Day 82 - Salar de Uyuni

Monday, 3 November 2014

I arrived in Uyuni at about 6.45 am. I was told that a girl named Lydia would meet me at the bus station but there was no one there. I was also told that if no one came, I was to go to a nearby restaurant. After asking for directions, I made my way to the restaurant, where I washed up a bit, and I asked the lady what time the tour would start. She told me the tour would only start at 10.30 am. It was then only about 7.15 am. Great. So I ordered breakfast and sat down in the restaurant for a bit, and then Lydia came. Lydia is really a nice girl, she outlined the tour to me, and told me that I could leave my stuff in the restaurant, use the bathroom and wifi for as long as I wanted. I asked her if there was anything to do while waiting for the tour and she suggested a museum and the local market.

So after breakfast I walked around the small town of Uyuni, it is really a very small town with one main church and a walkway which I gather was the main walkway. I found the local market but I had already been in and out of local markets that this market did not really interest me that much. Around the town there were interesting monuments which I took pictures of, and the words "Dakar - Bolivia" everywhere, I found out later that the Dakar Rally went through Bolivia this year. I also found a small museum of anthropology in town but it was closed right up till 10 am. 

Having done my tour of the town of Uyuni, I made my way back to the restaurant to wait for the tour. The tour was to be in a 4x4, with 9 of us, including the driver. Here I got really angry; the tour agency that I booked this tour with told me that there would be a guide who spoke 'basic' English. What I got was a driver who spoke no English. Ok, nevermind the not speaking English,  there was no explanation or information whatsoever about the places we visited! I was properly pissed off with the tour agency, but I knew it wasn't the 'guide' or Lydia's fault, and besides, I was already on this tour and there was nothing I could do about it now, so there was no use being angry. In this way, I managed to calm myself down.

The first stop on the tour was the Train Cemetery which is more than 70 years old. In the past, Uyuni was an important distribution hub for the trains carrying minerals such as copper to Pacific Ocean ports. The rail lines were built by British engineers arriving near the end of the 19th century. In the 1940s, the mining industry collapsed, partly because of mineral depletion. Many trains were abandoned, producing the train cemetery. Lydia informed me that the Bolivian President at that time, a man named Gorni (who had a dual American-Bolivian citizenship) was more of a businessman than anything else, and he did not order the abandoned trains to be discarded because it would be a waste of money. So it was just left there till today.

Next was a small town called Colchani. The people in this small town sell handicrafts and work the salt flats for a living. Here we were given time to buy souvenirs, but I didn't buy any.

Next, the Salar, the biggest salt flat in the world! Some 30,000 to 42,000 years ago, the entire Salar was part of a giant prehistoric lake, Lake Minchin. When it dried, it left behind two modern lakes and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Salar de Uyuni. Salar de Uyuni spreads over 10,582 square kilometers. The salt flat is a renewable source of sodium, lithium and magnesium chloride, and according to Lydia, the government plans to set up a company soon dedicated to extracting lithium chloride for exportation. I wonder why this was not done sooner; perhaps Bolivia would be better off now. 

The 'guide' showed us where the salt was brewing from underground. We had lunch at the Salar which was nice. We took many funny photographs here, and the Salar is really beautiful. Miles and miles of white salt.

Next, we went to the Island of Incahuasi. When the salt flat was a lake, this was an island in the lake, and now we could drive up to this island and trek to the top, which I did. When the lake dried up, it made interesting indentations on the rocks at the base of the island, it looked to me like bubbles on the rock, quite pretty! The island is inhabited by many cactuses, some as high as 15 metres. At the top of the island is something that looks like a stone table with stones piled on top of it. According to a guide (I was eavesdropping again), the local people believed that if you made a wish and placed a rock on top of the pile of stones and the rock stayed where it was, your wish would come true; but if the rock falls off, your wish would not come true.

The scenery from the top of the island was beautiful. In the distance was the most famous peak in Uyuni, known as Tunupa. There is a legend about this peak (I love legends! - and today I had developed excellent eavesdropping skills out of necessity) - the Aymara legend tells that the mountains Tunupa, Kusku and Kusina, which surround the Salar, were giant people. Tunupa married Kusku, but Kusku ran away from her with Kusina. Grieving Tunupa started to cry while breast-feeding her son. Her tears mixed with breast milk formed the Salar. Many locals consider the Tunupa an important deity and say that the place should be called Salar de Tunupa rather than Salar de Uyuni.

It was good to go trekking after lunch, which happened to be delicious (at least something turned out nice today on the tour). After the Island of Incahuasi we went to see a salt hotel, this was a hotel made entirely of salt. Then more pictures at a monument made of salt with the Dakar Rally symbol, and then we were done with the tour at about 6 pm.

I returned to the restaurant where I accosted Lydia and asked her for all the information about the places I saw today. I also had a beer while waiting for the bus, and then at about 7.30 pm I went to the bus station to take the 8 pm bus back to La Paz.