The Salar de Uyuni and the Southern Altiplano Part 2

One of the bizarre but heartening things about the desert in Southwestern Bolivia is the rock stacks of obviously human origin on the side of the road or out in the middle of the sandy, rocky plain.  There is a human hand in even the most inhospitable, remote climate, and the desire to make one’s mark is beyond cultures down to the very root of what it means to be human.

Three days we were on the move.  Through shivering valleys, along dirt paths grooved by all-weather tires, in frigid motels, we shambled.  The second day we woke up at 7 a.m. in a below-freezing hotel.  We rented a sleeping bag the night before and spread it over the both of us in two full beds pushed together for three dollars to supplement the blankets and duvet on the bed.  We ate breakfast and breezed out of the hotel, past the blood red spectacle of the Laguna Colorada.

Our first stop was the rock tree.  When I was told about this at the tour agency, I thought it sounded lame.  A rock that looks like a tree?  Well I’ve seen a rock that actually used to be a tree in New Mexico.  A red lake is novel, but a rock tree is trite.  What I didn’t know was that the rock tree was in the midst of a boulder forest sitting in the middle of a sandy valley bed.  It was one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole trip climbing the rocks.  A little bit of physical exertion is a welcome relief from a bumpy, sedentary, day-long ride.  Amanda said that they must have been washed down into the valley by a glacial flood.   A similar thing happened in the Midwest as well, look it up.

 Then another flamingo Laguna, but this time there was an ominous portent.  Salt.   Cracked, soft white ground on the shore of the lake.   Our approach to one of the world’s most mysterious tourist attractions was becoming real.  Even as we began this journey, I didn’t know what to expect.  I thought to myself that the people who recommended this must be crazy, but I knew that there must be something in it.  Salt?  I’ve seen salt, used it on my food even.  I’ve driven through Utah and seen a pretty gigantic salt flat, why is this one so special?

Another Laguna, this one had the most flamingoes.  It was nice but it’s already been described.  Lunch already?  Ok.

After lunch we stopped to stare at a volcano from a distance of perhaps several kilometers (it’s pretty hard to tell distances in the desert).  It was big and the ground around it was obviously volcanic.  It was much harder, less dusty, and more porous than in the rest of the desert.  It was here that I found my desert voice.  On the base of the rock formation I stacked six stones, and then on the underside of the formation’s promontory I stacked six more precariously on an edge.  I’m proud of that one because it conveyed the way the desert spoke to me and it’s not in an obvious place, only someone on a tour who wanders around the side of the rock would see it.

After another hour we reached the real portent of things to come, the “pequeno” salar.  We stopped and viewed it from the side of a mountain and Amanda and I collaborated on a rock tower. It looks like a sandcastle does when you drip wet sand onto it slowly.

As we crossed the salar we saw the loneliest train in the world heading toward Chile and crossed the impossible train tracks in the middle of the salt flat.  It made me wonder where the people who built it were living when they built it.  We walked around on the chalky ground in the frigid air for a minute and crossed the flats to an impossible little town between the smaller salar and the largest salar in the world, the Salar de Uyuni.  Our hotel was a five minute walk from the town, and was mostly made of salt.  The floors, bedframes, tables, walls, stools were all made of salt bricks.  It wasn’t the ensuite ritz that we were led to believe it would be, but we had a private room with twin beds.

We walked into the town to find a tienda, but we didn’t buy anything.  4 dollars for a bottle of wine?  Steep.  The roads were dirt, and there was a soccer field on the edge of the town that looked rarely used because there were llama toilets scattered around it.  And near our hotel there they were, the llama herd.  Amanda, being our resident llama expert, explained to us how you can tell if the llamas are happy or angry by the position of their ears.  It was evident that the ones we got close to didn’t appreciate our presence very much, so we left them alone and settled in for the night.  We would have to wake up at 3:30 in the morning the next day to see the sunrise on the salar.