Salar de Uyuni
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2008
1
6
64
Trip End
Ongoing
Uyuni,
Bolivia
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Last night I took an overnight, ten hour bus trip from La Paz to a tiny town called Uyuni. The bus itself was really nice and I was fortunate to have an empty seat next to me. But sleep was impossible, even with a healthy dose of the Bolivian version of Ambien. A few hours outside La Paz and the pavement gave way to bumpy, rock-covered dirt roads. It felt like we were driving over boulders and it sounded like we were on the receiving end of machine gun fire.
We arrived around 7:00am this morning in Uyuni from which I would embark on a three-day trek-by-SUV through the Bolivian wilderness. The local travel office brought me to a rickety Toyota Land Cruiser, introduced me to the driver, Cesar, and the cook, Marie. Sharing the car with me for the next three days would be a French pair (Guillaume and Anne) and three enthusiastic Israelis (Erez, Raz, and Chen)
Our (trusty?) Land Cruiser
. Guillaume and Anne have been friends for seventeen years; he is working in Peru, she is in South America visiting him for five weeks. Guillaume reminds me of Jean-Paul Belmondo. They speak almost no English so I was forced to brush off my barely functional French. I was horrified when they told me they had taken a 27-hour bus ride to La Paz from the Brazilian Amazon. Then they corrected me -- not 27 hours, 67 hours -- with only one stop to change buses. Erez, Raz, and Chen are all twenty two and are traveling around South America for eight months after finishing three years in the Israeli military (two years for Chen). They actually came to South America with different groups, met each other for the first time in Peru three weeks ago, and have been traveling together since. Raz and Chen have been "dating" for ten days now. Erez is a bit of a wild man; he's on this trip looking for girls, parties and extreme sports. Like many non-Americans, he has a trusty arsenal of English catchphrases he's learned from American music and Hollywood movies ("DJ, pump that shit", "Take a lesson from the pros"), but it's much easier for them to understand Spanish.
After a quick stop at the Cementerio de Trenes, the big attraction for the day is Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat at 4,085 square miles and approximately 10 billion pounds of salt
Perspective is skewed on the salt flat
. It's basically a gigantic lake, but instead of water there's a salt floor. There's a hotel out in the middle of it (the Salt Hotel), as well as an "island" of firm ground (Isla Pescado) where we stop for lunch. We spent the night in a tiny village called San Juan, in a building made almost entirely out of salt. The only running water is in a sink. I took a walk at sunset, fortunately bringing along my camera and getting some good llama photos. I learned a hard lesson yesterday strolling around La Paz, when I happened upon a protest group of several hundred farmers; all in traditional outfits (bowler hats galore), waving signs, chanting slogans, even setting off fireworks. Their goal was to bring attention to the same issue that has caused tens of thousands of farmers to march through the countryside towards La Paz. I stood around and watched for a while; it was quite a sight. But I'd left my camera back at the hostel (and I'm still kicking myself for it).
Wake up call tomorrow is at 6:30am.
Comments
protest that stuff
this is totally rad.
please join in as many protests as possible.
salt hotel
did you go in?