The Salt Flats, day 1

Shortly after writing the previous post, we made our way throughout the town of Uyuni in an attempt to find the best Slat Flat tour possible. This consisted of going to one agency, taking a long lunch break, then picking the next one we went to as it cost abut 15$ less than the first. We were exhausted. The problem we discovered was that there are roughly 6000 agencies all claiming to offer roughly the exact same thing but charging different prices, while at the same time informing us that all the other agencies put scorpions in your pants and provided nothing but llama feces for meals. Since we had no real way to judge who was telling us the truth and who actually did insert stinging insects in your boxer shorts, we picked a cheap option that seemed to provide what we wanted.

Luckily, we were already hanging out with one cool Israeli guy and met a threesome of travelers who seemed cool enough, so we booked our tour together since the cars hold 6-7 and we didn’t want to end up stuck in a car for 4 days with whoever happened to be the luck of the draw. That’s how you end up bumping over desert roads with a dude with horrible BO, vomity-guy, a leper, and Hitler. As it was, our group turned out to be a lot of fun. To introduce our players:

Roey – Israeli guy with typical Israeli traveler hair (huge afro). Had a nice camera and a serious cookie addiction.

Paddy O’Reilly – Irish guy. No really, an Irish guy named Paddy O’Reilly. Nice fellow, unfortunately broke stereotype and didn’t drink whiskey the entire time.

Penny – English girl of Chinese heritage. Couldn’t stand silence, unless she was reading or sleeping.

Sabina – Danish girl. Yes, Ty’s eyes lit up when he heard.

Hector – Our driver, a 30-ish Bolivian who could handle our ’89 Toyota Land Cruiser like nothing I’ve ever seen. Quiet except when spoken to, friendly, and didn’t kill us in a desert rollover accident.

We were scheduled to leave at 10:30 in the morning, so somehow Tyler and I managed to arrive at the agency’s office only somewhat late. This proved to be no problem at all, as we then proceeded to sit around the office until 12 for the 4x4 and driver to show up. This was apparently due to lines at the gas station, or some such Bolivian nonsense. Finally he arrived, and after only one brief stop to drop his wife off at his house, we were off bumping across the desert.

We drove along a dirt road out through the dirt plains on the outskirts of Uyuni, littered with garbage complete with random stray dogs nosing through in search of lunch. After a short while, we veered a hard left off the road, and out onto the salt flat itself. The first views were incredible, with the stark white expanse extending off to the horizon, where giant mountains waited to lick the salty edges. Our first stop was the salt harvesting stations, where workers first broke and scooped the salt into small mounds both for ease of collection and to let the water seep out, drying the salt.



After snapping some photos and of course tasting the salt (which to everyone’s surprise tasted like salt), we piled back into the 4x4 for a short drive out across the huge plains of salt (1200 square kilometers of it). After stopping briefly at the “Salt Hotel” (a building built out of blocks of salt cut from the flats), we continued on to Isla de la Pesca (Fish Island). Its either called this because it’s vaguely shaped like a fish when seen from above, or because of the fact that there are no fish to be found there. One or the other. The island rises out of the salt like some sort of, well, island. The total height of the hill isn’t all that great, but our group quickly tired while climbing the cactus covered sides. This was probably due to the fact that the altitude was still somewhere around 3600m (roughly 11k ft), and someone apparently forgot to put enough oxygen in our atmosphere to fill it up to the height we were at.



After eating lunch at the base of the island, we then walked out a ways into the flat to take advantage of an interesting effect of the flats: a complete lack of perspective in photographs. We spent the next hour or so taking a number of funny photos playing with this effect.



(This isn’t actually one of the perspective photos, for some reason bottles of Bolivian rum are in fact 15ft high. We brought 3.)

After snapping our photos at the flats, we bumped off for another few hours journey to the edge of the giant realm of salt (slugs beware). Once off the white, we followed a dirt track for a ways until we came to a small pueblo, where our company had it’s “hospedaje” located. The pueblo was made up of perhaps 40 dusty adobe-esque buildings, with unfortunately not a single disco or bar to be found. The compound where we stayed for the night consisted of two long buildings, one made up entirely of unheated concrete rooms with only two beds apiece (and no cable!), and the other containing the dining area and kitchen. We ditched our gear thankfully, and ate a hot meal with three other groups of tour-goers, before drinking a few Bolivian beers and crawling into our sleeping bags.
- posted by Micah @ 4:55 PM