Advertisement
Published: December 4th 2011
Edit Blog Post
We decide as a group the night before that we would leave by 5:15AM at the latest so that we could catch the sunrise on the salt flats. For various reasons (it looked like the local guide/drivers overslept) we didn’t get going until 5:45AM. Fortunately we got to the salt flats just as the sun was rising.
Formation of Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni salt flat):
Scienific:
This part of the Altiplano has no outlet to the sea. The salt deposits are the result of the minerals leeched from the mountains and deposited at the lowest available point.
Legends(from LP):
A rounded promontory juts into the Salar de Uyuni along its NW corner and on it rises Volcan Tunupa (5432m). One legend states that Atahualpa slashed the breast of a woman called Tunupa on its slopes and the milk that spilled out formed the salar. Another story says that in the ancient days, mountains were men and women. Right after giving birth to their baby, Tunupa learned her man was living with another woman. Devastated, she wept and wept, spilling her salty tears over her breast milk, and creating this vast area of sadness and beauty that
is now the salar.
Regardless of how the salar was formed, it’s quite spectacular and it has to been seen in person to be appreciated. Repeated freeze–thaw and evaporation cycles gradually push the thin salt crust into hexagonal honeycomb shapes. The surface is hard, not smooth, and at certain spots it’s easy to crack it open to see the salt crystals and the water underneath.
We kept driving to Isla Incahuasi, better known as Isla del Pescado because it’s shaped like a fish, almost in the middle of the salar. This rocky outcropping is covered in giant Trichoreus cacti and surrounded by a flat white sea of hexagonal salt tiles. The cacti grow about 1 cm / year and the oldest living cactus is about 900 years old.
Because of the vast expanse of white salt, perspective can be distorted, producing some interesting photography. Unfortunately most of them didn’t quite work for me.
We then headed east towards to town of Colchani, stopping by a salt hotel, Playa Blanca, near the edge of the salar. It used to be a salt hotel but because of its sewage system polluting the salt pan it has been converted
into a museum. Supposedly the sewage gets trucked out rather than dumped into the salt flats now.
Near the edge of the salt flat by Colchani, workers still use manual labour to hack out salt with picks and shovels and pile it into small conical mounds that you see in so many of the photographs. They are then hauled away to be processed. Colchani has the main plant for iodisation of salt. Ovens are used to dry the salt, which is then formed into cakes. Apparently there remains at least 10 billion tons of salt in salar de Uyuni. There are a few souvenir shops. I had some llama meat with corn, not bad. Rather than having lunch at Colchani we drove a bit further and found a spot for lunch – llama chop, quinoa and corn. The llama chop was a bit tough and gamey, but when you are hungry pretty much everything tasted good.
Before heading into Uyuni, we stopped at the Cementerio de Trenes (Train Cemetery) with a large collection of decaying and rusting historic steam locomotives and rail cars.
Unfortunately one of the people in the group slipped coming down a train and
cut herself, requiring stitches and hospital stay.
Uyuni (3669m) was founded in 1889 by Bolivian president Aniceto Arce, essentially a military outpost (there is a military base close to where we stayed), but also important for mining and the growing tourism industry. A small airport just opened recently, with daily flights to/from La Paz. Like San Pedro de Atacama, I hope the growth in tourism will be developed in an environmentally sustainable way. Other than the Train Cemetery, there isn’t much to see in the town itself.
We stayed at Tonito Hotel where the famous Minuteman Pizza is located. According to LP, run by Chris from Boston and his Bolivian wife Sussy, has the best pizzas in town, tasty alternatives and fantastic deserts. I wholeheartedly agree and I met both Chris and Sussy that night. I ordered the spicy chicken pizza, which I later learned was Sussy’s favourite. They are very friendly and welcoming and Sussy told us the story behind Minuteman Pizza, which I am sure she has told hundreds, if not thousands of times. They also accept donation of old sunglasses which they give to the salt workers of Colchani.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.132s; Tpl: 0.037s; cc: 7; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0742s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb