Indescribable Landscapes

6/20/11 4:20am
I’m sitting here at the station after a night bus to Tarija, waiting for it to get a little later so I can check in to a hostel without having to pay an extra night. My ears are popping from all this altitude change – though now I’m under 2000m and will be around this level for the rest of my trip. Tons and tons to catch up on from the last few days.
Given my good luck with buses, the trip from Potosi to Uyuni on Wednesday was of course an adventure. I was told the bus would leave at 10 sharp, but at 10, there was no bus in the designated spot. It finally pulled up and we all piled in and left around 10:30. Okay, not too bad yet, that was to be expected. About an hour in, we stop for half an hour or so as the driver fixes a flat time, and then on we go. But another hour later, we just stop cold and most of the locals get out, so we follow. The only foreigners on our bus were a couple from Holland and Oliver from Germany who was also ultimately heading for Tupiza. We sat outside in the middle of nowhere – a very pretty middle of nowhere, but still, it was a bit stressful having no idea how long we would be sitting there since we were apparently waiting for something. The driver said we were waiting for another bus to switch to, but a very angry woman ranted to me that we were just waiting for someone to bring something to repair the bus and it would take longer still. After waiting an hour with no solid word on what was going on, us travelers pretty stressed out and the locals just lounging around like this is an every day occurrence, another travel bus that was pretty empty pulled up. We ran up to it and asked them if we could get on, and then ran back and tried to get our driver to get our bags down from the roof. He was quite angry about it and resisted, but eventually threw them down at us with a scowl and we made our way over to the other bus. We had to pay a large portion of the bus ticket all over again, but it was worth knowing that we would actually get to Uyuni – we needed to get there before too late in order to book tours to leave the next morning. The new bus was much faster and sturdier and we got to Uyuni much earlier than we expected – the ideal trip would take six hours, but even with all of our mishaps, we got there in seven.
Picking a tour agency is tricky because every random company from the street tries to grab you and engage you in conversation and get you on their trip. But there are so many horror stories about Uyuni trips gone wrong with awful cars, drunk or crazy drivers, bad food, skipping out on promised places to visit, too many passengers, etc. Oliver and I wanted to find a four day trip that left us in Tupiza, but those don’t seem to exist unless you can get the group of four to six people to yourselves, so it was to be Uyuni back to Uyuni and then a night bus to Tupiza. We checked out a couple of the agencies that we had heard good things about and settled on one, Emprexsa. They told us that we would be with some people who were arriving from La Paz in the morning. But when we waited outside the following morning after a nice but expensive breakfast, the office was closed and there was no site of the owner for quite a while after the designated meeting time. So typical here, but still not used to it. Eventually she showed up, and then a nice shiny black jeep pulled up and we got in. We picked up Jung (Korea) from another agency down the block, and then Steven (Belgium), Mike (US), and Juergen (Germany) from a third agency, Red Planet. It seems our La Paz people didn’t show up or something so they loaded us on with Red Planet, but we got really lucky and that agency was a good one.
The six of us and our driver/guide/book Faustino piled into the jeep and set off first towards the train cemetery. I had purposefully not looked at many pictures of the trip beforehand, so the scenery never stopped amazing me. The train cemetery was old, dusty, windy, and rusty, but was filled with abandoned old cargo trains that had never been upkept. After the station was abandoned, people ransacked it and took parts of trains and knocked over others. With the weather, the trains are now merely red and brown metal skeletons, but it was still a really cool sight. I of course needed to climb up on whatever challenging parts I could find, and it was fun to walk across the top of the train and see endless train skeletons and desert in the distance. Getting down was always harder than up and took some creativity, especially with my short legs, but it was worth it. A bit like metal rock climbing, needing to find grips for your hands and feet and use arm strength to pull yourself up at certain points while dangling below.
Back in the jeep, it was then on to the little town of Colchani on the outskirts of the Salar where they process salt. They were selling tourist goods made entirely of salt, and we got out first glimpses of the expansive white fields with lined up piles of scooped packed salt ready to be loaded into a big truck and taken for processing. Then into the Salar we drove, stopping to play a bit where workers were busy making salt piles. It was such a strange experience to see the white-covered group and expect it to be wet, slippery, and cold like snow, but it was none of the above, just salt. One of thje best things about the Salar is that you can take some really amazing pictures because of the endless white into the horizon. You can play around with perspective and the angle of the camera and have jumping pictures look like you are flying, have someone who is behind some else look like they are being eaten or stomped on, make people really small in compared to objects, etc. We were really lucky to have Juergen, a professional photographer, in our group, so got some extra amazing pictures. Which the computer won´t let me upload right now! It took quite a bit of thought to figure out how to get the perspective right to get the photo we wanted, and it would have taken me a ton longer. There are endless kinds of photos you can take on the Salar, and I wished I had brought along a dinosaur figure and things of the sort, but we made do and got some really cool pictures regardless. After taking in the salt pile scenery for a bit, we had to move along to the salt hotel for lunch. The food was pretty good through the entire trip and I always got a decent substitution for my vegetarian option. We ate inside a building made entirely (except the roof) from bricks of salt. The chairs and tables were salt as well, covered with cloths and cushions. There was a little museum in back with more salt furniture, a salt bedroom, and large salt animal figures.
Then it was on to Isla Incahuasi, a really strange phenomenon to take in. Forever in the distance were white flats of salt, but there was an island in the middle full of cacti and hardened corals. Over one thousand years ago, this entire area used to be under water (and the salt planes are still under water during the rainy season), but there is now a rocky desert in the middle of the salt. With the chilly air and endless white scenery, it really feels like you are in the snow, so it’s quite the odd and confusing to see “snow” and cacti side by side. It was getting late in the day, so we just had a little over the hour to hike the island and then move down to take pictures in the endless white, the perspective undisturbed by any piles of snow or working trucks. We played more with our cameras in the salt until we were dragged off so that we would see the sunset over the water and arrive at the hostel before dark. From the car, we could tell that the salt on which we drove was segmented into perfect hexagons and other shapes, caused by a relationship between the sun drying up water between the cracks and the pressure of the salt lake underneath.
As evening begin to descend, we drove into the water-filled part of the planes. During the summer/rainy season, the entire Salar is covered in water, and at this point, we get the best of both worlds with much of it dried out but still a large portion remaining a shallow lake. We drove on through the lake, watching the waves that we and the other jeeps created. There was an incredible sunset over the lake and at one point there was a salt dune where we were able to get out, take pictures, and try not to freeze while taking in this indescribable site, so different than a typical sunset over a lake with the knowledge that this was all salt.
The day nearing its end, we headed to our salt hostel for the night, another building with practically everything (though thankfully not the mattresses) made of salt. We warmed up with tea and cookies before dinner. Outside, the near full moon rose surrounded by a circle of clouds that it dyed a bright yellow – a very nice sight to eat dinner to! After the electricity went out at 9, the only illumination for miles was from this bright yellow moon.
We got up in the morning to breakfast with a gorgeous sunrise over the Salar, and then headed out for the day. It was sad to leave the Salar, where I could have easily spent a lot more time, but there were many more things to come. We drove off into an endless desert, stopping to take in the scenery and take pictures at a set of abandoned railroad tracks. In the horizon were snow-capped mountains and volcanoes of both Bolivia and Chile. We stopped again at an area with volcanic rock formations amidst their astounding background. In the distance, we could see smoke emerging from a semi-active volcano. It was near silent out here aside from the sounds of our footsteps on the rocky ground and the constant clicks of our cameras.
Next came a series of lakes, each appearing after we rounded another bend. They smelled of sulfur, which must have been rundown from nearby volcanoes. Many of the lakes were surrounded in white material, which Faustino told us was calcium carbonate. There were occasionally tiny settlements near the mountains where people used to collect sulfur, but the price is almost nothing now so they have abandoned the practice, leaving one person there as a caretaker of the equipment and facilities. The most fascinating and unique lake was Laguna Colorado. The waters are red from the presence of red algae and other bioorganisms. During the wet season, thousands of flamingos inhabit the lake, but migrate during the summer to Chile or to the more tropical regions around Cochabamba within Bolivia. The older flamingos, however, stay year round, as it is too much for them to migrate. The lake is filled with toxic chemicals including sulfur and arsenic from the surrounding mountains, but the flamingos are able to use their breaks in a manner to filter out the toxins and only take in the delicious algae, thus maintaining their bright colors. So we saw a good number of flamingos but could only imagine what it looks like flooded with flamingos in January and February. In contrast with the strange red water of the lake were yellow banks, brown hills, and distant snow-capped mountains. Fluffy clouds scattered the sky throughout the day and were a really nice addition to the scenery. They would race through the bright blue sky, changing shape, as their corresponding shadows sped alongside the mountains. As we drove through the changing landscapes, we could sometimes see the huge dust clouds created by nearby jeeps as well as our own, and sometimes we were the only car, nothing in the distance but vast desert, the only sign of life being old tire tracks. At the highest points in these open deserts live only vicunas (part of the llama family, but so petite and graceful that I at first thought they were antelope), a chinchilla-like creature, and flamingos. Further down in the altiplano there are llamas, sheep, and other animals that you would expect to see, but it was fairly desolate at 4000m plus.
We also went to the Pierdra de Arbol, a formation of volcanic rocks where the most famous rock resembles a tree. The tree was impressive, but more so was the collection of volcanic rocks that surrounded it. It was late in the afternoon and the wind was insane, sand blowing everything, so it was quite the environment. I of course climbed to the top of one of the rocks and stood at the top, but was practically tipped over by the wind and had to use all my strength to maintain standing. My eyes were streaming in tears from the bitter cold wind, and I had to hold tightly to my hat and scarf, which the wind constantly tried to snatch away. A nose muff would have been perfect, but I unfortunately didn’t have any clown noses in the car. We eventually climbed back into the warm jeep, frozen but exhilarated. This set of volcanic rocks is very weak and brittle. In the early morning, the rocks are very cold, but heat up and become malleable midday. With the strong winds of the early evenings, bits and pieces of the rocks are constantly eroded away, so this landscape will eventually disappear bit by bit.
We hid inside at our next hostel, seeking shelter from the cold strong winds and swirls of dust. After our tea and cookies, we played cards until dinner, which was pretty basic spaghetti but finished with a good bottle of wine from Tarija in place of dessert. My zipper luck continues and just as I was about to go to bed, the zipper that had been fixed on my big pack broke again and I was unable to get it back on the track. So back to safety pins and a buckle it was, and at this point I’m just going to leave it be since I won’t be moving around very much anymore and this is becoming too much of a pain.
All night long, there was pattering on the metal roof. We were supposed to get up at 5:30 to begin our journey and eat breakfast later on, but we got knocks on our doors at 5:20 saying that it was snowing and way too windy and dark to go out yet, so we would eat breakfast at the hostel at 6. It was a little lighter by the time we left, but there was still a constant swirl of white and it was hard to see more than a few feet in front of the car, let alone which direction the road even curved. Luckily our guide was a very good driver, though scared us quite a few times as he drove quickly through the white abyss. We were going to visit the geysers, but as we passed the turnoff at 4900m, it was clear that there was no way we would be able to see anything, so we had to skip that bit. We continued on to a lake with hot springs. The strong winds and intense snow had stopped, but it was still cold to go into the bath knowing that we would have to get out of it again – some other groups did, but none of us went for it. This was my first ever snowstorm, so although I was disappointed to miss the geysers and hot springs, it was definitely an adventure clinging to the seats as we hoped that Faustino knew what he was doing. Standing outside, I was really excited by the snowflakes that fell on me – I don’t think I’ve been in anything more than a snow flurry where the flakes disappear right away, but these stayed on my clothes, shaped in perfect geometrical patterns as if cut out from paper and shrunk down.
There had been uncertainty about whether we would be able to drop off people in Chile or not, if the border would be open given the weather, but we eventually sent Jung, who was going to Chile, with another group and took an Australia from that jeep back to Uyuni with us. The third day was the least exciting of the three, and I wish they had spread out the main sites better, or saved the Salar for the last day, which can only be done if no one in the group needs to be dropped off at the Chilean border. We spent most of the day just driving, which was gorgeous but got more tiring than the other days because there were less things to see that were unique and completely breathtaking. We had been near 5000 meters and watched the landscape change drastically as we moved away from the high lakes and vast deserts with scarce greenish shrubbery. In the altiplano, the fields got greener and more towns appeared, most of them based in quinoa harvest, though the fields are currently empty due to the season. We stopped on the way at a few more sights, my favorite being another huge formation of volcanic rocks onto which I climbed way up, finding shelter from the wind between two nearby layers.
I had much more to write during the trip but nothing else is coming out right now, though I guess this is quite long as it is. Back in Uyuni, I got dinner with the guys and then Oliver and I began our journey to Tupiza. We had bought our bus ticket earlier but once we got to the station, we were told that we were moved to another company because their bus wasn’t running that night. After a complicated mess of things, I went back to the ticket lady to sort something our, leaving all of my bags on the sidewalk with Oliver. Suddenly saw the bus drive away and even though it was way before it was time for the bus to leave, this scared me quite a bit and I ran after it until I saw Oliver giving a thumbs up through the window. The bus was just making a u-turn and going to a different spot. Definitely not a fun experience, especially with having to break into a sudden sprint at that altitude! The bus ride was uncomfortable and shaky because the road was so awful. They squeezed people into the aisles. At least I had a seat, but it got partially taken over at times. There was a young woman with her baby sitting in the aisle next to me, and her husband sat in front of her on some sack (which is very rare to see a guy traveling with or even helping a young mother). The baby was adorable, hardly crying, just looking around with a constant giddy look on her face, her mouth open in joy over every little thing. I fell asleep on and off, and woke up once to find the dad had wedged his feet into what little room my feet weren’t using in front of me, and the mom was sitting on my armrest and taking up a good amount of my chair with her back. Squished! We eventually got to Tupiza at 4am and decided to get a hostel for a few hours to get a little bit of sleep. Tupiza details later, it’s late enough now to go find a place in Tarija.
Oh, at some point during this whole adventure, I lost my voice, and it´s still gone. Not good..