Shalom, Dali! - El Salar de Uyuni

I knew I couldn´t leave Bolivia without paying a visit to one of its geographical wonders, El Salar de Uyuni.  The Salar, or Salt Flat, is the largest in the world.  You can clearly see it from space; it`s that white blob that is over 4000 square miles in all!

Doing so required an overnight bus trip, and since neither Lu nor Ceci could get away from work and school to come, I headed out on my own.  I was never alone for long, though; I met plenty of interesting people along the way.  In the bus station in La Paz, I sat for a few hours with two Peruvian girls and a woman from Ecuador who were all migrating to Brazil to look for work.  They, too, had just met each other, but we decided it was better to sit in a group.  They were extremely kind, even sharing their dinner with me (I traded  some chocolate in return).  I hope everything goes well for them!  I wish I could hear how their stories turn out.

I boarded the bus around 8:00 PM and attempted to sleep.  I never really managed it.  The road from Bolivia to Uyuni is only paved for the first couple of hours.  Then it transforms into a washboarded dirt track that made for the bumpiest ride of my life.  If not for the anticipation of my destination, those 11 hours would have been horrible.

I arrived bright and early the next morning and was immediately able to set up a one-day tour of the Salar.  The tour didn't start for a few hours, though, so I wandered around town with a British guy I`d met on the bus.  We walked the length, breadth and circumference of Uyuni in about an hour (that´s how small it was) before finding a restaurant that served English breakfast!  My British friend was inordinately excited, and I was happy to eat something besides bread, too.

My tour company grouped me up with 7 crazy Israelis who barely spoke a word of Spanish or English.  We had a fun time trying to communicate, although the only words of Hebrew I managed to learn were ´Shalom`(hello), ´Shalom`(goodbye) and ´Peengeen` (penguin). Our first stop on the tour of the Salar was the area in which they process the salt.  Apparently they mound it up using only shovels before trucking it off to be processed in another part of the Salar.  The mounds of salt were actually quite pretty, especially since the edge of the Salar was still wet and reflected a little bit.

However, the next stop was even better.  We drove to the Hotel de Sal, which is in the middle of absolutely nothing.  It is white as far as the eye can see, which is disorienting and beautiful in its own right.  It reminded me of Dali´s surrealist paintings.  The Israelis were very excited about taking pictures and using the lack of horizon to play with perspective.  They even took one of me with their dinosaur.  The hotel was interesting because it is constructed entirely of salt blocks (the only available building material) and filled with salt sculptures.  We ate lunch there, where the Israelis taught me how to say ´Cheese!´ in Hebrew (Shwoom!), and then continued on into the desert.

After an hour of driving through bleak, dreamlike whiteness, we suddenly came upon our last stop of the day: la Isla del Pescado.  Rising up from the salt, there is a single island covered in gigantic, ancient cacti.  There aren´t any fish there (the name refers to the shape of the island as seen from above), but there are caves, arches, and lots of little birds.  Supposedly there are vizcachas (like rabbit-squirrels), but all I found was droppings.  Most of the tourists didn´t go onto the island, preferring to spend more time taking pictures of the salt, so I spent a couple of hours in nearly perfect solitude, wandering around the island.  I found the oldest cactus on the island (labeled), which was over 900 years old!  The whole experience was wonderful, especially after the frenetic pace of La Paz.  I was sad to leave at the end of the day, but very glad I decided to go to the Salar.