Tour of the Giant Salt Desert

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Uyuni lies at 3660 m in a high, dry area in the Andean chain. The town itself is a genuine dustbowl (convenient, we found, for clothes drying). It is surrounded by unique geological formations, such as vibrant deserts, colored lakes, and shapely rocks. The chief attraction of the area is the Salar de Uyuni - the great Uyuni salt flats - formed from an ancient sea that dried up. Strongly recommended by other travelers, we checked them out ourselves on our way south to Argentina.

We took a bus from La Paz to Oruro on Tuesday, Jan 12th, arriving around 12:30 pm. After lunch, internet, and a brief look around, we boarded our train for the 8-hour ride to Uyuni. In this part of the country, it was now the high season for tourism. Wealthy Bolivians as well as Argentinians and Chileans were enjoying the southern summer with extended vacations. As a consequence, the regular seats on the train were booked up, and we had to ride first class, paying double the fare. The first class privileges consisted of Spanish music videos on a television screen, and cold cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, which the train steward passed us from a large black garbage bag he carried down the aisle. Arriving finally at 11:30 pm that night, we got to appreciate the inconveniences of high season even more fully as we found hotel after hotel booked up. We and several other tourists wandered the dark streets for about 20 minutes before we found a room. Our room was 100 bolivianos, a pretty high rate in Bolivia, and the water wasn't even working! We went to bed cranky and unwashed.

The next day, we moved to the more comfortable Hostal Marith on the other side of town, then headed out to book our tour. We try to avoid tours when we can, but tours are really the only way to get to the salar. Technically you could rent a truck, but it would be easy to get lost (there are no marked roads through the salt flats), in which case you would dry up and die in a few days. Although the 3-day Uyuni tour had a very standard itinerary, travelers warned us that the quality of the food and behavior of the drivers can vary widely. In one instance, we heard that the driver openly berated some of the passengers, and he became so drunk a passenger had to take over driving. Our guide book, the South American handbook, was not much help as some bad experiences came from agencies they recommended. Some of their recommendations were nonsensical. How could an agency be "strongly recommended" and yet have "mixed reviews". Contradictions such as these, as well as disjointed sentences have let us to wonder if the book is a copy and paste job.

Of the agencies we visited that we had the best impressions of Tito Tours. It was staffed by an amiable English-speaking man. He himself was a possible driver for tomorrow's tour. If not him, than the driver would probably be the great Tito himself. Tito's English is not so strong, but otherwise he was the best tour guide in town. He knows everything about the area, and as long as some of the passengers help with translating you couldn't do better. So said our new friend. Indeed, the office walls were covered with positive messages from former tourists raving about Tito. Our second impression of this place, when we returned to actually pay, was a little disconcerting. There was a second English-speaking guy there. His face was covered in scabs from a recent fall. We soon wondered if the fall had injured his brain. Even as we were paying, we asked very casually if we would have an English-speaking guide for the next day, not a deal breaker for us by any means. He became very defensive, and told us that driving, not talking was the main function of the 'guide'. It didn't make sense given how much the first guy raved about Tito as a guide. We were a bit worried, but figured we would be ok if we didn't get the lunatic.

We showed up at 9 am the next day. Everyone was there, Tito, and his two English-speaking cohorts, crazy and otherwise. They were a bit stressed and not talking to us, with no word on who was driving. Finally, after an hour and a half of waiting, a jeep pulled up and we were loaded in. One of the Spanish-speaking passengers noticed that his window wasn't working and complained, and we were off loaded onto a second jeep. After almost two hours of delay, we got going. However, our driver was not Tito or one of the English speakers, but Marcelo, a young fellow who was obviously not part of their business, but only a contract hire. As we discovered through the next three days of the tour, Marcelo understood that his job was to be the driver. He was accommodating when we asked to stop or slow to take pictures, and he was quite knowledgeable whenever he was asked a question. However, he rarely volunteered information about what we were seeing, and he disappeared at mealtimes. No doubt it was a tough job driving a jeep three days straight over rough mountain roads and across great roadless deserts, but we were tired out just being passengers! Still, though no fault of Marcelo, he didn't match the 'guide' image they had originally sold us at Tito Tours.

Our first stop was the so-called train graveyard, a group of old scrapped train engines and cars in the desert just outside of town. Though rusted brown, most of the engines were intact enough for people to climb aboard, and they did make great pictures with the desert in the background. The most singular thing I noticed about the trains is that they had been graffitied ... by physicists. Several physics equations had been painted on the trains, including the famous E = mc squared, which almost anyone could do, and even the far more obscure general relativity equations (I don't know them well myself except to recognize them). This first stop also gave us a chance to appreciate the crazy scale of Uyuni tourism as we met up with the other tour groups. We were heading through an exceptionally remote, sparsely populated country, and yet there were 50 - 70 more jeeps coming with us!

Our next stop was the small town of Colchani at the edge of the salar where there was a salt processing plant and hawkers selling souvenirs made of compressed salt (i.e. jewlery boxes, ash trays, etc). Here we stopped for a few minutes and talked to a worker about the salt processing process. As this salt was, well, pure salt, there wasn't much to it but to break the salt up, dry it, and bag it.

After the town, we left any semblance of road and drove right over the salt flat itself. How to describe a salt flat? Well, its a bit like a great white desert, or maybe a large lake frozen over. The salt flat stretched in all directions around us. There were mountains at edges of the flats, and by some trick of the light shining on the sand, the bottoms of the mountains were invisible! The mountain tops seemed to float.

After a couple of hours driving, we arrived at Isla Incahuasi, also known as Isla del Pescado, a giant mound of fossilized coral rising like an island from the surrounding salar and covered in giant cacti. Its nickname, Isla del Pescado - Island of the Fish - was derived from its somewhat fish-like shape. After lunch, we had an hour for exploring the island. Eva and I climbed around it, taking pictures of the cacti and the salt flat below us. A lot of tour groups were there too. Some people checked out the island like us, but others stayed on the flat, and took advantage of an optical illusion provided by this environment. The perfect white background of the salt flat made it hard to judge perspective. Thus, by placing a small object nearby, and a large object further away, it was possible to take pictures where the smaller object appears to be the larger. We thought these people were wasting their time, but after we saw the pictures (i.e. a person sitting on a giant Pringles can, or a group of people in the palm of another) we wished we took some ourselves. However, we would have needed a third person to be taking pictures if I were to appear in Eva's hand (or vice versa).

We left the Isla del Pescado and drove to our hotel at the edge of the salt flat. This was a salt hotel, everything inside was made of salt! Imagine a simple one story hotel in which the walls are made of salt bricks, the floors are made of coarse salt, and the 'beds' are hard, salt blocks, and that is pretty much what we were staying in our first night of this trip. I enjoyed the novelty, although Eva felt very dehydrated - like she was being mummified. That evening, we sat around the salt dinner table, talking to the other people in our group. Besides us, there was a couple in their mid-thirties from Spain. She was born in Bolivia and they were back visiting her family. There were also a couple of young Jewish girls from Israel who were enjoying some time off after completing their mandatory 2 years in the Israeli army. The Jewish girls spoke perfect English (and Hebrew of course when talking to each other). The Spanish couple spoke little English, but with Eva's Spanish skills, we were able to communicate with them and our driver Marcelo pretty well. Everyone was good-natured and mature, and a good crew to travel with. On some of these tours, the passengers booze it up and encourage the drivers to get careless, sometimes resulting in accidents.

We left bright and early the next day, continuing southwest on our journey. This was a much longer drive than the first day, with not as much to see. For the first part of the driving, we continued over mountainous, bare terrain. Though we did lots of ascending and descending, we were on the whole climbing higher and higher. We stopped by a lookout where we were surrounded by weird volcanic rock formations, and from where we could see Volcán Ollagüe, a volcano, in the distance. Eventually, we reached the desert of Siloli, where we paused for pictures of the famous Arbol de Piedra, an isolated rock structure in the shape of a large tree. We continued south to view four different small lagunas or lakes (Laguna Negra, Laguna Cañapa, Laguna Hedionde, and Laguna Honda) containing lots of flamingos. The lagoons all have different, unusual colors owing to the presence of minerals and salt in their waters. We did not swim.

After a long days journey we came to rest at a hotel near the Laguna Colorado. Larger than the first four, this lake has a brilliant red color in its waters, due to the presence of the red algae. The edges of the lake are white as snow due to borax and salt deposits. We saw hundreds of flamingos wading in the lake slurping the water up to eat the zooplankton and other invertebrates. I am told (by Eva), that this is what makes them pink.

The food had been mediocre throughout the trip. On that last night, supper was terrible. We had spaghetti, and the noodles seemed to have been left soaking for an hour. What's worse, the other tour groups in the hotel had the exact same meal, but their noodles were fine. Even the unexpected wine bottle was no consolation. There was little do after dark, especially after the generator went out, so we all went to bed early, all six of us in the same room.

We got ourselves up early, before sunrise, for a pre-breakfast start the next day. Our first stop was at a place called Sol de la Mañana, not far from our hotel. Sol de la Mañana was a geothermally active area with a collection of thermal springs, steam vents, geysers, and mud pools. These were similar to those we saw in Yellowstone, although Sol de la Mañana was not so large. The setting was quite different, of course. In Yellowstone, the geyers were boiling up through the forests, while in Sol de la Mañana they lie in a rocky desert.

After we've had enough of the hot steam vents, we continued south to a lodge on Laguna Challviri where we breakfasted. Later I went for a swim in the Termas de Polques hot springs in front of the lodge. The temperature was near freezing outside, but the water was very warm and it felt great - especially after 2 days in the jeep. There were no changing rooms and dozens of other tourists about, so Eva helped me change discretely behind the tire of one of the jeeps.

Next stop was the Salvador Dali Desert, so named for the Salvador Dali- like rock formations on its western edge. I really loved this place. Not just for the rocks, but for the cool-looking sand. It was red to the west of us, but a brilliant yellow just to the east, and the border between the yellow and red sand looked as straight as a line. I could have stayed for an hour or so, but we only stopped for a couple of minutes. Eva was not as impressed, but took pictures anyways. We just don't see eye to eye on deserts.

By mid-morning, we reached the southernmost point of our trip, the tip of Laguna Verde. This was a clear, green lake, in which the surrounding mountains were perfectly reflected in its surface. There were no flamingos in this lake. We found out later that the clearness was due to the presence of arsenic, which kept all life away.

We now headed back towards Uyuni. After returning to Laguna Colorado, we were able to take a different route the rest of the way back. We were all pretty tired and had seen enough of the sites, although we made a couple of stops worth noting. The first was at the so-called Valles de Rocas, a spot in the desert with dozens of large shapely rocks protruding from the ground. Some of the rocks were three or four stories tall! We were able to get out and wander amongst the rocks, but I kept running into people relieving themselves! We had one more stop at some protruding pancake-like rock formations. These weren't quite as grand, and apparently not named, but we enjoyed some sightings of viscachas, a native rabbit-like rodent. We returned to Uyuni, and bid our farewells to Marcelo and our traveling companions.

That night we ate hamburgers at an outside table in the main plaza. We got to see some of the ill-effects that tourism can have on a town. Over a hundred people back from the salt flat tours were catching evening buses or trains. Not having accommodation in town, these people were all hanging out in the plaza with their luggage. Some had to wait until 11 pm that night! I didn't see any rowdiness, but it must have happened at times, as there was booze flowing quite freely within the surrounding bars. Still, I would think that as a place for the locals to come and enjoy, the plaza had been ruined for them by the tourists, and this happened every night. In other South American towns, the plaza (Parque Central or Plaza de Armas) was an important place for commerce and socializing.

Eva and I at least had a room, since we were not leaving that night. We didn't have long to enjoy it though. We had a 6am bus to Tupiza, as we continued our journey south to the Argentine border.

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Photos

Cemetario del Trens
with physics graffiti?

Rea on the salar?
No idea where this guy came from...

On Isla Incahuasi
also called Isla del Pescado

Arbol de Piedra
Literally translated as "Tree of Stone"

George on world's largest Pringles can
Sinced we missed cool pictures on the salt flats...

Dawn desert driving
by Marcelo

Enjoying the Termas de Polques hot spings
even though temperatures are freezing cold outside

On top of the rocks
with viscachas hiding (not shown)