4×4 Day Four: The Return!

Tuesday 20^th

Come 4.30am, blearly-eyed but ready to just go, we were sitting in the porch of our hostel waiting for the driver. After 20mins, I went to get the duvet off the bed to wrap myself up in. After 40mins, David went to investigate. Had we got the time wrong? Were our watches right? Yes to the latter, no to the former: our driver – after reminding us not to be late the previous night – had overslept.

At 5.15, he appeared and started the car – so we got in, but he must have only just woken up at that point, because he didn’t actually get to the car himself until 5.45. At that point, I was so cold my extremities could have been up to anything, and I wouldn’t have known about it. He said he was sorry and put the heating on, and when at 6.30 he stopped the car, searching for a mysterious bleeping noise that he took about 10mins to track down – it turns out it was his phone, and the alarm, two hours later than it should have been. Wonderful.

4×4 Day Three: The Long drive Goodbye

Monday 19^th

Penola’s parting gift was to save me from kidney failure induced by the lack of open public banos, (thank you!) and we got back into 4×4 to discover quiet but sweet Freddie gone, and a new man who was equally quiet, but exuded surliness instead. He spent about 15mins driving round, frantically phoning on his mobile looking for his wife. I thought she was supposed to come with us, but it turns out all he wanted was a massive bag of coca leaves from her, and then we were ready to set off.

Having behaved like a junkie from the start – desperate for his leaves – he then proceeded to stuff them into his mouth at a rate that puts even my popcorn hand to shame; never mind that driving a 4×4 on unmarked, dusty, desert tracks with a windscreen that is cracked and as dirty as a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap, is supposed to require much more concentration than gawping at the latest blockbuster on a screen the size of a house. Whether it was his age, or the copious amounts of alkaloids he had consumed, in any case, he couldn’t see in the glare of the afternoon sun and 

4×4 Day Three: Total rubbish & the place trains go to die

Monday 19^th

Our final stop on the flats was the mining area, where piles of slushy salt pyramids littered the horizon and trucks were crawling like ants over the distant crust. There was something quite pretty about the way the piles of salt were reflected in the bluish waters of the briny floor, but I also felt quite sad that the pristine white, hard cracked crust we’d got to know and love that day was being broken up from the edges inwards. Obviously, it’s such a massive natural resource that the mining is barely touching the vast expanse of the salt flats; but it made me wonder how long the flats will be such a wonderful place to visit – will future generations have the same endless, amazing whiteness to marvel at, cartwheel over, and feel pleasantly insignificant on? Or will there be new, ever-increasing slushy piles every kilometre or so? Will it all turn into some kind of crazy Mad Max-esque industrial wasteland with diggers and trucks lining a new San Pedro-Uyuni highway? Will anyone care enough to actually try and stop it anyway?

We had to leave sometime, and although we had had a couple of hours on the salt crust – and far more sun than my poor still-burnt face could take – it seemed like the ‘main event’ of actually making it to the famed Salar de Uyuni  was over too quickly. The landscape changed so quickly….

4×4 to Uyuni Day Three: David the Hero

Monday 19^th

Back in the Landcruiser again, and as we skimmed along the flats, with the azure blue sky above us and the blinding salt below, us girls in the back must have zoned out a little, overwhelmed by the beauty and vastness of the landscape (or maybe just a bit knackered from the early start). David, however, was clearly much sharper than all of us, and saved a man’s life (probably).

4×4 Day Three: I ♥ Salar de Uyuni

Monday 19^th

Merry on the victory of wine won, we stayed up quite late chatting and voted on getting up in time to see the sun rise over the salt flats…. So up we woke at 4.00 am. The drivers were worse at faffing than me, (all that business about strapping things to the roof and bringing out boxes of provisions, etc.) so we only just made it in time to see the sun rise over the flats – it was magical to watch the vast salt wilderness change from black, to purple to blue to orange in the rising sun. When the sun actually burst over the horizon, our shadows stretched and lengthened towards the mountains in the distance, and the temperature started to warm; I was so glad we’d decided to get up early, despite the wine-induced headache I’d suffered!

Like children with new toys, we played on the flats…. Jez had us girls doing repeated cartwheels to get us mid-manoeuvre and perfectly aligned in front of the mountains, and Steve tried to capture himself jumping in mid-air, and ‘standing’ on his phone. Endless amusement, and then off we went again in the Jeep to Incahausi island. It’s a giant island

What IS Salar de Uyuni anyway???

Monday 19^th – Salar de Uyuni: facts and weird local fiction

Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat – covering 10, 582 square kilometres, 3, 566m above sea level. It used to be a huge lake, with up to 90m of water in places, but 30-40 thousand years after a tectonic shift separated it from the sea, most of the water has dried up and in places there now lies up to 30m of salt crust covering the brine lake of between 2 and 20m deep.

Uyuni is the closest town to the salt flats, but the Aymara people who live there fervently believe that the flats should be named after the mountains surrounding the flats; in local folklore, the mountains are believed to be giant Gods, Tunupa, Kusku and Kusina. Tunupa married Kusku, but then Kusku ran away from her with Kusina. Grieving Tunupa started to cry whilst breast feeding her son, and her tears mixed with the milk and formed the salar. As a result of this tale, Tunupa mountain is an important deity and the Aymara believe the flats should be named Salar de Tunupa. Of course it should….

4×4 to Uyuni: Day Two

Sunday 18^th

I think the image that will stay with me of those first few days of the Bolivian trip will be that of Laguna Colorades and its flamingos. The high-altitude lake was tinged with blue, red, pink and a bit of green; like some psychedelic Alice in Wonderland landscape dreamed up by Carroll on acid. Steam rose from the warm water, as the birds picked their way through the shallow waters for food and took flight, skimming across the multi-coloured ripples with their wings flashing black and hot pink in the morning sun. Truly breathtaking, and utterly surreal; if I didn’t have the photos, I probably wouldn’t believe we’d actually seen it like that.

Our next stop was the ‘stone tree’, or ‘arbol de pierra’; a rock that had been so weathered by the stinging desert winds, that the bottom had eroded so much, it looked like a tree blossoming from the sand. Naughty headstrong Asia ignored all the signs and proudly climbed it for a photo, while I wondered where on earth the advertised ‘banos’ were – were the desert authorities having a joke about there being bathrooms in the middle of the desert? All I could make out were rocks and sand as far as the eye could see.

Onwards and we encountered more lakes, more multi-coloured mountains, and then we stopped in a small village called San Juan to do some ‘shopping’. Thanks God Freddie wasn’t referring to the same shopping as on the Uros tour; more on our wave-length, he meant we could buy beer and wine if wanted to for our night in the Salt Hotel. David and I got a bottle of Bolivia’s best red wine, with a picture of a man who looked remarkably like Ghandi on it. We didn’t have high expectations, but it only cost a few quid.

On the way to the hotel, we encountered our first mechanical failure. Luckily, despite the stories of the few people who die on this trip every year, our issue didn’t involve a head-on collision as the drivers played ‘chicken’ on the tracks, nor did it involve us having to dig ourselves and the truck out of a salt or sand dune. No – thankfully, we just had a puncture in our tyre, so about 15mins away from the hotel, on the beginning of the salt flats, poor Freddie and Juan had to get on their hands and knees and change the tyre.

The guys were quite efficient, and we soon arrived at the Salt Hotel, where everything (except the showers because that would be stupid) was made out of salt. The furnishings were certainly quirky, and I loved that the floor was just a thick layer of salt crystals; like walking on sand! Much to my delight, there was also the chance to charge our camera and take a hot shower – bliss! Dinner was a much talked-about affair, where there had been rumours of us getting wine and alpaca instead of tea and pasta. As it turns out, these rumours were true, but because we had bought beer and wine at San Juan, the owners of the hotel were less than inclined to relinquish the vino!

At the suggestion of foul play on the Bolivians’ behalf, the Aussies immediately raised their voices and began to complain, at which we got one of the two bottles we were due. At that point, David and I – as good English folk who abide by the laws of ‘don’t-make-a-fuss’ and ‘no really, it’s fine’ – were slightly awkwardly and embarrassedly pushing for compromise, especially seeing as we already had three bottles… David also made the point that ‘it’s best to complain AFTER the food has been served’.  However, the Aussies continued undaunted, and much terrible Spanish was aired in aid of our cause. In the end, the drivers were summoned, and we got our second bottle of wine. The situation resolved, we tucked into our llama steaks (hopefully without the bitter phlegm of defeat from the Bolivian cook), rice, surprisingly good chips, and vegetables. After we’d finished, one of the drivers almost managed to convince us we’d actually eaten Vicuna, the cute endangered deer-esque animals we’d seen throughout the trip, but thankfully when he tried to convince us they also serve Flamingo, we realised he was taking the p*ss.

4×4 to Uyuni: Day One

Saturday 17^th

7.45am saw us at the Cordillera Travel office, ready to change some Chilean Pesos for Bolivianos, and get two 5litre bottles of water for the journey.  The minibus rocked up, full of Aussies and a Polish girl, and immediately one of the guys, Ashley, struck up a conversation, declaring us ‘almost’ Australian, and saying how funny/cute he found my accent. The best introduction was from Steve, who was still sleeping when the bus turned up at his hostel. Consequently, he arrived in a rush approximately 7mins later, in a flurry of clothes and bag and random stuff. Sitting on the cool box, he proceeded to pack his bag and tell us how the previous night had been his heaviest in his two-week stay in San Pedro. As the bus carried on towards the border, it transpired he was a) feeling incredibly hungover b) had left behind his $200 sunglasses and c) left some of his electronic equipment behind. How he managed to remain so chilled about it all amazed me – if it were me I’d be spitting blood.

At the border we all got out and queued for about an hour behind some keeno Japanese businessmen to get our passports stamped, and our forms validated. In the wait, David and Penola, a gregarious Aussie named after the town her father was born in, went to find coffee and came back with brown, hot, sweet, wet stuff that approximated it. It was another 45 min drive over about 86 kilometers to get to the Bolivian side of the border and their small, concrete ‘Migracion’ hut was laughable when compared to the Chilean pomp on the other side.

We breakfasted in the freezing cold on bread, cheese, jam and coffee, and marvelled at the small hut nearby which had about two feet of ice on the INSIDE. It didn’t bode well for my flimsy gloves and super-light fleece. I was sincerely hoping we hadn’t come 4×4 trekking by mistake.

We hadn’t. Phew. We split into two cars – Penola, the Polish Asia, me and David (lucky guy!) in one car driven by Freddie; and Ashley, Steve, Ben and Jeremy in the other, driven by Juan. Apart from David and I, the rest were lone travellers, though Penola and Ashley had been travelling together for a few days, and Penola had met Jeremy in Argentina previously.

Day One was worth the entire fee alone: Freddie drove us through the desert, past strange icy outcrops growing out of the sands, through rocky terrain where the Toyota Landcruiser was put through its paces, and in deep ruts between mountain-scapes. We saw La Laguna Verde, a green and red tinged lake which reflected the mountains glass-perfect; the Dali desert stones, where craggy rocks had sifted up through the sands in bizarre shapes and angles as a result of tectonic shifts; we saw thermal springs where steam rose into the freezing air from 30 degree water (I was too sunburnt to go in – boo!). The best sights of the day were probably the bright pink flamingos, which I had no idea lived in the desert lakes, and the geysers which came puffing out of the ground as if from an angry dragon’s lair, surrounded by bubbling pools of mud and earth stained with minerals in rust, yellow, white and grey. I’m so glad I woke from a  momentary altitude-induced stupor to see them! We had all fallen suspiciously silent on the way to the geysers as an effect of the rise in altitude – the highest point in our trip was 5,500m just after the geysers. We also drove by the mountain ‘de seis colores’ which was quite hallucinogenic – the more you stared at the slopes, the more colours you saw, until it seemed like the entire mountain was made as a crazy pile of souvenir sands and someone would be along to jar it soon. I promise it was actually like that and I wasn’t really hallucinating…. See the pictures for hard evidence 🙂

Our final stop was at La Laguna Colorado – but we didn’t get to see it up close because we were staying the night in a hostel close by. Like something out of a horror film, it was a quiet, abandoned hostel – with loads of cold, stone-built rooms, fronting onto a long corridor with glass facing out to the desert and an opaque plastic roof. We had a lunch of soup, mash, veg, scary frankfurter-esque sausages that had been cut into flower-like fronds at the ends(?!), and a banana for pudding; then the drivers informed us that we would have the rest of the day free, and we would commence the tour again the next day, as strong winds were coming.

As the winds came in, whistling around the hostel, I noticed colourful paper shapes hanging over the doorways (cue scary canned children’s laughter in the background) and one by one the staff and drivers left us to it. We split up and some people went for a wander outside or to put warmer clothes on, searching out the last remnants of sunshine to sit in and read… there were many jokes that one by one we’d find ourselves alone and running out into the desert to look for everyone… AND NEVER RETURN.

As it happened, another tour group coming the opposite way (from Bolivia to Chile) arrived at the hostel, and the silence was broken by familiar accents – Holly and Lauren from the Machu Picchu trip rounded the corner and we had a good catch up. Dinner was a welcome warm interval, as a small stove was lit and we ate more soup, some spaghetti with a basic tomato sauce (& cheese, yey!), and a very pleasant tinned peach (Who would have thought).

Post-dinner, we ventured out for a quick spot of stargazing and I was again reminded of the beauty and elation I’d felt during the trip in San Pedro; in fact the Milky Way was even more visible than that night; a mesmerising cloudy stripe across the entire sky. We then attempted to regain some of the warmth we’d had in the communal dinner space with the dying embers of the stove (which was only actually lit for about 15mins). We brought out a pack of cards to play a few hand of the globally-known game ‘Shithead’, and together with Ben, Jeremy and Penola, shared the deck and the humour of managing to get more cards than you can physically hold; Asia was a spectator.

As the girls went off to bed, I joined them so as not to come barging in an hour later when they’d just gone to sleep, and it was actually quite nice to share a room with them…. We all reminisced about school trips, when the best thing was trying to smuggle beer / chocolate into the room (depending on our age!); trying to sneak into the boys’ dorm; or the the holy grail: GOING OUTSIDE!! Needless to say, we didn’t have any booze, had no desire to go into the boys’ smelly room, and had even less desire to venture outside where we’d freeze literally to death. So, we chatted girl talk for a bit and went to sleep. My 13 year-old self would have been so disappointed!