Salt Flats, Lakes and Geysers!

11/24 Santa Cruz -> San Jose = 6 hrs
11/25 San Jose -> Conception = 9 hrs
11/26 Conception -> Santa Cruz = 6 hrs
11/27 Santa Cruz -> Oruro = 15 hrs
11/28 Oruro -> Uyuni = 9 hrs
11/29 Uyuni -> San Jose = 3 1/2 hrs
11/30 San Jose -> Lago Colorado = 4 1/2 hrs
12/1 Lago C -> Uyuni = 10 hrs
Total time on a bus or train in the past 8 days: 63 hrs.

We've been travelling everyday for the past 8 days, which is quite unusual for us. 63 hours travelling in 8 days is a brutal stretch, especially when you consider that we have an 9hr overnight train tonight, then 7 hrs to Salta, then 20 hours to Mendoza. That will all likely be done straight through in the next 3 days, since we're a very long way from Buenos Aires, where we need to be in 9 days. Maybe we'll take a rest day in Salta if we feel that we have the time, but that has quickly become a hot commodity: almost as cherished a commodity as showering, which has become a rare treat as well.

One of

the major reasons people come to Bolivia is to visit the salt flats, or the Salar de Uyuni, so this was a major thing we wanted to see, even though we saved it for the very last. We arrived from Oruro around 6am and immediately started looking for tours to leave that day (Sunday). We managed to find a tour operator that we liked, gave us a good price, and was leaving that morning. So we paid up and hopped on the 4x4 Toyota after a delicious breakfast of eggs and toast. We had been out of the tourist areas of Bolivia for so long that we nearly forgot what it was like to have all the services a tourist area offers. Quite off the tourist track, we spent 2 hours in Oruro looking for breakfast, only to find nothing but empanadas and beef soup. Mmmmm. So delicious. I've always enjoyed gnawing the marrow out of a cowbone to get my day started.

There were 8 people in total on our tour: 3 girls from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 2 Portuguese, us and a driver/guide/cook.

It ended up being a great group to be with, quite a bit of fun. The first stop we hit was the train graveyard. This is where they sent the original trains that came to Bolivia in the late 1800s after they died. Basically, it was an adult playground, with a bunch of steam engines rusting to their slow death, offering jungle gyms of epic proportions that were in dubious state of repair at best. The conversation on everyone's lips was the last time they had received a tetanus shot. From there, it was a quick drive through a small town with a pseudo-museum, and then off to the salt flats where guys were shoveling tons of raw salt into trucks. They literally were cutting up the ground, grinding it into smaller pieces, letting it dry in the sun, then shipping off to processing. It would then end up on people's dinner tables. Crazy, huh? It's basically just a huge lake of salt waiting to go on top of my potato chips, fried chicken, and everything else.

We did make a major mistake, however.

The mounds of drying salt are sitting in two to three inches of water, which is pretty much irresistible to touch. It's water, in the middle of a desert, sitting in salt. So it would be a pretty accurate statement to say it's as saturated with salt as water can get. This isn't really a problem until you start having fake "saltball" fights, throwing it at each other. You're not really worried about getting wet, because everything dries so fast. But what happens when it's not just water, but supersaturated salt water? You end up with salt on everything. Everywhere. It leaves a white residue on anything it touches. Oh, and you're in a desert where there's no fresh water, so you can't even wash your hands. You just pick salt off your skin as best you can. But it was definitely worth it.

From there we drove to Fish Island, which is literally an island in the salt flat. It's known for it's cactus plants, which grow at 1cm a year, but are sometime 3m-4m high. It was also nice to get up from the flats to get a bit of perspective. We hiked up to the top of the island, and then decided to go down a different route, only to be told once we're at the bottom that we weren't supposed to do that.

We said that no one told us we couldn't, and the lady told us to look at the tickets. It was rule number one: stay on the path. Oh well. We all pile in the 4x4 and 2 hours later we arrive at the hotel for the night. It was a salt hotel, made out of salt bricks and glued with some weird type of salt mortar. This was the first time we had an opportunity to really talk with our tour-mates, so we spent the night chatting Bolivian politics and economics and everything under the sun. Quite a nice time, just hanging out with some good conversation. I was proud Erin participated in the spanish-only night.

The next morning was a bit relaxed, nothing too early. After a filling breakfast of bread, jam and coffee, which hopped in our roving Toyota to do a quick tour of a bunch of lakes and a "rock tree." The lakes were truly fantastic.

Surrounded by borax, filled with various minerals, algae giving unique colors to them all, the lakes were speckled with flamingos. I, to this day, have no idea where I think a flamingo should live. The only places that come to mind are zoos, disneyworld, and croquet courses. The high plains of an arid desert over 4,000m high, filled with crazy colored lakes and beset with llamas, does not seem like a place a flamingo would call home. But apparently they do. In between all the lakes, we got to a wind-eroded rock that kind of did look like a tree. It was in the middle of nowhere. There were some other rocks around, but this was definitely the highlight. So, we stopped, got out of the truck, took some pictures, and hopped back in the truck 10 minutes later.

Most of our stops were less than 10 minutes. Nighttime found us at the Laguna Colorada in a mud-brick hotel playing guitar, talking, and just passing the time with the crazy little kid running around and the herd of polish who borrowed my guitar and spent the night singing polish folk songs in a circle until the vodka was gone. The early morning departure on the horizon didn't faze them at all, but the howling wind kept us on edge, thinking the roof itself was going to be torn off.

4:30am departure was rough. No one seemed to sleep that well, so everyone was moving slowly. Erin and Bernardo (one of the Portuguese) were both definitely ill, the girls from Santa Cruz weren't even awake yet, but somehow I was a bundle of energy as we checked out our first sight of the day: geysers.

I've seen geysers before in Yellowstone, but they seem to be worried about litigious America, so they won't let you anywhere near the geysers or boiling mud or fumaroles. Bolivia, however, couldn't care less. They went so far as to put a sign up that said "Danger!" but people just walk right past it to walk among all the thermal activity. Fantastic. In addition, it happened to be during the sunrise, which is my favorite time of day. However, no one else in the car really had any real enthusiasm, so when I got back to the 4x4, they were mostly asleep already. Oh well. After the geysers, we stopped for breakfast by the thermal waters where you could go swimming. No one wanted to go swimming, and I wasn't going to go alone, so turns out I didn't get to go swimming. But the term "swimming" is a bit of a stretch. It could more accurately be described as sitting in knee deep water trying to hide as much of your body as possible from the biting cold desert wind.

From there we went down to Lago Verde, which is green from the magnesium in the water. Click click, couple of pictures, then we were off to the Bolivian-Chile border, where we dropped the Portuguese in the no man's land between the border posts. Then it was a bee-line back to Uyuni, where we now wait for our train to leave for the Argentine border so that we can get our bus-tired bums all the way to Mendoza. Can't wait for the 35 hours of buses and trains down there, on top of the 60+ hrs we've done in the last week or so. That's just a lot of busing.