People don’t stay too long in Uyuni. It’s merely a transit point for tours of the Salar de Uyuni and Southwest Bolivia. And there are a lot of operations (of variable quality and safety records) vying for your business. Christi and I choose Cordillera Traveller for our tour. We also pay a little more for the comfortable 4-person trip, rather than the cramped 6-person version. Our compadres are two Swiss guys one of whom speaks fluent Spanish. Yippee! Our driver/guide/cook is Richard and he arrives at our hotel in a pretty beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser. We leave Uyuni less than 16 hours after we arrived.
Our first stop, (along with 12 other vehicles) is a rusting, roached-out train cemetery – a relic of colonial times when Uyuni was a major train hub. Surrounding the cemetery, the Altiplano is awash with plastic bags snagged on small shrubs. It’s a sad and troubling allegory of our modern, technological world.
Colchani is our next stop, but along the way we encounter our first little mishap – a burst tire. Worryingly, though, Richard does not have a jack and is forced to improvise using nearby rocks to support the axle. Turns out, our delay is to our benefit as Colchani is one of those horrid tourist stops foisted upon unsuspecting tourists. We stay only long enough for lunch and a quick peek at the salt sculpture souvenirs, before finally moving on to the famous Salar de Uyuni.
Located in the Bolivian Altiplano, the Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt lake in the world, measuring some 4,000 square miles and containing some 10 billion tons of mineral deposits (including nearly half of the world’s lithium reserves, so without Bolivia the Energizer Bunny is going nowhere). Fortunately, mining is strictly controlled enabling the Salar to retain its almost pristine appearance, particularly the beautiful geometric salt crystal formations. The landscape is mesmerizing: the Salar is stark and blindingly white, while the sky is vast and empty. And due to its extraordinary flatness and monochrome color it’s possible to distort reality (at least in our photographs).
Myriad trails cross the Salar and our quiet, but knowledgeable, guide speeds along to our next point of interest: Isla de los Pescadores. The island appears to be a mirage initially, but then it resolves into a sizeable rocky outcrop festooned with giant coral cacti (the dozen other tour vehicles parked by the island are not, sadly, a mirage). A raging wind scours the island, although the cacti (some of which are 30-feet tall and more than 900 years old) don’t seem to mind too much. The needles on these furry buggers are incredibly sharp as I find out to my cost.
Only very reluctantly do we leave the mesmerizing Salar de Uyuni to overnight in a genuine salt hotel in the town of San Juan. The floor and walls of our room are literally made of salt, while the bed and the ceiling are reassuringly non-edible. It’s a cold night up here on the Altiplano, in the land of salt.
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, laugh-wrenching tale
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