Salar de Uyuni Trip: Day 4

The previous two mornings had required us to get up at about 5am, but David wanted us up even earlier to make sure we got onto the Salar for sunrise. We were all at the car, ready for leaving at 5am, but this time David and/or Bernadine had slept in, and they were rushing around trying to get stuff done. Abi was already seated in the car and a suspicious smell of bacon was wafting out of their quarters. Our breakfast had been stale bread and dolce de leche every morning.

Clouds at dawn

Bricks for salt hotels

Nice PC background? The Salar.

Dawn

Distant volcano

More bricks

We did get to David's preferred stopping place for dawn, but his preferred stopping place was disappointingly ugly as there were rows of salt bricks hacked out of the flats and piled up near where we had stopped. The dawn was a bit of a non-event anyway, as there was a lot of cloud. Oh well, time to get down to David's proscribed repertoire of photos locos.

Photos Locos!

When we got out of the car, Joanne noticed that her trousers were wet and after a bit of investigation it seemed that it had been a mistake for them to put Abi in the back of the car so long before they were ready: she had wet the seat, where Joanne had then been sitting. After a bit of photo taking, we were off again towards an island in the middle of the Salar. These salt flats are huge; I think they are the biggest in the world. Apparently they were formed through the evaporation of a large inland sea, which occupied the whole of the Bolivian Alto Plano at the end of the last ice age. So the island in the middle, Isla del Pescado would have been a real island in the middle of an extremely saline lake at some point, and it still really gives the impression of being a real island, except that it is surrounded by salt rather than water.

At the island, Bernadine prepared another pitiful lunch for us, while David stood around chatting to other guides, who were all chewing coca leaves.

Guides with bags of coca leaves

The Salar

Abi

Then it was off again for more photos locos and also to dig around through the salt layer to look for crystals. The salt layer was surprisingly thin and it was quite easy to make holes with our shoes. The car didn't seem to be in any danger of falling through though.

This is like Sesame Street: Near...

... Far!

Apparently when it's the rainy season you need to wear wellies because the water just lies on top of the salt layer, and this is when the Salar looks its most impressive, apparently, with the reflections in the water. Joanne wanted me to do a star jump (or "jumping jack") to get her own photo of me doing silly things, but disaster struck: a large hold in my new trousers ripped open at the crotch, rendering them totally unwearable. Luckily I had shorts to change into. It was a bit cold, but it would have to do. I knew I should have paid over the odds for trousers that didn't quite fit correctly! A quick action photo sequence of the whole process of my trousers ripping and me realising exist on Joanne's camera. Unfortunately she hasn't been uploading many photos so nobody will ever see it....

Everyone taking photos

Wheels

Photos Locos

Eventually we set off again, to stop at the salt hotel. It turns out that this is the illegal one, so it's now been turned into a museum. We originally had thought that the illegality might come from some desire to preserve the salt flats, but it fact they are quite happily mining it all over the place: for building bricks and also for food. In fact the original salt hotel is the only one on the Salar itself; the rest are near, and the problem was that it had no proper sewage facilities, located as it was in the middle of nowhere on the salt flats. Oddly, you can't go into the shop and museum until you agree to buy something, but you have to do this before you've seen what's on offer, so we refused. Business sense seems to be seriously lacking at time in South America! We just took photos from the outside.

At last the tour was over and we hung around a small market where they are trying to flog all manner of tourist tat, which we also declined to buy, reasoning that on the salt flats is probably the most expensive place to buy any of it.

She was crying before

Abandoned child in abandoned truck

Then it was on to Uyuni, where I had to pay for the trip. They had a cash machine, I had been told. However, what they didn't tell me was that the maximum withdrawal is only half what I owed for the trip. Luckily I had a credit card I could use for a cash advance, but it could easily have been an awkward situation.

We said goodbye to everyone and gave David a tip from us all, though he had been acting very strangely since leaving the salt flats: he had become very sullen; maybe he was sad that we were going, or maybe he had run out of coca leaves. I'm sure his mood had been rising and falling depending on how large the bunch of leaves in his mouth. Poor Victoria was taking the option to return with them to Tupiza; maybe the problem was that David was in a huff because she was depriving him of family time. She was planning going to the office to complain and refuse to pay any more than what she owed minus all the money she had spent on water during the trip.

We booked cheapish bus tickets and sat around at a bar, drinking and chatting to some other travellers, before getting on the bus out of there. Uyuni is a rather ugly and pointless place, so we were delighted to leave. Not so delighted when we discovered how cramped the bus was: it was the least leg room we had seen since Nepal. I was getting leg cramps from the lack of space, but thankfully the person in front did not recline their seat. Whew! Another overnight bus, this time to Sucre.

We had been promised toilet stops as the toilet on the bus was locked, but the first stop was at 2am, seven hours after the bus had set off. This was also the food stop, so we bought some cheese and bread. Oddly the cheese was being sold for 5Bs for three cheeses, which was far more than we needed, but it was so little money it hardly mattered and we bought all three.

written by

The Happy Couple on October 22, 2009 from Uyuni, Bolivia

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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