The Happy Couple

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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To some extent, day three was just more of the same, except prettier, perhaps. Hence the many photos. At the start of the day I was feeling a bit sick from the altitude again so David insisted I join him in chewing coca leaves again. It's also good for your digestion, he told me, since I had just finished breakfast... and it's good for working, good for staying awake, good for concentrating... in fact, he told me, it's good for todo. I think he had already been chewing his mouthful for some time. This time he offered me a little piece of what looked like a small stone to put in my mouth along with the leaves; a catalizador he told me. This time, instead of slowly building alertness as with a cup of coffee, my cheek went numb and I felt instantly really awake, but then the leaves in my mouth seemed to be "done" not long after. The catalizador didn't taste very nice; I suppose it was some sort of alkali, perhaps lime, and, from the back, Tina informed me that it makes your teeth go black and fall out. Certainly David's teeth were in a state. I thought I'd give the catalizador a miss in future.

Another mineral lake

Che

More flamingos in a thermal lake

Flamingos and Volcano

It was more mineral lakes, more volcanoes, and more flamingos. Soon we were requesting no more flamingos; we have enough photos of flamingos we insisted, but every time David told us that these ones would be more tame and we would get better photos; and he was right. Why he didn't just take us to the last really tame flamingos and forget the rest, I don't know.

David and Abi walking over minerals

Flamenco y Volcan

Hot lake

The wheels

More minerally mountains

Not much of a road

Surely this should be Dali's Desert?

After the flamingos in Laguna Colorada, we came to some much more distorted and interesting rock formations in the desert, than those in the Desierto de Dali the previous day. Here David introduced us to photos locos, which I think is a course they must do in guide school. All the guides know how to get the best shops of people doing silly things, but their favourite is to take photos with an unusual perspective, making it look like the object of the photo is much larger or smaller than it really is. I believe this all may have started with people holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and pinching the top of the Taj Mahal, but it probably goes back to the dawn of photography. The main attraction in this part of the desert is the Arbol de Piedra which David instructed us each in turn to pretend we were holding. He didn't make a very good job of mind so I didn't bother putting it up, but there are plenty more photos locos for the Salar itself. Normally I would have been embarrassed by such behaviour, but months of witnessing Chinese tourists has completely desensitised me to extreme posing.

Photos Locos no.2

El Arbol de Piedra

Boogeyman from Nightmare Before Xmas?

A wee walk by the lake

The previous day, we had passed several vicuñas, which are another of the four species of camelids living in Bolivia, where llamas and alpacas are the most common and only two to have been domesticated. Vicuña, by contrast, are wild and rare, David told us, and there is a program to protect them from extinction, so all hunting had been banned for some time. Of course we wanted photos of them, but David had been keen to stick to his timetable the previous day, and we had been unable to take any photos. So, this day, I was waiting for an opportunity and as soon as I spotted one I asked if we could stop and we all took photos. If I'd known how many we would see, I might not have bothered with that first one.

First vicuña caught on camera

Another mineral lake with....

... FLAMINGOS!

Yup , flamingos

There were some flamingos

More vicuñas

Ffff... flamingos

Flamingos!

Would you believe it - flamingos?

Explosive lake

How did they come up with the name?

My stomach had been giving me trouble all day, despite having made it for seven months in Asia with barely mild indigestion. Argentinians had warned us about the food in Bolivia, telling us we should be very careful, but I had thought the tour would be fine. Throughout the day, I discovered that everybody else also had a bit of a stomach upset. I suspected last night's chicken. But it could have been the humitos, who knows? After many many flamingos over several small Lagunas, we came to what David seemed to think was something of a climax: an active volcano, still smoking. It was quite nice, but not really much different from any of the other volcanoes we had seen; just a little wisp of smoke coming out of the top.

Vicuñas in front of mineral lake and volcano

Vicuña AND flamingos

Smoking Volcan Ollague

Abi helps with the driving

What's that reflected in Jo's sunglasses?

Oh, it's me and a smoking volcano

Joanne and volcano

New Nazca Lines?

Finally we reached our destination for the day: a salt hotel. Joanne had read something about a salt hotel being illegal, so we were a bit apprehensive about it, although it was very nice and it was also the first time on the trip that we could have hot water showers. There were a few other groups staying in the hotel and we noticed that, just like the previous day, and at lunch, everyone seemed to have nicer food than us, although they were all complaining about not getting enough water. Our food had been pretty awful and now it seemed we all had food-poisoning. To irritate us further, every time we had a meal, including breakfast, at least two litres of fizzy drinks were brought out. Why couldn't they forget about the fizzy drinks and just give us more water? Clearly people from the first world do not have as sweet a tooth as South Americans.