Uyuni, Bolivia! Deep in southern Bolivia. At nearly 12000 feet of elevation! The trip there from the capitol city of La Paz entailed 4 hours in the early morning bus to Oruro. Then onto the train for 6 hours to Uyuni. And what a nice train trip it was. Faster and far more comfortable than the bus that would have kept bouncing along the rutted dirt road for another 9 hours! But even more amazing, the train left on time! That just doesn’t happen here!
So what is there in Uyuni to warrant such a long trip to this windswept dessert enclave? Well, when the huge prehistoric salt lake, Lago Minchín, which used to cover all of southern Bolivia, began to dry up, it left several small lakes behind. And several huge salt pans behind. Perhaps the most incredible of these is the Solar de Uyuni! It is at an elevation of 3653 meters and covers more than 12,000 square kilometers. It looks like a sheet of ice that extends further than you can see, with a thin layer of water over it much of the year. It has islands that rise out of it, rocky and covered in cactus, surrounded by salt as far as the eye can see. It has ‘eyes’, the ojos. These ojos are deep holes in the salt pan where water circulates to the surface of the salt, fed by the towering 18000 foot peaks which surround the salt pan.
The locals mine the salt. There’s also a hotel on the salt pan, made entirely of bricks of salt, cut from the pan! And of course the locals also offer an incredible 4 day 4X4 tour through the salt pan and into the high dessert country south of the salt pan. It was an incredible four days!
Day one found us on the Solar, stopping to see the mining operation where people use hand tools to scrape the salt up and pile it into mounds. Then, after it has dried, it is shoveled into ancient dump trucks. The workers heave the salt 12 feet into the air, over the side of the truck, by the shovel full. So often on this trip I saw people engaged in hard physical labor like this that we would probably never think of doing. But when you don’t have a back hoe, bulldozer or front end loader, you use your body!
We then headed to the Isla de Pescadores (Island of Fishermen) where we hiked and ate lunch. Definitely didn’t see any fishermen on the island. Or any fish anywhere near! There were 6 of us tourists on the trip, my friend Kelley and I from the USA, two guys from England and a couple from Switzerland (although the wife was actually Japanese). And our driver. And our cook. All but one of the English guys spoke Spanish. All but the Japanese wife and the cook and driver spoke English. Only the Swiss man and his Japanese wife spoke German. So, we had no common language that all could speak. Translation fun!
Riding on the Solar was a blinding experience, with a bright, sunny sky, 12000 feet of elevation and all of that white salt covered with water reflecting the light! I used sun creme liberally, and still burned to a crisp, losing skin as long as 2 weeks after the trip! Ouch! But it was incredible to see these 4X4’s skimming across the salt, with big blue Wal Mart style tarps wrapped around the bottom to try to protect the engine and frame from the corrosive salt water.
Late afternoon we were heading off of the Solar when we ran into a traffic jam! Not what you expect when four wheeling! At the spot where we were to leave the Solar and start driving on a rough dirt road, a local government official had set up a road block and was trying to charge each vehicle to pass through. But nobody was paying! Our driver was the first to get fed up and pull off of the ‘road’ to drive around the road block! We immediately sunk axle deep in the thick mucky, mire of mud! (There must be a rule about too many words starting with the same letter used in a description!). Then our driver got out, locked in the hubs, we all lined up behind to push (and get mud thrown at us from the spinning tires) and boom, we were free, around the road block, and flying down the 4X4 road! Legal? Well . . . Lets put it this way, an hour later, when we came to a military post that we were supposed to go through as a check point, we went four wheeling way around! I mean WAY around.
That night we slept in a tiny village, high in the Andes, where curious yet frightened kids walked the dirt paths between the adobe houses. And played football (soccer) of course! The llamas walked home from the fields around the town at sunset, each going to his owner’s stone walled enclosure for security for the night. Oh, and the sun setting over the heads of the llama herds was beautiful!
The next days we continued to head up into the mountains, seeing less and less of the scrub vegetation as the air dried out more and more. At points we hit totally barren dessert, no vegetation to be seen whatsoever. This dessert is the northern reach of the Atacama Dessert of northern Chile, portions of which had seen no rain in over 400 years, since the Spanish first came exploring!
And in the middle of this stark and beautiful land, we found the vizcacha. An animal, not an Italian type of bread! It looks like a rabbit. With an incredibly long tail! It is actually a rodent, related to the chinchilla. It usually lived in rocky areas where it climbed like a mountain goat!
We also saw incredibly beautiful lakes, surrounded by peaks stretching to 20,000 feet. And nearly every lake was teeming with flamingos! Many of them the rare James Flamingo! Two of the most memorable lakes were Lago Colorado, brilliant red, and Laguna Verde, a stunning blue lake that turns green as the morning breeze hits it, churning the water and perhaps the algae. Another lake had a wonderful hot spring bubbling up beside it. We basked in the hot water, eating breakfast as the sun warmed another day after the frigid night.
And we went to a field of geysers at 16000 feet, steaming and fuming, mud pots bubbling as the sun peaked over the horizon.
But as incredible as the scenery was, I can never forget the people and the unbelievable style of life that I saw. Each adobe house had a cross on the thatched roof. A symbol of the Catholic Church’s influence. But the crosses usually had symbols from Incan tradition sitting beside them on the roof. A ceramic bull on each side of the cross, representing a request for an abundant life. Or roosters, a symbolic plea for fertility! And along with these spiritual traditions, we also came across a house with animal body parts hanging out on the clothes line, drying in the vicious sun. We saw entire lungs, testicles, all hanging out to dry! To be used later in black magic potions!
For food, most families depended on their tiny family gardens of potatoes and quinoa as well as the family herd of llamas, alpacas and sheep. Electricity here? Not often. And when it was, it was powered by a generator. Oh, and transportation for the locals generally was on the bus. It came to town usually once a week. And left once a week.
Music and dance were definitely important parts of the way of life too! In one town we were fortunate to arrive in mid day while school was in session. I went in and listened to the school band practice. Three trumpets, four baritones, a snare drum and a bass drum. Playing traditional folk music in a two part call and response style. Another evening we were able to watch the local teens practicing a traditional dance to music supplied by a boom box with nearly dead batteries. The traditions of this culture are being passed on to the next generation.
And of course, this type of trip would not be complete without at least one mechanical story to tell. So . . . We’re well into the second day of the trip, crossing a high dessert valley, when the driver starts sticking his head out the window listening to something none of us hear. He stops! Oh-Oh! He crawls under the truck. An even bigger Oh-Oh! We here banging and shoving and soon see the entire tailpipe and muffler start emerging from under the truck! Wow! The engine still runs fine, so no damage was done to the manifold. Good. But the truck sure is mighty load! The tiny villages that we pass through every 4 or 5 hours definitely hear us coming! Oh, and coolest to me, after removing the tailpipe and muffler, the driver doesn’t just leave it sitting in the dessert to be trash. We haul it up on top of the truck. And bungee cord it on. And carry it for the next three days! Very environmentally wise! Plus, he’ll take it to town and weld it right back on and see how much longer it can last until it falls off again and the process starts over again. In this culture there isn’t much trash. Recycle and reuse have always been the way of life. When you don’t have much, you don’t throw things away. They’ll be useful again. Someday. Somehow.