Every day up to 80 Toyota Landcruisers (most oddly disguised as Lexus') pull out of Uyuni, a nasty dirty town that exists only for the tourists, headed into the desert, all packed to the gills with food, fuel and gas. There is nothing out there, nothing. Our group of 18 spread out in three 4WD's were a mixed bunch, a family of Koreans who didn't speak to any of us, a large group of 21 year old Sydney boys, 2 lovely London girls and us.
First stop was the train graveyard, hundreds of train parts left out to die a slow death from rust and graffiti. Slightly uninteresting. Next we drove across the salt and into the desert itself, the Salar de Uyuni sits at over 3600m and is more than 12,000sq kms, rumour has it that NASA saw it from space and at first thought it was an immense snow field. A seemingly endless stretch of white hexagonal tiles that play tricks on your eyes, revealing shifting mirages, giving you no sense of distance. Because it was the wet season much of the lower sections were under water, the cars had to drive through crystal clear, tropical looking waters before we arrived at our lunch destination, the much hated Playa Blanca Salt Hotel. It is illegal to build on the Salar, but some sneaky family built a hotel made almost entirely from salt out in the centre, where it sits and pollutes the surrounding whiteness a nasty yellowish brown. You are told not to go to Playa Blanca, but there is no choice, all the tours end up here on the first day.
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| Train graveyard |
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| House made of salt |
We spent a ridiculous amount of time trying, rather unsuccessfully on our part, to take pictures playing with depth of field.
The first night we stayed in fairly simple rooms, but ate and slept well. The next day we left the salt behind and headed into the higher, dryer, almost completely treeless deserts of the Altiplano bordering northern Chile.
This place was vast, huge skies and incredible colours. It cleared the head and the heart. The distances and the amazing diversity of landscape. Huge bolder fields, red dusty sands, massive towering smouldering volcanoes, dried out lakes, their colours ranging from pastel creams through to vibrant reds and poisonous greens. And nothing out there, no towns or houses, no empty plastic bottles strewn everywhere, nothing but hundreds of flamigos and the odd llama.
That night we stayed in slightly less than basic rooms, which was good because when we first arrived at the dismal looking hostel, dumped in the centre of nowhere, they didn't have enough beds for all of us. But our guides figured it out eventually.
Our final day we were up at 4am in order to get to the geysers before daybreak. We drove through a darkness so deep and so velvet, looking back to see all the cars spread out below us like fairy lights trailing through the desert. And as light leached into the landscape we watched huge jets of blisteringly hot steam shoot into the air and piping hot bubbles of mud boil out of the earth.
We visited thermal springs and a desert nicknamed the Salvador Dali desert, a landscape straight out of one of his paintings, rocks the size of houses strewn across the sand with early morning shadows stretching away from them. We passed lakes so still the mirror image was reflected in the surface, lakes of arsenic stained livid green and void of life. All at over 5000m.
After dropping the London girls at the Chilean border we turned around and drove all the way back to Uyuni. A round trip of almost 1000kms. But worth every cm of it.
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| Driving across The Salar |
The first night we stayed in fairly simple rooms, but ate and slept well. The next day we left the salt behind and headed into the higher, dryer, almost completely treeless deserts of the Altiplano bordering northern Chile.
This place was vast, huge skies and incredible colours. It cleared the head and the heart. The distances and the amazing diversity of landscape. Huge bolder fields, red dusty sands, massive towering smouldering volcanoes, dried out lakes, their colours ranging from pastel creams through to vibrant reds and poisonous greens. And nothing out there, no towns or houses, no empty plastic bottles strewn everywhere, nothing but hundreds of flamigos and the odd llama.
That night we stayed in slightly less than basic rooms, which was good because when we first arrived at the dismal looking hostel, dumped in the centre of nowhere, they didn't have enough beds for all of us. But our guides figured it out eventually.
Our final day we were up at 4am in order to get to the geysers before daybreak. We drove through a darkness so deep and so velvet, looking back to see all the cars spread out below us like fairy lights trailing through the desert. And as light leached into the landscape we watched huge jets of blisteringly hot steam shoot into the air and piping hot bubbles of mud boil out of the earth.
We visited thermal springs and a desert nicknamed the Salvador Dali desert, a landscape straight out of one of his paintings, rocks the size of houses strewn across the sand with early morning shadows stretching away from them. We passed lakes so still the mirror image was reflected in the surface, lakes of arsenic stained livid green and void of life. All at over 5000m.
After dropping the London girls at the Chilean border we turned around and drove all the way back to Uyuni. A round trip of almost 1000kms. But worth every cm of it.
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