Where's Andrew

SALAR DE UYUNI, BOLIVIA - NOVEMBER 24 - 27

Buying a 1st class ticket seemed like a good way to get some sleep on the bus from Las Paz but unfortunately it did not work out. I think the bus had some sort of wheel alignment problem and when we hit about 80km an hour, there was a bad vibration that would turn into an low bass audible hum. Between the vibration and the low bass hum, it was just about impossible to sleep at all. I arrive in Uyuni at about 7:30AM and get a room at the Hotel Julia for $6US. I'm so tired I decide to get a couple hours sleep before doing anything.

Uyuni is in the southwest corner of Bolivia in the desert close to both the Chilean and the Argentinian boarder. It is a popular destination because of the world's largest and highest salt lake called the Salar de Uyuni located near town. One of the unusual things about the Salar de Uyuni is that combination of the high salt content and the dry desert. The result is that the surface of the lake is almost solid salt and the water is about 1\2 a metre or more below the surface. There is a large desert that surrounds the lake and extends into Chile, Peru and Argentina. This is also an area full of volcanos, even some that are active. I'm going to Uyuni to do a Jeep tour of the salt lake and surrounding desert.

I awake from my nap around 10:15AM and head to the nearby main plaza to check out tour options. I quickly find out that the standard tour is 3 days and 2 nights. On this tour, 4 to 6 passengers ride in a Jeep for 3 days stopping at various points of interest but there is a lot of time spent in the Jeep each day and costs just over $100US. There are also custom 4 day tours where the party booking the tour chooses what they want to do on the extra day and this tour costs $130US. Most of the tours are the 3 day tour but I would like to do the 4 day tour. I go to 2 or 3 tour companies, they all have 3 day tour options but none have a 4 day tour with a spot for a solo traveller available. Then I go to Ripley's Tours, they have 5 people leaving on a 4 day tour at 11:00AM that morning. It's 10:45AM and I'm wondering if I will find another 4 day tour leaving preferably tomorrow. So, I negotiate a deal on the tour including a bus ticket to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile and decide to book it.

I zip back to my hotel and grab my stuff, make quick stop at a store to buy water and snacks and get back to the tour company just in time to meet the others in my tour. They are a group of 5 Israeli travellers, there is Amir, Anir, Ben, Natalie and Dor. They are all in the early twenties and have recently completed their mandatory military service. It is common for Israelis to travel right after doing their military service but before they start university and I have met quite a few Israelis on this trip that are doing this. I also meet our guide and driver named Eduardo who only speaks Spanish which I had not confirmed when I booked, I guess I did not ask enough questions before making the snap decision to go.

Our vehicle is a Toyota SUV 4x4 with an extra set of seats in the back to fit everyone. I am the only one with big baggage because everyone else will end their tour in Uyuni instead of San Pedro in Chile. There is only room for my bags on top of the truck but it's a desert so rain is pretty unlikely. After 4 or 5 stops to pick up supplies, we finally are driving out of Uyuni but we don't make it far before our first tour stop. We stop at a graveyard for railway equipment and there are lots of remains of old steam powered locomotives and old rail cars. We stay for about 30 minutes taking pictures and are off again. Within 10 minutes, we are driving through the salt lake although salt flats would be a better description. Visually, it looks like we are driving on a frozen lake but when we stop and you get out in the hot sun, you know it is not ice.

We stop again in an area where they harvest the salt and there are thousands of piles of salt that have been raked together awaiting pickup. The salt lake is huge and it seems to go one forever in each direction right to the mountains that are in the distance. So far, I seem to be the odd man out with the Israelis. I'm old enough to be the father of any of them and it is easier for them to speak Hebrew than English. So, I've been sitting up front with Eduardo and they have all been in the back. When we make this first stop in the salt flats, they spend almost 2 hours taking photos. For some reason, it is very popular for travellers visiting the salt flats to bring props like a small plastic dinosaur and then take pictures with the dinosaur close to the camera with everyone posed behind it. They spend the whole 2 hours taking pictures with their dinosaur and other props.

We then drive for about and hour to an island with a towering volcano. There is a small village here called Coqueza where we will be staying the night. The town has a population of a couple of hundred people and the local people raise llamas on the island. We stay at 1 of about 6 hostels specifically built to support the Solar de Uyuni tours and we also have dinner here. The rooms each have 3 beds but I am able to get a room to my self. Tomorrow we will be up at 7:00AM and will climb the Volcan Tunupa before leaving for our next destination after lunch.

We leave the hotel around 8:00AM and drive to an mirador (viewpoint) a couple kilometres up the volcano. Our guide is not joining us but will be here to pick us up around noon. A local tour guide is waiting to take us into a small local tomb to see a couple of mummies. The tomb is a short walk away and we enter a small cave in the hillside. There are numerous tombs that have mummies but there are a couple of mummies that have been left unburied. The mummification is more to do with the extremely dry salt air than any special procedure done to the bodies after death. One of the mummies in particular is kind of creepy, it looks like he or she died in agony and you would swear they died screaming but the guide only spoke Spanish and I'm not sure what he had to say.

We then leave the tomb and get started on the climb. We are at about 4000m and the top of the crater is at about 5200m. Luckily, the slope of the volcano is not that severe as the trail simply goes straight up for the first hour before the slope finally flattens a bit. Although we are at altitude, it is a desert and the temperature is steadily climbing, it is extremely dry and quite windy. I'm starting to wonder if the 1.5 litres of water I brought is going to be enough.

The crater of the volcano on the side we are climbing was partially blown out during an eruption thousands of years ago but the views as we

Emir, Dor, Natalie, Enir, Ben & Andrew

approach are fantastic. Much of the volcanic rock is a rich red colour and as we near the crater we come to one last climb up this red rock which is a loose slag and extremely tough to climb, it's often 2 steps up with 1 sliding step back. The views of the salt lake below are amazing, it looks like we are on a volcano surrounded by clouds with just a few other distant peaks sticking out above the clouds. I think my young Israeli friends are surprised how easily I am keeping up with them considering how tough the climb is.

I don't realize until sometime tomorrow, but half way up the climb I take some photos of some

desert flowers and select the "Miniature" setting on my camera. With the bright sunshine, I can barely make out the camera setting icon on the camera's LCD display and I end up leaving the camera on this setting for the rest of the photos I take this day and many that I take the next day which is a real shame. The volcano and everything else within the Salar are incredibly beautiful but the "Miniature" setting is the worst possible setting to leave my camera in as is severely effects the cameras ability to focus particularly on landscape type photos. So, many of the photos I take are quite badly out of focus.

It takes more than an hour to get up this last loose rock climb and it is exhausting because of the loose rocks and the altitude. The last couple of hundred metres of altitude, I walk for 2 minutes and rest for 30 seconds and keep on repeating this until I'm at the top; it's the only way I can keep by respiration and heart rate at a reasonable level. The 3 Israeli guys reach the crater first but I'm the 4th up so at least I'm not slowing everyone down. It's about 11:15AM when we get to the top and we enjoy the views at the top of the crater for about half an hour before we start back.

I know we hiked up at a good pace but we are going to be a lot longer than the 4 hours that our guide said it would take. I'm also not looking forward to a big descent because I'm sure it will really cause my left knee some pain and going down all this loose rock should be interesting. The loose rock ends up big quite fun to walk down, it's kind of like walking down a sand dune when the whole area you step on slides down with you for a ways before you take your next step. It takes almost 2 hours to hike back down to the truck and I run out of water about 20 minutes before getting there and I'm surprised that my knee has not is not hurting at all.

We head back to the hotel for lunch and to grab our luggage and then we are on our way. We drive about an hour to the Isla Incahuasi where there are some Inca ruins and some amazing cactii. It will cost about $8US to visit the ruins and what we can see of them is not that impressive so we decide not to go into the ruins and get going to our next hotel as it is getting quite late. It takes us a little over an hour to get to Puerto Chuvica where our next hotel is located and just before we get there, we come to the end of the Salar.

I think the hike really broke the ice with the Israelis.

They comment how fit I seemed on the hike and speak a lot more English in the afternoon. After dinner, they invite me to play cards and teach me a good new card game. They also ask me a lot of question about where I've travelled and why I am travelling. I seem to get this "Why" question a lot. There is a lot of twenty something travellers, quite a few thirty something travellers and you will even see quite a few late fifty to over sixty tour groups but there are very few travellers in their forties and the few that I have met are usually on a 1 month or less vacation. So, I usually answer this question by saying that as you get older you realize how short life is

especially when you go through family illness like I've done with both of my parents. And I also say that I'm at an age where I'm still physically able to do anything I want to do on this trip like climb a volcano or learn to scuba dive but if I were to wait until after retirement, even if my health was good, the type of activities I would likely be able to physically do will probably be a lot different than now. So, I love travelling and I decided now was the time for an adventure and it made no sense to me to wait.

The next morning we are on way just after 8:00AM. We are now driving south through the desert and it is

so dry here that there are are very few plants anywhere. The terrain is getting more mountainous instead of nothing but flat plains like the Salar. Today, the main thing we will be seeing are a series of lakes. There are 5 lakes in total that we see and they are the Lago Canapa, Lago Hedionda, Lago Chiarkota, Lago Honda and Lago Colorada. It takes 3 hours to get to the first lake and on the way we make a couple of stops to get photos of an active volcano and more photos of some very interesting rock formations. When we get to the first lake (Canapa), it is quite small and very shallow with what looks like salt around the edges but Eduardo

tells us it is Balsite deposits. There are a few flamingos in the lake and they are almost all white with just a hint of pink. The next 3 lakes are just a few minutes down the road. They are all similar but a bit larger than Canapa and there are many more Flamingos. Some are almost all white but many have a dark pink streak on their wings.

At about 1:00PM, we stop for lunch at Lago Honda which is the 4th lake we see. We then continue south for a couple more hours before finally getting to Lago Colorada. It is the largest lake we have seen so far and has a type of plankton in the water that

gives the water a red tinge. There are thousand of Flamingos in this lake and we spend about 90 minutes here exploring and taking photos. By now it is after 5:00PM, it's been a long day in the truck but we only have a short 30 minute drive to our next hotel which is just past the south end of the lake.

After dinner we play more cards for a couple of hours before heading to bed at a decent time since we will be up at 5:30AM tomorrow. We're on the road by 6:30AM and it takes about an hour to get to our first stop which is a small valley with numerous geysers. There is steam every where and it is

beautiful in the early morning sun. We are able to walk right up to the pools of water that are boiling and bubbling away. Some geysers shoot steam straight up into the air 50 metres or more.

We are soon back in the truck and on our way to our next stop which are some natural hot springs beside a lake. This will be my last stop before heading to the boarder where I will catch a bus to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. Everyone else will have an 8 hour drive back to Uyuni and I'm so glad I don't have to do this drive as we have been in the truck enough the last 3 days. Eduardo tells me that

he is going to see if any of the other tour vehicles are going to the boarder but if not, he will drive me. I decide not to go into the hot spring pool until I find out what is happening which is a good decision because Eduardo is soon back saying he found me a ride that is leaving now. I quickly say good-bye to the 5 Israelis, grab my stuff and jump in this other truck.

It takes about 40 minutes to get to the boarder. I quickly clear Chilean immigration and then catch a 10:30AM bus that is heading to San Pedro which is just over an hour away. One strange thing about entering Chile, it is west of Bolivia but it is actually

one time zone ahead of Bolivia. It is the first time I have ever travelled west but moved my watch forward an hour. If I had travelled directly from Peru to Bolivia, it is a 2 hours time difference ahead. The reason they do this is that Chile is a really long narrow country and as you head south it curves a bit to the east. The government decided that it did not make sense to have more than 1 time zone so this little anomaly of moving the clock forward when travelling west occurs in the north part of the country.

I really enjoyed my time in Bolivia but I feel like there was so much more that I wanted to see and do. I should have got the Brazilian Visa when I first got to La Paz and I would have had more time to travel other places. And the early date of Carnival really surprised me and meant that I did not have as much time as I thought before I need to be in Rio de Janerio and it is Bolivia where I decided to cut my time short as a result. Well even if you are travelling for as long as me, there is still not enough time to see and do everything you want.

More on Chile and travelling south to Patagonia on my next post. Adios amigos.