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Published: November 8th 2008
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Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God,
I don't know but today seems kinda odd,
No barking from the dog, no smog,
And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog,
...Today was a good day
A little bit of inspiration from the lyrical poet Ice Cube. While I´m not celebrating not having to "use my AK," or "gettin´a beep from Kim," I would say that the last few days in the Salar de Uyuni were some of the best, with the most surreal, outlandish landscapes I´ve ever seen.
The Salar de Uyuni is an enormous salt flat? just outside the city of Uyuni in southern Bolivia. The city itself lacks anything of real interest besides Minuteman Pizza, the best pizza I´ve had on the trip run by an expat from Boston. The only thing of note is that we watched the U.S. election from our hotel room in CNN en Español (Eric´s edit: The self proclaimed best political team on latin television.) The commentary was a bit more difficult to follow, but not much less interesting than Wolf Blitzer´s Situation Room. Anyway, I have been excited to see the Salar ever since I watched the
"Where the Hell is Matt" video
for the first time. (If you´ve never seen it, please do. There is nothing that makes you want to travel more."
The salt flats are an enormous plain of blindingly white salt with criss-crossing, delicate, inch high ridges of salt stretching to the horizon. Here, occasionally, the flat field of vision is broken by distant mountains. After driving for a few hours through this mind boggling landscape, we came upon an island in the midst of it all. The island was not very large, it could easily be walked around in forty five minutes, but was covered in enormous cacti of the most bizarre shapes. It was something out of a Dr. Suess book. We convinced our guide to give us several hours here so that we would be able to catch the sunset as we left the Salar. We used the extra time to take the requisite Salar de Uyuni photographs, playing with the optical illusion caused by such a large, flat, undisturbed plain. There´s one of me in the palm of Eric´s hand, me eating Eric, Eric pulling a Mighty Mac Super Punch (Mike Tyson´s Punch Out anyone?), among many others on the second page of photos
Laguna Colorada
It is frequently refered to as the red lake. of this blog. (Eric´s edit: Taking these goofy pictures is an absolute blast. The more props you have, the more creative you can get, with patience and time the only constraints to taking mind boggling pictures of your imagination´s design. This may be hard to envision but we watched a large group attempt a picture of one man holding 5 people on each of his outstretched arms. We also assisted another group of girls in a photo of them crawling into a pringles container.)
After playing around we took off eventually to catch the last rays of sun from the middle of the Salar. While it doesn´t beat out sunsets at
Kalalau Beach in Kauai, it was the second most spectacular sunset I´ve seen. It capped off a day of otherworldliness with skies of every color at the end of a seemingly endless plane of white salt.
The next day we drove to various lakes in the mountains of southern Bolivia, stretching from 4,100 meters (about 13,000 feet) to 4,600 meters (just over 15,000 feet). The terrain is a completely barren, red sand, landscape with igneous rocks strewn about which range from tiny rocks to large boulders. Surrounding
A 40 Yard Shadow
Eric paced my shadow off at sunset in the Salar. you are enormous 6,000 meter (20,000 ish feet) volcanoes, some of which are still active. It feels completely Martian. The only signs of life are tiny tufts of yellow grass when you are below 4,200 meters and the occasional vicuna (cousin of the llama). There are only occasional roads, and for the most part you try to follow the tracks of the 4 x 4s that came before you. However, sometimes these aren´t the best and contain bumps, rocks, and ruts the size of VWs. The guides pay no heed though, and drive through them at top speed sending passengers tossing throughout the cabin of the top heavy SUVs loaded with baggage and extra gasoline on the roof. How more of these vehicles don´t flip is beyond me, but I figure it is simply another means by which Bolivia gets its laughs, scaring the hell out of tourists and then easing up just enough to realize you had no real reason to be afraid. They do, however break down frequently. Ours only did twice and was fixed pretty fast by the guide-driver-mechanic. However, we came across one vehicle that seemed to be in rough shape. There were six or seven
Salt Piles
Harvesting salt in the salar Bolivian men trying to fix it, and I had never actually seen one of them run, or look concerned, until this moment. The ultimate fix, though, was like nothing I´ve ever seen. They took a broom from the nearby restaurant, sawed off a few inches of the handle, wrapped it in a pastic bag, and, with a huge hammer, they pounded it into the engine. I´m not kidding. Look at the last photo on the blog for how you fix an engine in Bolivia.
As you are driving, every few hours you come across high altitude lakes, ringed by white mineral deposits, with large numbers of flamingos feeding on the microbes that inhabit these red, yellow, white, green, grey, and every other color imaginable, bodies of water. And when I say that these lakes were different colors, I truly mean that the lakes are colored due to the minerals within them. For example, Laguna Colorada is a red lake. Not red in that it has a tint of the color to it, but it looks like a lake of blood (sorry, a bit morbid analogy, but it was all I could come up with).
On the third
day we woke up before sunrise and drove off to see some high altitude, 4,900 meters (16,000 feet), hot springs and geysers. The guides called them geysers, but they are hardly Old Faithful, and look more like someone buried a tea kettle letting off some steam. However, the hot springs were impressive, boiling mud and sending off enormous amounts of steam into the early morning, crisp mountain air.
From there we drove a little further, to the green and white lakes (I forget the actual names for them), and a few minutes past there we were left at the Chilean-Bolivian border. There is no Chilean post at the border, so we just jumped onto a bus and life changed drastically. The bus had seats without holes in them, it didn´t look like it was pieced together from several buses left to rot in a junkyard, and as soon as we crossed into Chile we had paved roads! People have change, the internet works, and you don´t feel like your stomach is going to hate you every time you get something to eat.
We had a quick respite in the city of San Pedro de Atacoma, which is an
oasis town in the driest desert in the world. The town itself is exactly what you would imagine for an oasis, there are small, one story, sandstone brick buildings covered in white plaster, sand roads, few cars, numerous bikes, and tons of tourists. The trees are the largest objects in the immediate area, the days are incredibly warm and the nights cool off drastically. The town doesn´t offer much, although the plaza is quaint and the church, which has a roof of cactus wood, is one of the nicest places I´ve been to have a contemplative moment on a Saturday morning, the countryside is loaded with activities. You can go and see intriguing rock formations, geyser fields and hot springs, and barren dessert plains. We just kind of did that... and have had enough, so we decided to jump on a bus and head to Santiago. Twenty-four hours on bus isn´t exactly exciting, but at least it is a Chilean bus with TVs, DVDs, a bathroom, and fully reclining seats that I´ve heard are more comfortable than those in the cheap hostels backpackers are accustomed to.
All in all, Bolivia is one of, if not the, best places I´ve
visited (Eric´s edit: Though my list is pretty short, its definitely my number 1 so far). There is an incredible amount of things to do and you can afford to do them all. That said, it feels good to be back below 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) finally and I can´t wait to get to places with trees, not just alpine shrubbery.
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Alan B.
non-member comment
halucinations
This certainly looks like a magical place. Are you guys sure that this is all optical illusions and the coca leaves aren't effecting your bodies and brains so grow and shrink in you own minds and then photogragh so we catch you doing magic trips. I don't believe any of this is real. It's that new camera Kyle bought that makes us think we are seeing ehat we are not seeing. Where can I get one?