12 hours to see a bunch of salt

Over the weekend, I traveled through the southern Altiplano (highlands) to Uyuni. This is what the Lonely Planet guide has to say about this area:

“Stretching southward from La Paz to the Chilean and Argentine frontiers is a harsh, sparsely populated wilderness of scrubby windswept basins, lonely peaks, and almost lifeless salt deserts. …The moment the sun sets – or even passes behind a cloud – you’ll realize this air has teeth… Those who live on the Altiplano are among the world’s hardiest souls, existing on the edge of human endurance…. They deserve a great deal of respect for their accomplishments.”

I personally feel like I, too, deserve a great deal of respect for going there and surviving for just a weekend. To get to Uyuni, one travels 3 ½ hours in bus from La Paz to Oruro. Then it’s a further 7 hours in a dusty and cold train to Uyuni. The miserableness of the train travel was compounded by the fact that the DVD player (or maybe DVDs?) were not fully functional, so during the trip, I watched from ½ to ¾ of three different movies, dubbed in Spanish, none of which I would have ever bothered to watch in the US. I sat next to a slightly melancholy Italian woman who seemed to think her blend of some Spanish and mostly Italian was enough to have a variety of small conversations with me during the trip. She meant well. I smiled and nodded a lot.

I was met at the train station by someone from one of the various travel agencies that arranged this trip (as a team, I guess), and taken to the hotel. He showed me to my room and turned on the “heater.” The heater didn’t do much, and the hotel was made from adobe (mud walls, basically), and it was very, very cold. Let me describe how cold it was. I had three blankets on my bed, which I doubled because it was a queen or full sized bed. I also wore to bed my pants, my running lycra pants under them, two pairs of socks, alpaca wool leg warmers, a long sleeved tee shirt, two sweaters, my hat, and earmuffs. Oh, and my scarf and gloves. I managed to sleep okay.

I mucked around in town for about an hour or so before the day trip to the Salar (salt flats) left and bought a few souvenirs. I ended up on a tour with a very nice group of people: a Swiss packpacker traveling alone, a very cute Canadian couple, and a mom and daughter team of Brazilians, the daughter being a theater actress living in Sucre and mom being a visitor. All very nice.

Our first stop was the Train Graveyard. Interesting, but not much of a story behind it. Then we drove to the small town that’s right at the entrance to the Salar. I did my fair share of supporting the local economy, based almost entirely on salt and alpaca products. Then we drove out to the flats. It was very cool. I mean, yes, in a temperature sense, but also in a sense of being really neat, awe-inspiring, other-worldly. For as far as the eye could see, it was white. We stopped in a few places on the flats and then drove to Isla Incahuasi or Isla de los Pescadores – Island of the Fisherman. It’s literally an island (one of several dozen) that was left behind when the salt water sea evaporated into the flats, and managed to sustain life in the form of mostly cacti and other scrubby, desert plants. The rock formations on the island were actually coral at one point when the area was covered in water. We hiked around on the island for a while and then started driving back, stopping a few more places along the way.

At that point, I was feeling like the trip had been worthwhile.

We got back to Uyuni around 6, and I made plans to meet the Canadian couple for dinner at 7. We found our way to Minuteman Pizza, inexplicably good pizza, inexplicably owned by a dude from Amhert, Massachusetts. Then we, along with another Canadian couple, went to the Arco Iris restaurant/pub for a drink or two before we all went our separate ways and I headed to the train station around 11pm to catch my midnight train back to Oruro.

The train was even colder than the hotel. The conductor handed out blankets. I was wearing the same amount of layers that I had worn the night before, except this time I was wearing an additional alpaca wool hat that I had purchased, along with three pairs of legwarmers (one pair on my legs, one pair on my feet and one pair on my arms). I did not sleep at all. We got to Oruro and luckily I didn’t have long to wait til the bus came. But with the bus came another bad American movie dubbed into Spanish that only worked until about 2/3 of the way through when a cable seemed to become disconnected, and no one bothered to tell the driver to do something about it.

I got home around noon on Sunday, took the hottest shower I could possibly stand, and slept for 4 hours. I felt like a new woman after that.

So the to and fro were horrible and uncomfortable, but hopefully the pictures speak for themselves about how incredible this place was once I actually got there. Definitely a unique experience that I will probably not have again. But, if the chance does come up, I’ll be bringing a sleeping bag. No doubt about it.