Friday 20th December 2013
Day Zero: The Flight
At 4058m, El Alto International is the highest international airport in the world. From here we were to fly to Uyuni to arrive there the day before our three day tour with Red Planet. We had read that flights to Uyuni are frequently cancelled and passengers are put on the next flight. Amaszonas has three flights a day to Uyuni (more than any other company). To ensure our arrival in Uyuni the day before the tour, we decided to take their penultimate flight of the day. Indeed our flight was cancelled and we were put on the last flight of the day.
Six and a half hours, two chicken teriyaki subways, a couple of blog posts, a tea and a cake after arriving in the airport, we were headed towards the plane. As we were boarding the plane from runway level we spotted our checked luggage in a trolley just outside it. The plane was small with a capacity of 56 passengers (the smallest plane I have ever been on); when we were onboard and saw the size of the overhead baggage storage, the 3kg carry on luggage limit made sense.
After sitting down a member of staff spoke softly in Spanish to the passengers at the front of the plane, explaining that for safety reasons the baggage would not be arriving in Uyuni until 7am the next day when we would have to collect it from the airport. This caused protest among the passengers who heard the news including us. We had little faith in the timeliness of the flight the next day and were not staying in Uyuni. Our tour was due to start the next morning at which point we would be heading towards Chile in a 4×4 and not returning. It was Red Planet’s last tour of the year. (We had read that they, like many other companies, close over the Christmas period as they do not trust their drivers not to drink drive during that time?!) We simply could not risk our luggage not arriving before the tour and we weren’t the only ones. A number of passengers were doing similar tours and had missed the start of theirs already thanks to the earlier flight being cancelled. They weren’t stopping in Uyuni at all and were heading straight out to catch up with their tour groups on arrival.
The protests grew stronger and some people began getting off the plane; Ismael followed. Eventually dissent caught hold and, much to the horror of the some staff, passengers began picking their checked luggage off the trolley outside and taking it onto the plane. Ismael grabbed our bags and the poor guy in charge of the baggage trolley and a member of the cabin crew tried to stop him. Ismael ignored the former and explained in his best portuñol to the latter that they were only small, “they are light, check for yourself”. Distracted by another passenger trying to take a much larger suitcase, Ismael seized the opportunity to grab the bags and ran onto the plane. He hid them under the seats and sat quietly in the hope that we would get away with it. We did. The guy with the much larger suitcase got on the plane after him with the contents in a trash bag. As part of his negotiation with the cabin crew member he had abandoned the suitcase!
You could tell that for a few of the staff, this kind of commotion was normal. One of the passengers had asked what the issue was with the weight of the luggage and if people grabbing their bags would be a problem. She told him that there was a reasonable buffer on the weight and that as long as both engines were functioning it would be fine. It would only be a problem if one of the engines died?! As the plane took off and later landed we wondered if our 25kg worth of backpacks would be the tipping point weight which caused the plane to crash.
Flying over the salt flats was quite a sight and I went snappy happy with Ismael’s phone, although frankly the pictures don’t do it justice at all. From El Alto the strangely flat earth seemed to have cracks in it which resembled the branches of a firn. The branches grew larger and more frequent before the salt flats appeared, the edges leaking into the earth around it. The salt flats then turned to glass reflecting the clouds. Eventually the salt was replaced by a red desert.
Day One: Salar de Uyuni
After a relaxing evening in the town, thankfully with all our luggage, the next morning we were ready to go. We packed all our luggage on the roof of the 4×4 and jumped in excited about seeing all the amazing landscapes over the next few days. The first and most unexpected stop on the tour was the train graveyard. The trains were apparently once used to carry minerals to the pacific coast. They were not popular with the locals who thought they would result in the loss of their livelihoods and constantly under attack. In the 1940s when the mining industry collapsed due to mineral depletion they were left there. When we arrived there were tourists clambering all over the trains, posing and taking pictures. It was as if it was a climbing frame in a nursery.
Our next stop was at Colchani village for lunch. After getting sick on the Inca Trail and hearing all the stories from people who got ill in Bolivia I was pretty suspicious of local food and generally steering clear. Lunch at Colchani village was a reminder why. For the rest of the trip my stomach was not happy.
After seeing the salt buildings and the salt production rooms in the village we drove to see the largest salt flats in the world. Again the place was crawling with tourists; the 4x4s were parked all over the place and people were running around barefoot. Nevertheless it was still beautiful.
Inca Wasi Island is a large rock outcrop in the middle of the salt plane. It is covered in huge cacti. The strange coral like structures on the island evidence the fact that the island and salt flats were all once submerged under a prehistoric lake. The islands are the remains of ancient volcanos. They are pretty bizarre to look at, in the distance they appear as giant black mounds against the white salt planes.
From here we drove a long way to get to the Aqua Quisa village where we would spend the night. We stopped at sunset to look at the wet salt planes which reflected the light like a giant mirror. Our shelter for the night was a salt hotel. Feeling pretty rough after a dodgy lunch and a day of being shaken by a 4×4 on a bumpy road, when we arrived all I was interested in doing was sleeping.
Day Two: Chiguana & Siloli Deserts
Thankfully I woke the next morning feeling much better than when I slept the night before. From here we would be travelling through desert all the way to Chile. Today we passed through the Chiguana and Siloli Deserts, the latter being the driest and highest in the world at 4550m. For much of the journey we had a good view of volcano Ollague, the top of which reaches 5840m. We passed strangely coloured lagoons, the first green with toxic copper and the second red from the plankton which thrives on the mineral rich water, the shorelines were coloured white with sodium, magnesium and borax.
As the day wore on the areas we stopped in became windier and temperatures dropped. The famous Arbol de Piedra (Tree of Stone) was not alone but surrounded with other huge stones of all shapes and sizes, all of which were being carved and smoothed by the wind and sand. The windiest and coldest of all the stops was the volcanically active Sol de Mañana (Morning Sun), an area covered in fumerols spewing out sulphurous gases with temperatures at the bubbling vents reaching between 150 and 200C.
We ended the day at some very basic accommodation indeed which had no running water (that means a bucket of sand and spade next to the toilet in each cubicle – nice!) but did have a hot spring on the doorstep which Ismael wasted no time in jumping into.
Day Three: Dali Desert
The last desert we would explore in the 4x4s was the Dali desert. The area was exactly what I imagined Mars to look like and in fact the US government had in years gone by tested their robots in the area before sending them there. We saw another green lagoon, coloured this time with lead sulphur and calcium carbonates and overlooked by the 6000m high volcano Licancahur. Our last stop before heading to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile was a white lagoon.
Ramblers Rumblings 