And so to the Salar de Uyuni. This is billed by the guidebook as THE must-see sight of Bolivia. After the Cretassic Park fiasco we were less inclined to trust said book 100% but as there is really remarkably little else to do in this part of the world and everyone we had met had raved about it we decided what the hell and booked a three day trip.
It should be apparent to anyone who has been further than Dover on an organised tour that the agency will tell whatever lies they deem fit in order to get you to hand over money. These lies range from the mildly inconvenient - telling you the bus will take five hours when it will take seven; the severely inconvenient- telling you there is a toilet on the bus but neglecting to tell you that it will remain locked for the duration and you will have to pay five bolivianos to a toothless crone so you can pee in her vegetable patch; and the downright criminally negligent lies- in this case, telling you that the temperature in Uyuni is the same as in Potosi (5 degrees at night) when in actual fact it is TWENTY FIVE WHOLE DEGREES LOWER.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we must get to the Salar. If you've ever seen pictures, you 'll know that this great white expanse of saltiness is the place where you can do trick photography that makes you look the same size as your stuffed toys, or enables you to sit on the palm of someone elses hand. It is interestingly the remnants of a dried up ocean, but no one really cares about that when there are trick shots involving coca cola bottles to be done. So, it's a big white salt desert. It's very cool, but i'm not sure what else I can tell you about it really. It looks like the sort of place you would expect to see mammoths, if there were any left. It should have penguins. I think if it hadn't felt cold enough to be the Arctic, the fact that it looked like the arctic but was warm would have been notable. But it looked and felt like the north pole.
We went to an island in the middle of the salar and had a bracing picnic in a hurricane at a table made of salt. The island, a former coral reef back when this was an ocean, is covered in huge enormous cacti, about twenty metres tall. The tallest one was over 1200 years old. Impressive eh? The wonder of it all is what would possess a cactus to settle on a coral island in a salt desert in a hurricane and then stay there for a millenium, but then I know remarkably little about the psychology of cacti.
We stayed the night in a hotel made of salt bricks. The beds were salt, and the floor was salt, so it felt like it had snowed in the house. There was an agreeable santa's grotto type feel to the place, and exceptionally good biscuits. We drove into town through a dust storm and 60mph winds to buy beer, and passed the night listening to a gale force wind trying to scrape the roof off. Fortunately we hit upon the idea of wearing all the clothes we had brought with us all at once and so a hat, scarf, gloves, three pairs of socks, two pairs of trousers, five t-shirts, two jumpers, a fleece, six blankets and a sleeping bag later we were ready for bed, although unable to bend any of our limbs.
Somewhat to our surprise we actually survived the night although our toothpaste had frozen in its tube. Our next stop was Laguna Colorada. It is a lake which is red, because of the microorganisms in it, and these same little critters turn the flamingos that live in the lake pink. Frankly I am surprised that the flamingos were not blue as I have never ever been in such a frigid and hostile environment, not even the time I got drunk and booked a holiday in Poland in January. Unbelievably there are people who live full time on the altiplano, growing quinua and running salt hotels. If NASA ever need to find people to colonise Mars, this is the place. The landscape was distinctly Martian too, with reddish soil and weird rock formations and some of the weirdest light I have ever encountered. All in all it was a good introduction to interplanetary travel and I'm not sure someone didn't put LSD in my breakfast, but it was beautiful. Beautiful, and of course, unbelievably fricking cold.
The second night's accomodation made the first night's look like the Hilton. Having driven for an age across an enormous wide windy space we pulled up at what could charitably be described as a shack. We were in a dormitory with the other four people in our jeep, who by this stage we were bonding with nicely. As the temperature plummeted after sunset I tried to have a can of beer but it was frozen (of course I surmounted this obstacle eventually). They lit a woodfire which gave out all the heat and light of a candle. We went outside to look at the stars: more stars than I would ever have thought possible, in the widest sky I have ever seen. We stayed outside for as long as possible without risk of an icy death, about four minutes. Some germans arrived, we played cards. It was as convivial a way as we could think of to pass the last night of our lives, as we were all convinced we would be found dead in our sleeping bags in the morning, six gringo icicles who should not have listened to their tour agencies. At one point it was suggested (by me) that we should draw lots to see which one of the group we should burn as firewood. In the end we burnt the bread from dinner, said our farewells, climbed into our bunks and waited for death's sweet kiss.
We were stunned to wake up the next morning suffering from nothing more than mild nasal frostbite although all agreed it was the most uncomfortable night we had ever spent. The itinerary for the day involved us driving to a hotspring, where we could, for no additional charge, take our clothes off and jump into hot water. The hot water part sounded great, but the part where we had to strip down to our swimming costumes sounded impossible. However, when we arrived the lure of the steamy water was too great after three days without a shower. And it was glorious. By general consensus we agreed that the best thing to do would be just to never get out of the water. We stayed in as long as we could, watching absently as our socks were blown away by the wind, until finally we were coaxed out with pancakes. We were then told that due to adverse weather conditions (ha! what the hell had this been?) the laguna verde was closed (frozen solid) as was the chilean border. Our guide tried to frighten us with tales of jeeps being blown away in the desert. needlessly, because by this point we were all ready to go home, if only to have another crack at the one hot shower in Bolivia, located in the hotel/prison in Uyuni where we had shacked up before the tour started. They had pizza there too, and heaters.
So the verdict is as follows: go to Uyuni, and do this trip, because the scenery is unforgettably beautiful. But for God's sake, pack thermal knickers.
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