Salar de Uyuni (Bolivian Salt Flats)
Trip Start
Aug 13, 2010
1
26
27
Trip End
Aug 12, 2011
Uyuni, Bolivia
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
To get there from La Paz I had to ride a bus that made me feel like I was a bird that had been put into a cage and shaken all night long. Uyuni is for all its fame relatively untouched by western tourism. The hotels are like something out of a bad dream with rusty beds sporting thin bumpy mattresses with half clean sheets laid on top of them. These are the sort of places where you would rather not touch anything even the walls which are stained with red, white and brown. I wondered if it would be more hygienic not to take a shower. Some might call this squalor, this was the type of Bolivia that I called home for three months.
Eventually I found a man with a 4 x 4 (or what Bolivia would call a tour company) and a couple of other people who wanted to venture to the salt flats. As a warm up we were taken to a Bolivian tourist attraction, a ruined and rusting train yard. Now our bloke with a 4 x 4 (or tour guide if you will) didn't speak English and there was no 'Tourist Center' with multi-language facilities so I was on my own to figure out the history. That may sound a bit uninspiring but I felt like a fat boy in a pie
shop. It was Indiana Jones time and I had a whole movie set to play
with.
On the salt flats themselves there are several hotels. We went to see the biggest and most impressive of these. Its difficult to imagine, the whole thing is made from salt. Everything from the walls, to the front office, to intricate sculpture all made from salt.
Do I have a story to tell you about the salt flats? Yeah but its pretty dry. Can I describe the salt flats? Yes but I don't think I will do it alieness and beauty of it justice. Make sure you look at the photos, each is worth a thousand words.
