The Salt Road

The Salt Road
Uyuni, Bolivia

Uyuni, Bolivia

Uyuni was going to be our final destination in Bolivia as cunningly we could use the tour out into the salt flats as an easy way to border cross into Chile, so long as snow at the border didn’t stop us. We did a ton of research into tours to take from Uyuni out to the Salt Flats and the more we read the more we wondered whether we even wanted to go at all. With the general content of most reviews including freezing nights in sheds with no heating, drunk drivers, crashes and third degree burns from falling into the hot mud geysers we genuinely felt like we were taking our lives into our own hands by stepping out into the abyss. We researched the more expensive tours and for double the price you seemed to get pretty much the same and everything we read just kept bringing us back to Red Planet Tours, seemingly the best of the worst. There was still a mix of reviews that claimed their drivers were too drunk to drive, but on the whole they kept coming out on top so we crossed our fingers and made a booking.

Getting to Uyuni once again I was subjected to the hell that was a tiny 19 seater Amazonia flight, in the dark it seemed a little less harrowing and at least until we landed and even Tim with his nerves of steel when it comes to flying looked a bit scared at just how hard we hit the runway when we landed.

Uyuni is a funny little town, it was founded as a trading post in 1890 connecting Bolivia with Chile and Argentina. Now it pretty much just serves at the central point from which tourists descend into the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat at 10,000 square kilometers.

We had a comfy nights sleep in a little hostel in Uyuni and started to acclimatise ourselves for the next 2 brutally cold nights that we had ahead. We donned our new thermals (thick ladies leggings for us both) and hopped into bed ready for the hostels heating to go off at midnight and come back on at 6am. Thankfully it was not too cold a night and we woke the next morning fresh and ready for our tour.

We headed over to Red Planet HQ and checked in. It was just a waiting game to see who was going to be in our jeep. There must have been 20 plus people in the office but thankfully not everyone was on the same tour. We got chatting and unbelievably managed to get put into the jeep with the best possible group of people that we could have hoped for. We had Tom & Sammy from Australia who were on an extended holiday after a ski season working in Canada and Neil from the USA who had been travelling South America for 7 months. We all got on like a house on fire and within minutes we had tunes blaring in our car and the party was getting started. This could have been a very different blog entry if we had been paired with some of the people in the other cars! Whilst we had been promised an English speaking guide when we booked the tour it turned out we did have one, he was just not in our car and happened to be driving the other groups car. We assumed that the two cars would stick together but our driver who had the superior car just set off at high speed leaving the other group and our guide eating his dust, this was to be the theme for the rest of the tour. Interestingly the first night at dinner our English speaking guide took exception to the fact that our driver seemed to be on a different schedule to him and told us off for not being where we were supposed to be when he wanted us to be there.. this is a first being told off by a guide because we have a rogue driver?!

The first stop on our tour was to the railway graveyard just outside Uyuni, a stark reminder of the transport hub that was once here. Sadly we didn’t get to fully appreciate this stop as every single tour company leaves Uyuni at the same time and so there must have been 200 people all milling around the trains and walking into every single photo that we tried to take, strangely those most guilty of walking into the photos we were trying to take were the idiots from the other car on our tour.

After just an hour or so of driving we finally made it to the main attraction, the start of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats, we stopped in a little village which had houses made of salt blocks and we had a tour of a little cottage industry where a man was refining and bagging the salt for consumption. Sadly salt exports are not big here and there is no plan to introduce it. Along with a massive amount of sodium the Salar de Uyuni,it contains 43% of the worlds lithium reserves, a vital component in electric batteries. Bolivia is keen for these supplies not to be exploited by multinational companies and plans to build its own plant to excavate lithium, which is pretty tragic as it means that in years to come the beautiful Salar de Uyuni will be destroyed.

We were visiting the salt flats in the dry season so sadly we were not going to be able to get the amazing reflection shots that you see when the salt is wet, but still this vast landscape of pure white salt was breath taking. We stopped for lunch alongside the huge salt Dakar Raleigh sign, I didn’t know this but the Dakar Raleigh was moved to South America in 2009 after security threats in Mauritania.

We stopped for lunch in a salt hotel and Tim made himself very comfortable checking out the salt beds and then we were on to the main attraction.

If you have ever seen any photos of the Salt flats they probably involved someone jumping out of a pringles pot, being chased by a dinosaur or just looking like they are in Lilliput land with Gulliver. The most awesome feature with the salt flats is that they are so flat and white you can change the perspective on a photograph just so easily. We sadly were let down by our angry grumpy guide who didn’t bother to help our group with our photos but thankfully between ourselves we managed to get some pretty good shots.

The sun was shining and we were all taking off layer after layer this first day wondering what we were all worried about, we hiked up and over a cactus island in the middle of the salt flats which very quickly reminded us that we were at altitude and our lungs wanted to climb out of our mouths to escape. After hiking the island the sun was starting to set and the cold was beginning to show its head, we stopped once more on the salt flats for some sunset photos which turned out awesome thanks to our driver, but we were all so cold we didn’t want to hang around for long and were back in the truck with the heating full blast along the music headed to our camp for the night.

After all the horror stories we were well and truly blown away at just how nice our first nights accommodation was, a little salt house with our own private ensuite salt room. We had hired sleeping bags which kept us warm as toast and we slept soundly ready for day 2 on the road.

Day two took us away from the salt and into the beautiful mountains and lakes which form the border between Chile and Bolivia. We saw llamas, rock trees and even snow. The lakes were all appropriately named, the white lake, the red lake and the yellow lake, but in true Currie form the weather was all wrong to actually see the lakes change colour. We needed wind and we had a perfectly calm sunny day, oh well, I think I would take a pretty sunny reflective view over a windy yellow lake any day. The final lake of the day was the absolute highlight as it was full of flamingos. We were pretty lucky as they usually would have all flown to warmer climes by now but as with everywhere we seem to go the temperatures are changing and the wildlife in the area is behaving differently. This is one time I am not going to complain about things being out of the ordinary as the flamingos were awesome.

The final stop of the day was the mud geysers which in all honesty we really didn’t appreciate as it was so bitterly cold we could barely feel our faces after 2 minutes outside the car. The geysers were steaming and stinking and after the horror stories of people falling in them and ending up with third degree burns we did our
best to navigate our way through them until we were allowed back in the car and headed to our last camp. This one was a little more rugged, we were separated, much to my disgust into male and female dorms, so Tim and the boys got one room and I got bundled off into a room with 5 other random girls, I was not impressed to be separated from the gang, however a nights sleep with no snoring or ******* was quite a welcome treat after 7 years of sharing a room with Tim.

The highlight of staying at this little rugged hostel was that outside in the freezing front yard was a natural hot spring. Red Planet is the only company that goes here at night as we saw the following morning as 20 trucks pulled up and the hot pool was full of cold unwashed bodies. We on the other hand had the hot pool completely to ourselves. It was beyond brutal getting into the pool. The air temperature was well below zero and walking in a bikini and flip flops from the changing room was horrific, but after a good hour of being warmed to the bone whist watching the milky way full of shooting stars, we were all too hot and welcomed the cool air was we headed back to the hut for an early night.

So we survived it, the next morning our driver took us to a few more moonscape type places that again we were too cold to fully appreciate before we had to say farewell to team A1 the name we had given our little gang, sad but true, and we were stamped out of Bolivia and bundled on a bus to Chile.

San Pedro De Atacama, here we come!