does the eyeful I was presented with this morning. The sky was the only normal part, a bright midday blue with a few whisps of clouds. Below was the peak of a narrow mountain with a rounded tip coloured a fleshy red, as if the earth were sticking its tongue out at you. Rolling off to the right were velvet green hills covered with a uniform, smooth dark green grass and two, and only two, kinds of plantlife. The most striking was the thousands of small shrubs coloured a faded mustard-yellow and having the appearance of a single pencil crayon making thousands of strait lines from a single point extending only a couple feet in all directions. The other type of plant was a cactus with only two arrangements: the most common was a single pillar sticking strait up like a petrefied catepillar; the other was the same hairy cactus but instead were in bunches going upward and outward from a single point like a muppet's hand clutching an invisible ball.

To the right of the tongue was the perfectly flat, grayish-brown beginnings of the salt flats stretching off into infinity. There were splashes of black and dirty yellow scattered randomly throughout like the messy pallette of a clumsy painter. In front of the mountain was another, brighter expanse of green grass which ended abruptly in a twirl of colour in the foreground, easily the most surreal portion of the scene. Spewn every which and overlapping incoherently were yellow, green, red and black splotches all on a solid white base, a twizzle of colour usually only seen in the colour-stained milk at the bottom of a bowl of Fruitloops. Running in the foreground was a green and red river, which fell off over a deep crack in the earth - if this was earth- which ran off into green-yellow of the left background hills. Scattered along the crack were tiny flowers consisting of nothing but little, round yellow dots like single splatters from a drip out of a pinhole in a can of yellow paint. To top it all off scattered about the scene were puffy llamas of white and brown, most of which had turned to face the sound of the bus with there eerie alien faces. So, in the eyes of the third martian, third deer, third shag carpets, the driver hopped back to his seat and in a buff of red dust we were off.

This was easily the most surreal thing I had ever seen. And, as it turns out, it would not be he weirest thing I would see this week...

Salar de Uyuni

The largest salt flats on earth, totalling some 12,000 square kilometers and 10 billion tons of salt

Day 1: Brown, yellow, red, green and everything inbetween

Waking up at 8 am on the piece of cardboard our hostel advertised as a Cama (bed) and freezing cold, it didn't take much convincing to get me up and out for a hot coffee and some breakfast. By 10 am I was at the rental agency, located on the cracked main street of the perfectly flat town of Uyuni, with my backpack in tow and an anxious smile on my face. After meeting the rest of my group, four israellis and Bruce, the South African I had been travelling with for some time, at about 10:30 we were quickly whisked away in our solid white Toyota SUV which was in good mechanical shape but, with the aid of at least two rolls of packing tape, bare bones to say the least. We were, though, comfortable and confident in our driver.

Within minutes of leaving the town we were chugging along the flat expanse at the edge of the Andean foothills rising up in the foreground. Listenning to Pink Floyd, we were all hushed as we looked at the mismash of colours flung around on the flat graywhite ground. The odd excited burst of Hebrew would come from one of the commandos (they were all fresh from the military) but would not spark much conversation. The aura was that of awe, which was not surprising now that the foothills became larger and we could make out the detail of their colour. Because of the altitude there was no plantlife larger than a bush, but the variation of colour of the small, almost lifeless looking shrubs was spectacular. Most of the hills were simply covered with the shrubs, but each hill seemed to have a completely different combination of colours. The one to our right had green and yellow bushes intermixed at random at the center but, towards the outsides, a homogenous group of each colour, like two opposing armies mixing in battle. The larger, more jagged hill to our right had purple-ish brown shrubs, again only a few feet high, mixed with short stubs of cacti ever few meters or so, only rising a few feet above the shrubs, like a closeup of stubble on a five o'clock shadow. The sand of the mountains varied from bright red to bright yellow (and not a weak yellow, think of a banana) and there was no lack of greens and blues. If British Columbia were the work of a well disciplined landscape artist, then this was the work of a graffiti artist on an acid trip.

After a quick lunch consisting of llama meat and vegetables at a small village whose existence I couldn't figure out (no farmland or any natural resources to speak of and hours from anything) we were back on the road trying to understand how this strange mix of colours, flatness and mountains, lightness and darkness, came to be. After about four more hours we came to the Valley of the Rocks (the naming of the attractions here was another source of contrast: totally unworldly places named so ho-hum-ly). The product of a long ago erruption of a neaby valcano, the valley was a collection of bright red rocks with very strange, bubbly colours, as if someone had poured millions of gallons of rock eating acid on one giant, red boulder and we were seeing the remnants. The israellis got out of the truck, made some grumblings in Hebrew I can only assume to be jovial complaints about the cold, took a slew of pictures and climbed back in the truck. Bruce and I walked around for about half an hour, trying again to wrap our mind around the scene of conflicting colours and acid eaten rocks (some of which were as high as 15 meters and as oddly shaped as the remnants of an eaten apple). After we got back in the truck and were whined at for taking so long (Bruce did take a long time, to be fair, making us wait maybe half an hour) we were off. As the sun was sinking towards the horizon the light made the once vibrant spray-paint colour of the shrubs and dirt turn to pastels, making the mood peaceful and, despite the strangeness of the day, serene. Just before dinner I climbed, alone, up to a nearby hill to watch the sunset. Watching the mix of colours on the hills all fade to gray, a wonderful feeling of wonder settled calmly on me. The sunset, quick miraculous, was red and yellow and made me sleepy. At the cusp of its brilliance the commandos, speaking only Hebrew despite the fact that they spoke English (which came to really bother me...) showed up and, without looking around, snapped some photos, exchanged some troubled sounding mumchojumbo in Hebrew which I assumed was a complaint about the cold, and returned to the hostel (which I am sure they called the barracks, which wouldn't be far off). The sunset shrivelled away to gray and disappeared, like a mapple leaf in autumn, and I soon retreated to my room and sleeping bag. Shalom.

Day 2: Stranger again...

At 3:30 AM a knock on our door woke us all to the sounds of our driver, Marcelo, yelling "Buenas Dias amigos, vamos, VAMOS!" which was obviously our cue to get our ass on the move. The night before, after some deliberation in Hebrew, we had decided to get up early enough to get the Geizers in time for sunrise, a couple hours away by bumpy road. Half an hour later we were back in the truck heading towards the crack between the nearby mountains. With some more Pink Floyd seeping out of the one working speaker we were again marvelling at the scene evolving around us. Where the horizon was flat, and I mean FLAT, the black of the earth abbruptly changed to a bright orange which abbruptly turned to a bright blue, seemingly only millimeters thick, which again turned to blackness. At about six we arrived at the geisers which were quite spectacular. The first one was a single, high pressure outpoor of hot rotten-egg gas which the commandos took about a million photographs of and I jumped through. The second patch was a collection of larger, lower pressure chambers of stink and a bunch of bubbling pools of gray mud. All in all this was something out of Star Trek and made for a great place to watch the sunrise which lit up the gas and made navigating almost impossible. Once again the Rambos were waiting impatiently in the truck while Bruce and I explored, obviously having had taken enough photos to impress their friends. But there was nothing that could sour the mood I was in, which was pure wonder. After leaving the geisers with the sun now above the horizon we got a glimpse of the new, wacky surroundings we were in. Through the mist of the geisers we could see the brown, smooth but stubly lifeless hills hopping up and down randomly around us, looking like the few day old sking of a shaved brown dog. The air was thin and crisp as we climbed to over 5000 meters and then quickly descended again which allowed shrubs to grow like coloured hair on the dogs.

For lunch we stopped at the banks of a lake made hot by the heated water (by the same phenomenon causing the geisers) pouring into its shore. Some people took a dip in the hotsprings while others stayed clothed and wandered the banks, like me. The lake was surrounded by mountains, mostly yellow but sometimes brown or red, and the banks had various rivers coloured green by the algea growing in their hot depths. Plantlife was various and strange, no surprise there, with many colours, sizes and shapes, the strangest being a field of yellow shrubs, green cacti, and red bushes, which looked like, from the vantage point of the nearby hill I climbed, like the sprinkles on a donut.

After lunch we headed to Laguna Verde (green lake) which, despite its lame name, was quite surreal. At its head was a snowcapped mountain and its beach was made of foam made from the strange chemicals which coloured it an emerald green. A million photographs and a few military style grunts of impatience later we were on the road again headed for the weirdest lake I have ever seen in my life.

Passing again through numerous valleys, each of which having their own character (green and blue with a valcano in the background; rockless or covered in boulders from erruptions; green lake or shiny lake; flat or just the opposite with countless cliffs; etc.), we arrived at Lago Calarado for a lunch stop. The lake was a tomato soup red and extended from its white and green bank off into the horizon, with the occasional solid white island in its midst. Strutting around the lake were thousands of flamingos occasionaly dipping their heads on long necks into the soup for a feed. I was floored: "where the hell am I?" was all I could think. In one glimpse you saw a white and green grassy shore, a two million gallon bowl of Campbell's soup, a group of bright yellow shrubs on a green velvet grass, and a snowcapped maroon mountain that looked like a regular mountain but burned by the sun. Huh?

The rest of the day was spent driving towards the saltflats with occasional stops made for the paratroopers to take photos and for the Colonials to wander about. We would go from mountain walled valley to mountain walled valley with each completely different like the last. It was like being ushered around from exhibit to exhibit, each hundred of acres large and each competing for the strangest place on earth award. Some were bald and brown, free from any plantlife and colour but beautiful nonetheless, while others were hilly and strewn with dozens of bright grafitti-like colours covering everything from shrubs, dirty hills, and lava paths wiggling down from a white crater in the sky.

And all this a short drive from Earth.

Day 3: Flat. White. Weird.

Again waking at 3:30 AM to the sounds of the hungover Marcelo exclaming Good Days (I'll tell the world), we sluggishly packed up our bags in the freezing cold and made for the SUV. Today we were going to make it to the white sea of salt (indeed a dried up sea that used to cover this part of the world) and climb one of the hilly "islands" for a view of the sun rising up over the salty horizon. Arriving at about 6:30 AM we again were shocked into a state of amazement by the view: indeed we were driving on an enermous salt bowl, perfectly flat and empty except for the green brown island we were to climb. The island was covered with cacti and shrubs like the hump of the back of some weird animal feasting on salt. Some of the cacti were as old as 1,200 years and meters tall while others, young by comparison, looked like little furry nubs, no matter how menacing they were in reality. The whole scene looked man made and surreal. After finding a quiet place by myself, away from the endless clacks of shudders and scrutinizing Hebrew, I watched - jaw at my feet - as the sun slowly rose above the horizon and splashed light on the huge spread of salt, making it change from black to gray to blue to white in minutes. I thought to myself "if god did indeed make the earth, this is his clean slate".

After breakfast consisting of yummy thawed eggs we piled again into the jeep and marvelled at the flats. Bruce and I stopped along the way to examine the various enomalies that the flats offered. For one, the whole sea was covered in pentagons made of slightly risen salt, something our driver said was due to the fact that pentagons are the strongest shape possible... I don't really get it but it sure was weird to see. Also there were swirls about 10 meters in diameter every so often which were coloured brown. Apparently when it rains the water takes dirt from the hills and makes the water somewhat dirty. But, for some reason, there are whirlpools all over the place on the thin temporary lake that comes to cover the flats, which act like little vacuum cleaners and suck the dirt to them. When it dries the dirt stays on these circles and keeps the flat perfectly white: how cool!

After stopping for a few hours to take some wacky pictures (this time it was fun to take pictures) and to wander about, we went for lunch at the "Hotel de Sal" or Salt Hotel which is exactly what it sounds like: a hotel made entirely of bricks made from hardened salt: a horse's dream. After lunch we saw how they rake the flat with trucks to extract salt for sale at a neaby village. You can buy 50 kg of salt for 6 bilivianos or about 60 cents. How many times can you do THAT? Still, we didn't.

Tired, salty, and in desperate need of a shower we arrived back to Uyuni at about 4 pm. The trip was, and I am sure will remain, one of the highlights of my trip.

That night I took a train, leaving at 2:30 am, to the border of Argentina on my way to Salta, where I am now. The train was fully booked save for a couple of seats in the cheapest class, class "popular", but I jumped at the opportunity. Silly me. I sat, for twelve long hours, on a wooden bench (I assume the paddless covers were for aesthetics sake only) crammed beside two other large men. The bench was 90 degrees and quite bad for the neck, back, and temper. At about seven AM a man carrying a gerry can (the typical red containers for gasoline) filled with coffee, although I think the taste of the sludge was in fact closer to gasoline, and balogne sandwiches obviously made in the last millenia.

It was a lousy but great way to end my time in Bolivia, especially with the contrast the Argentinian side of the border was to offer. After getting through customs (the nicest crossing I have ever had: "donde quires su marka señior?" - "where do you want your stamp", referring to my passport) I hopped on a luxurious double-decker bus filled with men dressed in designer suits and women with fake boobs. Arriving in Salta was like getting to the twilight zone, as if Europe was secretly only seven hours away by bus. It gave me the feeling that the whole five months I have been travelling in less developed countries was in fact secretly a tourist attraction I was now stepping off from. I saw, for the first time since I got here, lit up advertisements on bus stops and well maintained sidewalks. Getting into a taxi - which had a metre, how weird! - the driver, when confronted with a Do Not Enter sign on a convenient stretch of road, took the legal detour. Immediately I could see that something important had changed... I was back in the Western world with mixed feelings to be sure.

Which brings me to today. I just finished the best meal I have had in months, albeit the most expensive, served by well trained waiters in black vests. I get the feeling that when the economy crashed here everyone simply said "shhhhh... let's just pretend nothing happened". More on this to come...

ciao for now

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Photos

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth

Salar de Uyuni
A collection of pictures from the weirdest place on Earth