Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia

I apologize for the absence of blog updates for about a week now, I didn't have long bus rides or periods where I wanted to express my thoughts, but I understand that all lazy times must come to an end, so here I am writing this on the 16h ride from Arequipa to Lima :)

But first thing first, my last stop in Bolivia was the southern point of the continent as I was bound to go, it was to the Uyuni salt flats. This is considered almost one of the 7 wonders of the world and you have to see it while you're in the country, especially without a return date, like myself. The salt flats is a huge region of about 130km^2 surrounded by mountains where Bolivia's largest salt reserves are located. You can check it out on google matps, in the sattelite view, in the southern part of the country it will show up as a huge white area, that's the salt flats. A bit about the ride there from La Paz. The direct route is on an unpaved road that gets rather dusty and bumpy close to Uyuni, which in itself is a small dusty little village, that survives I'm pretty sure only due to the tourism it gets. At any rate, the road was so bumpy that not only I couldn't sleep but I thought the bus was going to come apart any minute now :) moreover, the drier kept making stops and coming to check something on the undercarriage of the bus, which made me even more suspicious. But I was wrong, we did arrive safe and sound. In fact one interesting piece of information about the engineering of Bolivians and Peruvians (given that's where I've so far traveled) is that they make things JUST work, not work well or lasting, but JUST work. I've been actually discussing this topic with a German engineer guy I met on the bus back from Uyuni, and germans are completely on the other side of the spectrum, they engineer things to work very well but often overengineer them at the expense of final cost. We came to a conclusion that somewhere in the middle is probably best, that is make something work but do it well, so that it is somewhat long lasting and doesn't fall apart at the next road hole :) simple conclusion but a very fine line to follow, as the decision of “well enough” is really the hardest for any engineer. There goes my professional rant, I promise I'll talk only about the story now :)

At any rate as we arrived at Uyuni, a group of condor type attacking women trying to sell us Uyuni flat tours approached every tourist looking person on the bus. And I mean literally we were like prey to them, in fact 2 of them followed me in a small cafe where I went for breakfast. But that sort of gave me confidence in my byuing power, in fact a bit too much confidence, such that in my bargaining for a cheaper price and considerations of other people (I tend to do that a lot) I got left that day without a spot on a tour. The tours work this way: they're all essentially exactly the same, you fill a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV car with 7 eager tourists, including putting 3 people in the cargo space area with really tiny seats and you take them on a tour. So really I was forced to take a day off in Uyuni, so I found a hostel and chilled for the whole day. It really is a bit of a God forgotten village, as there wasn't much to do, except doing some reading and internet (which was painfully slow), but that day I took care of business and made up my mind that there is no way I'm spending another day here. The next morning with that strong determination I went back to the tour companies in search of a 2 day tour only to find out that they only do 1 and 3 day tours that day. But I was determined. In the agency I found 3 more people, 2 corean girls and a japanese guy who I convinced that going on a 2 day tour is really the best solution for them. The tour operator wasn't exactly happy, but you needed 7 people to complete a car while we totaled 4 so far. No problem, I was really determined to make the tour happen, so I grabbed a bunch of fliers off of her desk and went outside. The first person I saw with a backpack turned out to be a young french journalist who was travelling with 2 of his buddies, who I quickly convinced to come with our 2 day tour and that's the best price they would find, so now we had 7 people. Victoriously I marched back in the office with 3 more tourists, greeted by the tourist agency lady's smile, I essentially did her job for her that day. In short though, the tourist agency representatives are not at all nice, they are truly business people, they don't really care about you or your interests or how to make your experience enjoyable, it's all about the money for them, and you can feel that from the first minute you talk to them. They can also let you go at the first sign of a better prospect without any remorse of keeping their word, this is something I experienced first hand as well.

So here we are at the beginning of our trip, packing our trusty Toyota Land Cruiser, backpacks on top and tourists packed inside :)

first stop was an old train cemetery. Apparently Uyuni was a strategic point for Bolivia back in the day and was a large railroad hub. Now its remnants are left for tourists to play around.

Me meditating on the background of infinity... the clouds are really majestic there, party because of the mountain backdrop, party because you're on a plateau and see them closer.

Entering the salt flats. This place is ridiculous, because it's now rainy season, it's covered with about 1-5 cm of water all the time, making it an almost perfectly reflecting surface. This is what really makes it great, I suspect in the dry season it's not nearly as nice.

Walking on the sea...

the 3 french guys exploring the saltness

experimenting with perspective

our trusty vehicle. I actually really felt bad for the car, since driving in salt for so much does wonders to the undercarriage of the car :) but apparently they must wash it down very well after each trip.

Standing on pure salt

on the way to our sleeping point in a remote village about 2h away we were caught in a serious storm and I managed to capture a lightning fractal hitting far in the distance, this is probably one of the coolest photos I ever took :) as you can probably already tell, photography is not one of my gifts.

We slept uneventfully in a small village hotel, but the food was good and they even had hot water for showering for an additional 10 bolivianos :) The next mornging we went exploring the rock valley. These have an interesting formation method. They formed millions of yeas ago when the area that is now Bolivia was precipitated with active volcanoes that spewed lava everywhere. When the lava came in contact with glaciers it immediately underwent a reaction where it froze into rocks covered with small surface pits, a secondary chemical reaction. So these rocks are actually frozen volcanic lava.

Natural window into Bolivia.

Here's another proof of volcanic formation. You can see that this rock looks like a ravaging flame tnat was frozen immediately while going through some sort of thermal vortex effect. That's the cool things about these rocks, they are thin at the base and become wide at the top, which somewhat ming boggling, but makes perfect sense with the story of their formation.

Some more meditation :) this is one thing I'll certainly take from this trip...

exercising the newly attained meditative power...physically

the Andes are really amazing, nothing I've ever seen.

To get to the lagunas you need to do some serious off-roading. Seriously, I got tons of respect for Land Cruisers here, as I thought a few times we're going to turn over and we just kept going. I usually despise SUV's because of their complete unecessarity for american roads and the sign of opulence they've come to represent, but these machines were engineered to go over some ridiculous terrain, and the bolivians use it to their maximum extent.

Our wonderful team at one of the lagunas.

Final stop at the last laguna, walking toward a hotel situated on its shores, in between the mountains.

Of course there were flamingos at the lagunas, they were the primary sight.

I had to post this photo. It was taken by Gavin, my volunteering english mate, during his trip to Uyuni. This is really the reason I decided to go to Uyuni in the first place, but for some reason, either due to my photography skills or the age of my camera I couldn't reproduce this photo's magic, it still is the best one I have from the salt flats.