Advertisement
Published: October 14th 2013
Currently in Pisac in the Sacred Valley in Peru!! (Oct. 13th, 2013)
Well, we have finished our tour of the Salar de Uyuni (Salt Flats outside of Uyuni) and i have to admit that it was totally fantastic!! Everything was just perfect! I hope to give you some of the details in the following...
So, our arrival in Uyuni was not very fun since Lisa was not feeling very well. The train from Oruro was fun and an interesting experience. About an hour´s out of Uyuni, we actually derailed in the desert!! And the train employees worked for about an hour and a half to (eventually) successfully put the engine back onto the track! It was amazing and I wished that I could´ve seen what they were doing but we weren´t allowed to exit the train. In my mind, once an engine derails, there´s nothing short of a crane that could lift such a thing to properly reset it back on the rails but the train employees were able to do the same with their shovels and massive resolve!! Wow!!
So, with Lisa going down fast, we pulled into Uyuni and went across the street to the
Hotel Avenida, which was ready for us and we crashed into Rm. 29. Lisa did not leave the room for the next 30 hours with severe gastro-intestinal pain and discharge!! Poor girl! Unfortunately, the hotel does not have any heat and we slept pretty late the next day so we awoke at around 10am and I quickly got dressed and ran around the area looking for another place to move to (the checkout time for the Avenida is 11am) but, alas, there was no place to go (most places were filled). So, we all hunkered down at the Avenida, which had nice beds and was very clean (did I mention that it was cheap? 50 Bolivianos (7dollars) each!). It was just a little chilly (Uyuni is about the same as La Paz as far as altitude goes).
So, Rumi and I spent two days checking out Uyuni, vegging out in the internet cafe (the Avenida does NOT have wifi!!) and trying to make Lisa more comfortable while at the same time letting her sleep as much as she can. It was Saturday and there was a festival going on directly in front of the church area and, as far
as I could tell, it was dedicated to Uyuni food and culture. There were lots of tables with local specialties and I had a very nice quinoa soup with dried llama meat (at that point, Rumi was already at the Internet Cafe about a 1/2 block away so I went and got him to try it!) and washed it down with a nice slice of some kind of caramel cake that the woman was slicing off of a roll. There was lots of music being played loudly over loudspeakers and many, many locals milling around having fun! We also bought Lisa a nice necklace to cheer her up.
Luckily, Lisa´s emesis was starting to slow a bit and she went directly to the Cipro, which started turning her around pronto. Rumi and I went over to the Minuteman Restaurant that evening and had a fantastic pizza with a very, very wonderful salad bar! Oh, yeah, how could I forget?? Rumi and I spent the afternoon by walking along the RR tracks west out of town to the Cementario des Trens, which Rumi absolutely loved!! We walked through the entire quarter mile of old, rusted and horribly bent frames of
both freight and passenger cars with wheels and other tren equipment lying askew everywhere. Finally, the procession ends with a bunch of locomotives lined up end to end, most with their boilers (is that what you call them?) missing. Rumi was in 11 year old heaven as he scrambled up and down and in and out of locomotives to his heart´s content!! We then had a nice walk back to the hotel by again following the RR tracks, with Rumi musing about his Minecraft Mods (Be Here Now, Rumi!!!).
We actually didn´t do much Internet that first day because every place we went to didn´t have any access to YouTube!!!! (You know that you have come to the ends of the Earth when you can´t access YouTube!!!).
Luckily, Lisa was feeling better in the morning and actually went out to breakfast with us on the second day to a place on the plaza in front of the RR station to the left. It was a great recovery! Great job, Lisa! She says that she hadn´t been sick like that for a very long time. She did go back to the Hotel after breakfast with a few hours of
rest but then reappeared in the middle of the afternoon and we went over to Emprexa Tours (which was located right next to our Hotel) to book our Salar de Uyuni tour. I had been speaking with a lot of people regarding their experiences with their tour companies and, IMHO, I think Lonely Planet is hyping up this "drunk/sleepy/drunk and sleepy/broken down vehicle" tour thing a little too much. The price was Bs 750 each and the vehicle and driver were great and we ended up having a fantastic time (like everyone that I spoke to did!).
So, on our third day in Uyuni, we finally met our tourees outside of the Emprexa office at 10AM (after Lisa and Rumi had a fantastic buffet breakfast that they absolutely raved about at the Minuteman Restaurant!). There was Tiffany and Sophia from the UK (actually, Sophia had a French mom and a Morroccan Dad and
grew up in the UK) and Werner from Belgium and everyone spoke English and a little spanish so before we knew it we were in the vehicle with our driver Omar and we were off!!!
We, for some unknown reason, went the clockwise route instead
of the usual counter-clockwise direction, which, it turns out, was a little better since we were going against the tide, so to speak, most of the time and were really alone at most of the big tourist stops (for instance, we were actually ALONE at the hot springs, having passed it (there were about 12 vehicles there!!) and gone on to the green lagoon/volcano first (where we were alone) and, by the time we returned to the hot springs, everyone had left and gone to the green lagoon!! Boy, that was great!! Thanks so much, Omar!
Everyone who does the 2 night/3 day tour (which everyone does!) goes to the same things along the same route!! There really are no variations in the route that it travelled. And, remember, this is really a vehicle tour, in the sense that you are going to be in the vehicle for most of the entire time. There´s not a lot of walking around, although, of course, you do some walking here and there but not much!!!
So, going clockwise means that we went down directly to the south on the first day, through San Cristobal and we stayed at the very
high hotel that first night (and that we stayed at the Salt Hotel the 2nd night!!). But the blankets were plentiful and we slept in our sleeping bags under the blankets and we were toasty. Werner didn´t have a sleeping bag so we lent him Rumi´s bag and Rumi crowded in with Lisa and they all did well.
I developed a slight headache during the first day and it intensified during the evening. I don´t know what the altitude of the hotel was but I would guess that we were over 14K feet if not over 15K...My night wasn´t too fun as the headache was bad and I got up a few times to go the bathroom (and it WAS a bit on the chilly side) but in the morning I took some Ibuprofen, skipped breakfast and started to feel better (thank G-d for Ibuprofen!!). We walked out at around 5AM to the truck and there were a million stars in the sky (maybe 2 million?)!! It was gorgeous! The 2nd day on the clockwise route is a long day so we started early and got to the geysers and bubbling volcanic area just as the sun was approaching
the horizon. It was gorgeous! We continued on past the hot spring and went to the Green Lagoon and Beautiful Volcano way down at the corner of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia! That was to be our southernmost point in our entire trip (the northernmost point was at the equator in the Galapagos!) and then we turned around and went to the hot spring, which was beautiful and quiet, we having passed the 12 trucks, who were there when we passed them the first time, on the way back to the hotspring!! Great decision by Omar!
The rest of the day was spent driving back north towards the Salar through desert and washes and canyons and past lagoons and volcanoes! It was very much like our home but somehow different. Omar explained at one point how the sandy region that we were driving through had been blown there by the winds from the Atacama Desert, which was directly west of us! Very cool!
After the sandy desert area, we descended into a narrow canyon through which we made our twisty turny way (it reminded me of the Collett Canyon road shortcut from the Kaiparowits Plateau road (between Big Water
and Escalante, UT) to the Hole-In-The-Rock Road!! During our journey down this way, Omar´s soundtrack entered (for the first and only time on our trip!) a Beatles section and right in the middle of it was "Imagine" and we all had a moment in the vehicle, singing Imagine and all of us being in Bolivia on this journey through the beautiful landscape, etc.!! (It was all videoed by Lisa!!).
That night we made it to the edge of the Salar, to the Salt Hotel. Tiffany and Sophia had a room with salt granules on the floor but our room had a salt block floor!! We all played Fluxx (which we had taught to the group!) and drank a bottle of wine and had dinner surrounded by Salt! It was a nice night (TG my headache was gone!!! Yes!!).
The next morning, we got up a little late and rushed to make it out to the Salar for the sunrise. It was already dawn by the time we made it outside so the stars were gone but we drove out onto the Salt and were able to see the sunrise out there! Gorgeous! We then drove over to the
Island where we climbed through cactus to the top of the mountain where there was a great view of the Salt stretching out for as far as the eye can see in every direction! Very Impressive!
We then drove back out onto the salt and stopped out in the middle of Salt Nowhere, where we spent an hour or so taking the Salt Perspective Pictures (I am going to try to attach pix to this posting from Lisa´s phone so I hope that you can see some of these pix from this trip!!). It was great fun making these pix!
It was a great trip and I highly recommend it to everyone!! Don´t miss it if you are in Bolivia!
When we returned to Uyuni, we were exhausted and couldn´t face taking an overnight bus anywhere. We had a goodbye dinner with Sophia and Tiffany at the Minuteman Restaurant before we staying overnight at a great hotel (whose name escapes me right now - when you leave the train station, you make a right turn and go about 3 blocks down and it is across from the Plaza des Armas - it´s directly across from the big
Kid´s Slide!) - we paid B 250 ($35) for a very clean and nice room up at the top in the corner -- alot of sun!! Yes! -- The family only knows Spanish but we had a nice time there (I only wish they would seal up the window frame in the shower to stop the flow of cold air into the shower!!). The next morning, we found that there were NO daytime buses to La Paz (!!??) so were hopped on the 9am bus to Potasi, where we changed for Oruro, where we changed for La Paz, where we arrived at about 11pm! What a long day (14 hours of bus riding!)....but they had a room for us at Arthy´s and we, thankfully, flopped into our beds and slept with dreams of Salt, Sun and Time....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 10; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0491s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Jana
non-member comment
Beautiful!
Hello Ron, Lisa and Rumi! Very nice photo's and story. Great to hear that you enjoyed it so much with the same Tiffany and Sophia I met in Puno! Enjoy the rest of your trip! Jana