Salar de Uyuni
Magical Mystery Tour
Where to go? Egypt was our original destination, yet the itinerary with its multiple tour groups didn’t appeal to our traveling style. Then one country appeared on the wireless horizon, a geography and culture we'd never considered - Bolivia. We selected locales, vetted lodging, and mapped out day (and night) travels. Once again our budgeted land traveling - learned during our cruising several years ago - became our mantra. With one exception: a private, three-day tour of the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni. Multiple emails zoomed between Maine and Bolivia. Backpacks grew larger with extra long underwear and altitude medicine. Finally, ten days into our trip, our magical mystery tour began with a four-wheel drive and Javier.
Dancing figurines and glittery boas adorned our bus to Uyuni. The one "bathroom" stop in the half-day ride was a local canteen with no bano... just the great outdoors. Our strategy was limited liquid intake that morning.
SALAR De UYUNI
Saturday, March 21, to Tuesday, March 24, 2009
After the 6.5 hour bus ride from Potosi to the small frontier town of Uyuni, we checked into yet another lovely Spanish style hotel with inner courtyard and immaculate rooms. The backpacker crowd finds decent rooms for $5 to $15 a night, but we splurged on continental breakfasts, heat, and clean bathrooms for $50 a night. ! Another luxury we gifted ourselves with was our Salar tour company. Horror tales abounded when researching tours of the Salar: overpacked vehicles, bitterly cold rooms, lack of food, and all coupled with unreliable guides. To protect ourselves against a less than stellar experience, we selected Ruta Verde Tours and arranged for a private, three-day tour. Emails flew back and forth between Gijs Dijkshoorn in Bolivia and us on Orr's to guarantee a smooth visit of the largest salt flats in the world. However, the itinerary came with a caveat - even major bus companies will cancel routes due to impassable main "highways" during the rainy season, which is November though April. Our driver, Javier Flores, picked us up Sunday morning!in his 4WD Toyota.!He grew up in el campo ('the country') raising llamas with his family who still live in a small pueblo outside of Uyuni. His first language is Quechua (introduced to the area by the Incans roughly 700 years ago), with Spanish being his second.!With his family of three little girls (ages 2 to 8) and his wife, Quechua is mainly spoken at home while both Spanish and now quechua is taught in school. It is such a! different language that it was hard to wrap one's tongue around the syllables, but he was smilingly patient when Lynnie asked in text-book Spanish if the name of a mountain or area was Quechuan. ! Within an hour we were well onto the Salar de Uyuni, salt flats left over from ancient lakes that existed!40,000 years ago. We literally drove across the!salt flats, navigating by the various black islands which popped up all over the place.! Some of the islands were covered in cactus, a few of which!recently died and!were noted to have been 1,000 years old.!! Snow covered peaks dotted the horizon in all directions; and, the white of the salt lake, especially!the parts that were covered in a few inches of water, created an endless variety of optical illusions and perfect reflections of the mountains. At times we felt we were at sea, so expansive was the vista. Cacti "buoys" added to the similarity as Javier steered his vehicle across the salt bed of 12,106 sq km. A reserve - Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa - covering the bulk of the area. Established in 1973 its goal was to protect the llama-like vicunas and the slow-growing llareta plant, both of which we saw as we traveled though this vast wilderness.
On Sunday, March 22, we began our trek across and around the Salar. Javier and Max pose for one of our multitude of saltflat photos. In the background snow cones of salt await pick up.
The bright red truck gathered the dug salt piles for cleaning, bagging, and exporting. Ninety percent of the salt is consumed by humans and ten percent by livestock.
At the edge of the salt flat in a small outpost Colchani, we visited a salt factory. Rudimentary cleaning and packaging is done, as Lynnie experienced, hand sealing pre-printed bags with an open flame.
Our first stop on the lake baptized us with llama meat lunch (no need to add it to any future dining) and a lunch time hike on Isla Incahuasi, 80 km west of Colchani. Here, too, we joined the other tour groups clowning against the white background, perfect for optical illusions. OVERLEAF: We asked some young Italian vacationers to snap a few of us.
SALAR De UYUNI
(continued)
We drove to Tahua, a town at the northern edge of the lake, with extensive stone ruins of pre-Incan cultures.! A wizened old man in the small village provided a key for our next stop. We drove part way up the mountain then hiked a!short ways to an ancient cave. The dwelling, secured with a small iron gate, apparently was the home!of a!pre-Incan family numbering about eight souls, referred to as the Coquesa mummies.! They appear to have died simultaneously,!perhaps from a volcano's toxic fumes.!!The!mother still wore a shawl with metal tie pin and had a braid down to her waist.! She was in the!kitchen are surrounded by pottery and cooking implements.! The father!was!seated on a throne-like chair!made of!rocks, and wore a pained expression.! Three small children lay in a crib-like area, and a couple other skeletons were sitting at the far end of the cave.! It was surreal to be surrounded by a family, in their spacious cave home, from perhaps 700 or more years ago,!seemingly untouched since the day they died. ! Thirty minutes later over rock-strewn roads we arrived our first night at the!Tayka Salt Hotel - walls, tables,!chairs, beds and much of the rest were crafted of salt blocks.!One reason we chose Ruta Verde was its ability to book tourists into the Tayka Hotels. Recently constructed, these four hotels represented a model of community tourism forming 'Limited Responsibility Societies'. Each community owned a third of the hotel, eventually acquiring full ownership. The profit was also shared with each community receiving a $1 per tourist. The local customs and culture, including culinary tastes, were incorporated into each area's Tayka Hotel providing guests a unique regional visit. ! Unlike the high season - Bolivia's winter months of July and August when the hotels were at full capacity with 70 guests - there were only two other groups in addition to us. We were very happy to be traveling in the off season,!with the added benefit that!the temperature's not nearly as cold. With these milder days we rarely donned our multiple pairs of long underwear, carefully squeezed into our backpacks on Orr's.
We kept uttering, "Is this for real?", as Javier let us absorb the quiet stillness echoing in the spacious cave home of these Coquesa mummies. The sacredness of this space settled over us as we respectfully eyed the bodies, imagining their disrupted lives.
The Tayka Salt Hotel's beds were surprisingly comfortable in spite of being one of the many pieces of furniture composed of salt. The doors were made from cacti. Fortunately the bathrooms featured porcelain banos. Leaving the Tahua village area on day two, diverting from the stone-built road would have resulted in sinking into a salty mire.
Wide-angled or Telescopic, our fascination with the Salar made for countless photos. Javier's respect and knowledge of his country's natural landscapes enhanced our awe of Bolivia's beauty.
Quinoa, a high protein grain native to Bolivia, paints mountain sides and valleys with its green, yellow, and red varieties. Javier explained that the different colored quinoa each had specific uses -- as flour, cooked grains, fermentation, and other consumables.
At Mala Mala Bahai we met one of the co-discovers of the Galaxia Cave topped by the Bolivian flag. The owner-guide led us around walls and pointed to ceilings encrusted with 300,000 year-old coral. In another opening they had found an ancient grave site where the pre-Incan Chullpas buried their dead in hollowed out holes.
A plastic tarp was removed from the underbody once we exited the salt flat. Constant companions were gas, drinking water, spare tires, and mechanics' coveralls. We used all of these accessories during our three-day exploration.
We toured a chain of lagunas or small lakes high in the Andes, colored according to the mineral present. White for borax,!yellow for sulphur,!blues, greens and reds for various other minerals.! Most of these lagoons were populated by large flocks of pink flamingoes, Andean seagulls and wild ducks.
The sight of these delicate and!graceful birds was!in stark contrast to the harsh rocky mountains topped with snow that loomed all around. Some were live volcanoes.
The flamingos have highly sophisticated filtering mechanisms with which they can!filter out the toxic chemicals present in many of!these lakes.
These regal avians fed by day and migrated at night. Javier who loved this wilderness told of nights fluttering with the traveling flamingoes' clicking speech. OVERLEAF: Velvetly lit or glistening dark, the landscape captured our eyes.
Throughout our journeys we frequently passed herds of wild vicu単a, similar to llamas but faster and sleeker. Now they're captured and sheared vs. killed for their fur, which is prized even more than llama for its fineness. NEXT PAGE: Max suggested we all dine together at our second Tayka Hotel, so tables were joined and conversation bubbled in Spanish and English.
Our last morning was documented by the Tayka Desert Hotel manager with his wife, young assistant, and three-year old daughter. As the only guests in the hotel, we truly felt part of an extended family. When retiring at 10:00p the Englishspeaking manager solicitously provided us with an extra 30 minutes of electricity before we resorted to candles.
Early morning rising presented us with flaxen vistas and wind-carved rock formations in the Desierto Siloli. The Stone Tree was a favorite photo op, and of course we obliged.
As we rose to over 15,000 feet we walked amid the Geysers of Sol de Manana,!full of sibilant airstreams and bubbling muddy stewpots.!Javier told us the geysers begin around 5am only to quieten six hours later.
After filming a snippet of Javier and Max holding their hats out to be caught and carried 20 or so feet by a geyser's wind tunnel, we then walked amidst this surreal moonscape.
There were dozens of holes in the!ground, some small, others 15 to 20 feet across, all bubbling away in grays, browns, yellows and reds, the sulphur smoke billowing high into the wind.!
Caution was advised due to possible cave-ins. Some pools were still. OVERLEAF: Others boiled and hissed and plopped a colorful mineral fermentation.
Documenting our highest point of altitude we then descended to our first bath in days: the natural Hot!Springs of Polques. The temperature absolutely perfect, neither too hot nor too cold with bathing costumes of (dark) underwear and t'shirts.
Chile to the west and Argentina to the east cupped the southern boundaries of Bolivia. La Laguna Verde or!Green Lake pooled at the foot of the Volcan Licancabur (5960m). Lead, sulfur, arsenic, and calcium carbonates tinted the lake green. Here!even the!flamingoes can't exist. Surrounded by wonder we couldn't stop grinning.
Chilean, Andean and the rare James flamingos coexist, filtering the algae and diatoms inhabiting these lagunas. Like the other lakes in this area, Laguna Colorada, the "Colored" Lagoon, obtains its hue from algae and plankton feeding on the mineral mix.
We picnicked our last day at Laguna Colorada with lunches prepared by the manager's wife from the Desert Hotel. "Con los manos" or eat "with the hands" was the phrase we used, explaining to Javier it originated in Cuba when staying with Jose, another gracious, wondrous host.
On the way back to Uyuni we stretched our legs at Valles de Rocas. Amidst the dry wind-sculpted rocks grew endangered llareta, which was harvested by earlier inhabitants to burn as fuel.
An apt and fitting road sign for our six-hour drive back to Uyuni.
Our celebratory meal was where we'd had our first dinner in Uyuni, Minuteman Revolutionary Pizza., a favorite among tourists. Owned and operated by Chris Sarage from Amherst and his Bolivian wife, this friendly eatery boasted "Pizza with an altitude" at 367 meters. Next stop: our 12-hour, overnight bus ride to La Paz.
March 2009