Sitting all curled up on the hard lava crust wrapped in an old, musty blanket, I feel like an ice mummy.
What a day yesterday was! I run my eyes over the tens of thousands of years old volcanic landscape and its rough, dark-brown surface; half-ruined stone walls erected by generations long gone are running up the hill.
Especially the way it took a turn for the worst, I laugh against my will and a blast of icy wind hits my teeth.
Behind my back, the red-colored Tunupa volcano runs up into dizzying heights; at the very top of it, near its toothed rim, snow is shining white. The caramel-colored peak throws long shadows on a little stone hamlet at its foot; the dark soil at the volcano’s nape is blending in with clays of rusty-red iron and pale-yellow Sulphur, creating colorful maps.
It’s around 15 degrees and the day is breaking. The dark line of the horizon, covered with low-hanging clouds, suddenly lights up like a fire. The columns of heavy clouds come alive and turn into menacingly outstretched monsters. Above the distant mountain peaks, outlined on the horizon like a curve of an abnormal EKG, comes out the sun’s blazing disk and a wave of golden glow expands across the sky, coloring everything in its way into the sweetest tones of the pink, purple and pearly blue.
Voices are carrying across the plain’s open space. I look down where the cracked sea of lava, looking like plowed up by a gigantic bulldozer, ends by the edges of a perfectly straight, neatly white flat running into a distance.
The Salar.
Out of a simple stone house, our last night’s shelter, pours a small group of people wrapped in alpaca scarves and hats. They’re jumping up and down to get warm.
I bet you don’t mind staying in that primitive shack anymore now, I observe as – amidst admiring cries – they take spectacular pictures of the sky and earth, still hesitating a little to step on the hard, salty shell reaching to the depth of a dozen feet. Even though the day before, we spent an entire afternoon on it.
Emotions, fleeting emotions, crosses my mind; give me a spectacular scenery and I turn from a pain in the neck into a well of tenderness.
From high above, the Uyuni Salt Flats look like an endless lake filled with milk, except the milk is not a liquid but a perfectly compact crust of whitish salt.
Braulio, our local guide, told us that in Paleolithic times, this remote, godforsaken high plateau consisted of several salt lakes. When they dried up, Salar de Uyuni was created, the largest salt flat in the world comparable in size with Jamaica.
It’s impossible to take eyes off it, off the plain of infinite silver, all shimmering and perfect in the sunrays. On the horizon, the blinding surface merges with a blurred sky – it’s almost impossible to tell where one ends and the other starts.
A huge frozen lake was my first impression. And along with the other guys, I couldn’t resist the temptation to run and take a slide on it. Coarse salt crystals crunched under our feet, though. Still disbelieving it, we picked up a handful of salt, shimmering like a snow, and licked it.
Salty.
“Don’t worry, we won’t break through, nor will the jeeps. The salty water is not up to 10 feet below. Even the sun is ok – salt doesn’t melt.” Braulio is making fun of us – obviously, we’re not the first people he met confused by this bizarre natural phenomenon.
“Even if we get lost, we won’t freeze to death – there’s always some civilization within a few hours of driving. The question is whether it’s still in Bolivia or on the other side in Chile,” he laughs.
Jeep tracks, the only sign of human presence here, cross the flat from horizon to horizon. We add some more to them.
Wind is whistling outside our windows, Abba’s playing on the radio, salt is crunching under our wheels and arching over the white plain is a bright-blue sky. A perfect day.
The Incahuasi Island, the only disruption in this white void, is a summit of a former volcano. It looks like a brown, sprawled out bear, like a lump of dark soil on the ice from a distance. When we get closer, hundreds of gigantic thorny fingers shoot up to the sky, resembling meerkats looking out checking if the coast is clear.
The prickly, 10-foot tall tubes of the ribbed Andean cacti bristle with spines so long they could penetrate a human body. The tallest of them, of 40 feet and up, are 1,200 years old!
After a short stop and a walk around, it’s the shiny white nothingness again.
Driving around such emptiness can be pretty disorienting; add the dry air, reflected sunlight and high altitude, and I can see why the Spanish conquistadores ended so often mad – though moving, they felt like they were standing in the same place!
From under the solid crust spring to the surface geysers of bubbling, sulfurous water. Though cold, they’re excellent for rheumatism. The crust’s top layer is covered by regular hexagonal shapes resembling giant honeycombs or benzene patterns.
Braulio shows us a special optical trick that takes advantage of the contrast between the depth of plane and the absence of horizon.
The groups’ photographic creativity takes off – place a bottle of water before the camera and a person behind the bottle. The picture shows a miniature ballerina dancing on top of a giant bottle. Two people standing behind each other result in a picture showing a miniature puppet with a bent head and stooped shoulders, manipulated by a giant puppeteer.
I’m forced to intervene so that we can move on to other activities. For this, I’m punished by a picture where I look like a giant teacher scolding with a raised finger a group of tiny students, huddled together in fear.
When the sun starts going down behind the volcano’s prominent peak, we head to the Salt Flats border, where there are several hotels.
A low, thatched-roof building with flags of multiple countries stuck into large salt blocks soon appears. We have to drive up into a small yard with white chairs and tables chiseled out of salt to realize that we are in a salt hotel. Wow!
There are several, all built from large blocks of salt that local people extract from the salt flat and hew with shovels into perfect cubes.
Braulio and I enter the spacious reception hall. Falling in through large, square windows is the remaining daylight; an igloo immersed in gloom is my first thought.
The hotel’s walls and columns, decorated with indigenous rugs and hand-woven tapestries, are all hewn from blocks of salt. So are the sculptures of human figures and llamas made by a chainsaw, just like ice statues. I peek into one of the bedrooms – even the beds and nightstands are made from salt! Exciting! Even though it’s colder inside the hotel than outside.
“The hotel messed up the reservations and gave our rooms away to somebody else.” Braulio tries to dampen my excitement. “And because it’s full, we have to go somewhere else.”
My excitement can’t be smothered that easily, though. No problem, I tell the group; there’s plenty of other hotels around.
We leave the salt flats and head in the last rays of the sun for the darkening cone on the horizon. Little houses at various stages of decrepitude can be seen on the volcano’s hillslopes.
Climbing a narrow, dusty road, I’m searching for something that would look like a hotel. But all I can see is a clutch of primitive adobe houses, one church and a grocery store.
Finally, we pull up into a small yard. In shock, we’re staring straight ahead, not able to believe our eyes. This?! Here?!
I look over at Braulio. He just shrugs his shoulders – like I said, all’s full.
The house before us is literally on its last legs. Build from loosely piled stones and covered in flaked mud layer, it has a crooked straw roof and windows without glass. Completing the tragic picture is a drafty outhouse in the corner of the yard.
“That’s awful,” someone says.
“Is it even habitable?” utters one of the Canadians. “I so wish now I was back home in my new condo!”
“Dere’s nod a single llama in our enclosure!”
We laugh, though I’m not sure the Dutch meant it as a joke.
Braulio and the drivers jump out the cars and move the supplies inside the house. They wipe the dust off the tables, plug the drafty holes in the windows with cardboard boxes and make a fire in the stove. I split the group and assign everybody to an icy-cold room where they receive one rusty bed, two sagging mattresses and three smelly blankets.
Nobody’s saying anything; that’s what shock does to you.
I feel like I should say something … cheer everybody up, prove my leadership.
Unfortunately, I do so.
And it doesn’t go well.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used words like “out-of-this world experience” or bring in astrology, though it’s absolutely true that such rural settings like these are very popular with stargazers because there are no lights to obstruct the views of the galaxy. That we’re actually lucky to be here.
Braulio and the guys in the kitchen do a much better job – they make everybody hot tea, applying in practice one of the most basic principles of higher psychology – in order to lift the mood of the object, provide it with physical warmth.
And it would work if it weren’t for Christine, who storms in like high water and spoils everything.
“Have you seen the toilet?!” Her trembling finger is pointing somewhere toward the yard and the low tin booth standing by the wall.
“What am I saying, the barrel that you have to dust with lime before and after, and fetch the water from a well! Don’t worry, though, there’s a whole ONE bucket for all of us to use for both flushing the toilet and washing our hands!” She collapses on the chair.
“What would I give for a normal toilet and a hot shower right now”!
Really? I raise my eyebrows. After the experience we made last night?
The experience that made me feel like I’m not sure what puts more fear into me now – whether Bolivian roads or showers.
The hotel in Uyuni we stayed at last night was a solid, monolithic rectangle with hardly any windows on the outside but swimming in light inside. Built in the style of colonial buildings, it welcomed us with cheerful, yellow-orange-red colors and rooms arranged around an inner patio. Wooden furniture and iron beds with patchwork covers in the rooms completed the overall cozy atmosphere. Super cute.
Until you were forced in those rooms with no heating at 12,000 feet above sea level to take a shower to get warm.
A shower?! Would I really call a bulky plastic showerhead with exposed electrical wires a shower?
I turned the water on. Icy cold. I waited for a bit to see if it’d get any warmer, and when it didn’t, I pushed a button on the side of the showerhead. A blue flame shot out.
Determined to figure the puzzle out, I kept examining the showerhead and receiving incessant mild shocks. The temperature wouldn’t change, though – coming out was pure arctic cold accompanied by crackling sounds of a badly insulated electricity.
The guy at the reception told me that the water is heated inside the showerhead by electricity (a concept I can’t wrap my head around) and had to be turned on slowly and added little by little.
That the small notice on the bathroom wall I hadn’t noticed, explained it all.
So would Christine really want to take an electric shower right now? Would she be ok standing on her tiptoes and fearing the moment when her head brushes against the showerhead and the ceiling lights flicker and the bathroom goes dark? I doubt it.
We go to bed, and the night feels endless. As soon as I hear the pots rattle in the kitchen in the morning, I get up and have a cup of hot tea. Praying I don’t have to do number 2.
After breakfast, we’re off to the Red Lagoon to see the famous pink flamingoes. Climbing down the eroded lava, we’re stumbling and tripping over sharp rocks, rolled down from the crater peak chewed away by erosion. The hardened permafrost is covered by sparse bushes whose tops are fluttering in the gusts of the chilly morning wind.
Herds of llamas are grazing inside shabby enclosures. When we walk by, they raise their necks covered with long, thick wool, and watch us with a curiosity. Some even venture to the fence; with my 5’9’’, I’m looking right into their large, round eyes with endless eyelashes, at their small smiley faces and half-moon shaped ears decorated with colorful tassels. In contrast with that are large, sheepy bodies that make them look like shaggy brontosaurs.
Someone clicks their tongue. A young llama, grazing on a rocky field outside the enclosures, raises her head and before we know what’s going on, chases after us. We yell and flee.
A swirling cloud of pinkish bodies rises from the lagoon, filling the air with the sound of hundreds of wings slapping.
The frightened flamingoes fly across the air in a long, wide arc and land on the other side of the lake. In a wild whirling of wings they touch down, and the water turns red with reflections of their salmon pink bodies.
Slithering above the village is a massive lava tongue towered over by a monumental volcanic wall. Hollowed out into it are several caves, inhabited by a pre-Inca culture. On display are a burial ground, mummies, tools, ceramics and even cave paintings.
Every year during the rainy season, the Salt Flats get covered with a thin layer of water. We’re lucky – though not a wet season, it rained last night and the Salar has turned into a huge mirror, into an endless surface of glass as transparent as ice, reflecting the sky above.
The Train Cemetery is a different story – on the outskirts of Uyuni, it is ruled by icy winds howling and raising clouds of dry dust over old, abandoned steam trains. There are dozens of them here, mostly 19th and 20th-century antique locomotives, rotting and rusting. I climb into one of them and scare to death a couple of backpackers in sleeping bags.
When our tour of the Salar de Uyuni is over, we stop by at the hotel to pick up our luggage. There’s a message for me saying to call Peeky. Peeky is my boss, and a phone call like that is suspicious.
“Hey, ehhh …. (trying to remember my name), listen, I got something important to tell ya and I got to make it quick, so listen well,” he says and I see that he’s not calling to ask how I’m doing or if everything is ok with my first tour.
“La Paz has turned into a city under “fucking” siege that can’t be crossed in any “bloody” direction, so I’m stuck “in deep shit” because I got three groups locked there and no “pissing” idea of how I’ll get them out.”
Turns out, the Bolivians had the audacity to reelect their first indigenous president in the history of the country, and maybe of the entire “fucking” world, and celebrate that by moving all their “smelly asses” to the capital to see their leader. So now, there’s “shitloads” of people on the move everywhere, which means there’s no trains or buses, and the roads are clogged like “third-world shitters.”
“Take the train via Oruro to get to Sucre. It’s longer that way, but at least, you’ll have a chance of getting there. Explain it to people somehow, promise them a “frigging” pizza or something but make it cheap. And pray to God there’s no railroad strikes. That would really, really “screw shit up” for me.” The phone goes silent.
An image of a podgy, 40-year plus man, who’s worked his way up from an overland truck driver to a local manager, flashes before my eyes. With the increased work stress and the higher status tensions, he’s been bravely coping in Cusco’s bars.
The train is leaving at 11 PM, hours after the bus we were supposed to take. So, plenty of time to go and check out the town, have a proper dinner or even send postcards.
The town of Uyuni is advertised by travel agencies as the starting point for Salt Flats trips and the gateway to the southeastern Altiplano. In reality, it is a small, deserted-looking town with a Wild West feel to it located in the middle of a flat nowhere.
The few interesting things it has could be summed up in a few words – stores and markets are situated on the warm, sunny side of the street, the local cemetery with its cheerfully colorful tombstones looks like a doll’s town rather than a final resting place, and the renowned 1930’s clock tower stubbornly reports 01:30.
In awe, I pause in front of a giant, creepy statue of some Goddess with exposed breasts, claws instead of hands and a massive chain around her waist (can’t tell if it’s part of the exhibit or an anti-theft measure), and a monument of a railway worker standing with his feet apart on a gigantic anvil and holding in his hand a wrench. Power lines are running by his metallic head.
In a local “hamburguesería,” I take in the joint’s food aromas and order the specialty of the place – a double llama burger (I’m probably gonna need a lot of energy tonight).
I’m right. After two hours of sitting around at the railway station, waiting for the train to show up, I decide I should have stopped at the Extreme Fun Café, too.
The battered platform is filled with local passengers dressed in colorful clothes and sitting on bulky bags, and backpackers with frame packs under their butts and eating cheap food out of plastic bags.
Suddenly, the loudspeaker crackles and, breaking up, it announces that in another 10 minutes the Uyuni-Oruro-La Paz train is arriving.
The train station comes alive. Everybody gets up and starts getting ready for the train.
Everybody except Braulio, who keeps snoozing on his bag, undisturbed.
A way too undisturbed, I realize and plop back down on my own frame pack. A good call.
It takes another hour and three more announcements, before the train really shows up. The level of general fatigue and stupor have reached such a degree at that point that not only no one complains or protests but quite the contrary – humbly, we all get on the train filled with unceasing gratitude. As soon as we sit down in the toasty-warm car, we fall asleep.
Two hours later, we wake up again. Because of feeling cold.
No, no railway strike or drunk villagers passed out on the rails; it’s just one of the train cars has derailed. It’ll take three hours to remove it, fix it all up and continue on our way.
I can’t help feeling an increasing concern about what else Bolivia has up its sleeve.
Still, I have to give it to her – no other country in the world captures to the letter the definition of “adventure” as an unusual, exciting and especially hazardous activity!
Read next https://bohemianhag.com/bolivia/whats-up-with-those-bowler-hats/