If anyone wants any salt, I know where to get you some

It was a crazy four days on the salar de Uyuni, the world's largest, highest salt flat - over 4,600 square miles of salt over 11,000 feet in the air. The scenery was awesome, the tour was awful. But more on that later. First, let me explain how this works - it's not complicated. Seven people and a driver in a Land Cruiser for four days. Food, water and gear are packed on top of the truck. With me were Cyril, Serine and Patina, from France; Adam and Jennifer, from England; and Alice, from Australia.

Our route ran backwards from the standard one: we began at the train graveyard, continued to the red and green lagoons near the Chilean and Argentine boarders, and didn't hit the actual salar until the fourth day. This meant that the first day had the most driving, which in a way was just fine, because we weren't sick of the Cruiser or each other yet.



The train graveyard, within walking distance of town and sort of tacked onto the tours, didn't appeal to me a whole lot - until we got there. This is the place where engines come to rest, from all over Bolivia, from all across the 20th century. The engines were as old as 1907, and for some reason were never really stripped for their iron, but instead left as public graffiti space (including the best graffiti ever, see picture). There were perhaps two dozen engines in all, and a few miscellaneous traincars as well, all rusted, looming hulks from a bygone age of transportation. Unlike something like this back home, we were free to clamber all over whatever we pleased, roll train wheels around, and do all the things that would be prohibited for liability reasons. There was also a heard of llamas wandering through the yard when we were there, adding to the bizarre feel of the place.





After a few hours of traveling through hot desert, we arrived at the strange little town of Culpina K. Standing in the plaza, you could see the edge of town any way you turned. I'm not totally sure why this town exists, except maybe to showcase some confounding wooden... sculptures? in the plaza that looked like the had been modeled off of something from the 12th century used to showcase the severed heads of those who had misbehaved. Lunch was quinoa (which originated in the Andes and is farmed profusely in this area) steaks, and peeled cucumbers and tomatoes. This was to be the best meal we would get over the next four days (generally the food was terrible, and four of us got sick from it - just one reason I described the tour as "awful" earlier), and I was reminded that outside of the United States, people of Western European culture really love their mayonnaise. I would see two bottles of mayonnaise drained over the next four days, and my only contribution was to add some to my tuna, which I then placed in bread with cucumbers and tomato - and was subsequently ridiculed for by the rest of the group members, who consider tuna to be an addition to pasta, not a sandwich.

Mostly the food was undercooked chicken, rice, or plain pasta for dinner and lunch, and stale bread for breakfast. We were all pretty excited to get back to Uyuni for some good pizza (at Minuteman, the pizzeria run by a guy from Massachusetts).

The rest of the day was spent in the car, rolling through sparse desert and quinoa fields (I guess quinoa grows fine in sand), while yellow caution signs warned us to look out for llamas. About an hour before the sun went down, we arrived at our palace for the night, a concrete building that used to house workers for the adjacent abandoned borox processing plant. We took a hike in the surrounding hills, which were populated only by a single type of scrub plant - which were nonetheless prolific enough to give the impression of a prolific green landscape - and a bitter cold wind. After a dinner of raw chicken, rice, and French fries (which caused illness #1 in the group), we hit the sack in our linen-less beds.




In the morning we headed through desert that was even dryer and sandier, stopping at a couple of flamingo-specked lagoons surrounded by borox, until we arrived at Laguna Colorado - a massive expanse of shallow water at about 13,000 feet, populated by three types of flamingo - the Andes, James, and Chilean - and an algae that stained the water red. Unfortunately, after sitting in a car for four hours from the last stop to get there, we only stayed about 15 minutes before our guide ushered us back into the Land Cruiser. The unfortunate thing is, although we thought we would miss other things if we didn't hurry, we spent the last hour and a half of daylight sitting at our hostel playing cards (one more reason the tour was no good - the guide was no good. But even more on that later).

The next big stop was at the next big lagoon - Laguna Verde, the Green Lagoon. Nestled at the edges of the Chilean and Argentine boarders, in the south-western most corner of Bolivia, this lagoon was inhabited only by a strong wind and a strange, soapy foam. Apparently 16,000 feet is too high for flamingos, but the wind was strong enough to whitecap the waters and nearly blow us over.



Fast forwarding through the next few days, past smaller lagoons filled with flamingos, Andean foxes (Zorro Andino), vicuna (more svelte than the llama, see picture), the Stone Tree, mummies, mountains that are colored like a painters palette, and Dali's rocks, to the last night before the salar: the arrangement, and main reason I chose this tour, was that we were supposed to get up early to watch the sun rise over the salt. Instead, the instant it started raining on our last night, our guide explained that es mucha lluvia, entonces no es possible vamos en la manana para la salida del sol. Translated, this means "it's my birthday tomorrow, and I want to go get wasted with my buddies instead of getting up at 4am to drive in the dark, even though it's going to stop raining in 20 minutes." Instead, we were supposed to leave at 7:30, although this turned into 8:30 since that's how long it took from the time we had some of the women at our hostel go to find our guide and the time he arrived, bleary eyed, back with the car (he would nod off while driving later in the day. What a champ).

But we did make it to the salar, which was surreal and spectacular, especially once we got to the part where the rain had settled from the night before: the salt acts as a giant mirror, making it impossible to tell where the sky ends and the ground begins. We walked on water, were shrunk to palm size, and hid behind giant cacti on Fish Island. I don't think I can say much more about it other than that it was awesome and unreal and spectacular. But I'll let the pictures do the talking: