La Paz to Chile via Salar de Uyuni salt flats and the Atacama desert.

Jan 16th.
We had a day of killing time (checked out of the Hotel at 10am, bus not leaving until 9pm) so had a long coffee drinking session at one Café and read books over lunch. We even went to the Coca Museum which had been recommended but was actually quite dull and depressing. Very mixed message about how great Coca is, the Inca and pre Inca people have been using it as a stimulant for 4500 years. They chew the leaves and drink Coca tea a lot and it reduces fatigue and is supposedly not addictive unlike the derivative Cocaine. Not addictive but the display proudly gave statistics that 86% of Bolivian women and 94% of the men chew it. The Coca industry was able to be controlled by the invading Spanish to subjugate the people and chewing Coca was a necessity in the hellish Silver Mines at Potosi where 8 million of the poorest Bolivians and imported slaves have died! Then it followed with the Cocaine industry which there is not much demand for in Bolivia itself, but the majority of the USA’s Cocaine comes from Bolivia. This makes Bolivia a problem for the USA with the DEA trying to stop farmers growing Coca while at the same time Coca-Cola is still buying thousands of tons of Bolivian Coca leaves to flavour Coke.
Article on current diplomatic state of Bolivia and USA.

We got to the Bus Station early and boarded the bus on time at 9pm only to be served a meal on board before the bus left as it would be “too bumpy” later! So 9.30 the bus pulled out and after half an hour of driving through the suburbs a movie was put on. The bus had two TVs and the one half way down the bus was broken so a middle aged French woman stomped up to the front of the bus and yelled at the bus attendant because she couldn’t watch the movie. She returned to her seat and then decided that she wanted to sleep and went back to demand the sound be switched off (so now no-one could watch the movie!) Then she decided she wanted to open her window and discovered it was taped shut. (All the windows were sealed as it was an air-conditioned bus and the tape was probably sealing a small gap to keep wind and dust out rather than the window shut.) After peeling off one large piece of tape she flipped out and had another rant to the attendant about how she was paying for a luxury bus and the TV doesn’t work and there is tape on the window blah blah blah and how she wants a luxury bus. There was some kind of attempt to appease her but she wasn’t having any of it. I think she was pushing for a free bus trip. The bus rep was offering a refund if she got off the bus. She threatened to call the police (because she had paid for a luxury bus and there was sticky tape on the window) and the bus rep and the other 35 people on the bus were getting pretty fed up with her so the bus stopped and a policeman came on and they tried to get the woman to get off. She refused as if she was getting a refund on her ticket she also wanted them to pay for a taxi and a hotel and a refund on the three day salt flat tour she was doing in Uyuni. Things started to get a bit nasty at this stage with the other passengers as it was now close to 11pm and we hadn’t even got out of La Paz and pretty much everyone on the bus was doing salt flat tours leaving shortly after we were due to arrive in Uyuni and this bitch was going to make us all late. There was quite a bit of “What’s your problem!” and “Just get off the f’ing bus” from some of the less reserved passengers. (Yes, they were Australians.) Eventually the bus rep got her to sign an agreement to shut the hell up and she could stay on the bus. I think in the end she might have got a partial refund on the trip because she was making a big deal of how we all paid too much when we got to Uyuni. (After complaining to the bus rep that we had arrived on schedual and not two hours late after they managed to make up the time she had delayed us!)
The bus trip was about 10 hours and the last 180km was on poor dirt roads and very bumpy and got pretty dusty inside the bus towards the end.

17th
We purchased our salt flat tour in La Paz and had been told that we would be met at the bus in Uyuni so when we arrived we walked a couple of blocks to the agency not at all surprised that no-one was waiting. There was a couple of hours until the tour was due to leave so we had a little walk around town. (Dusty desert frontier town) and waited until a battered 26 year old Landcruiser pulled up and we had our backpacks loaded on top wrapped in a Tarp so all 6 passengers could fit inside. Apart from the driver there was a Bolivian mother and daughter, a Japanese guy, a Brazillian guy and us.
The driver didn’t introduce himself or anything, just indicated for us to board and we headed off out of town.

A few minutes later we stopped at the Cemetario de Trenes “Train graveyard” beside the railway line. Dozens of rusting train engines and carriages dumped in the desert. Next we drove back through town and north towards the salt lake. As we left town I noticed the driver crossed himself and said a little prayer, perhaps for a safe journey for us I thought as he almost ran off the road putting his cap back on.
We stopped for a few minutes at a small village on the shore of the lake which was a drab adobe (mud brick) village where people who collected salt from the lake lived. There was a couple of tacky ’hotels’ built out of salt bricks and the street through town was lined with stalls selling things like dice and candle holders carved from salt.
A few minutes from the town we reached the salt lake Salar de Uyuni and left land driving over the flat white expanse with only puddles of water and occasional mounds of collected salt breaking the featureless landscape. Oh, and about 50 other Landcruisers.
We stopped and took a few pictures and continued on for about 30km before stopping at a “Salt Hotel” in the middle of nowhere. It was a one story structure built with salt bricks and inside the tables and chairs in the dining area were also made of salt bricks. We picked up a 7th passenger, another Japanese guy who had stayed the night and headed off across the lake again to Isla de la Pescado, Fish Island which apparently looks like the shape of a fish.
The Island was our stop for lunch and we had half an hour to go for a walk. The island was pretty amazing. Apart from some ground vegetation the only plants were huge cactus which grew up to 12 metres tall and lived for up to 1200 years.
After lunch we turned south and left the salt lake travelling across dusty plains for a few hours until we reached a small adobe village where we would stay the night. The hotel was mud brick and pretty basic but we were lucky to get a “matrimonial” room with double bed and bathroom. And for just 10 Bolivianos ($2) they switch on the gas water heater and we had hot showers!
The village was in a flat valley which had a large herd of Llamas and it looked much like I imagine the Mongolian Steppes would look like.(Except I suppose they would be Yaks there.) I had a walk around town and took some pictures of the Llamas and even found a mud-brick chook pen.


18th
Next morning we left pretty early and travelled across the plains with snow-capped mountains and a volcano now dominating the horizon. Stopped at a rocky outcrop for some pictures of said mountains and at one point in the journey the driver stopped and made us get out to walk up a steep hill that must have been too challenging for the 4wd with 8 people on board.

We had lunch beside a salt lagoon with lots of Flamingos and the dodgiest self claimed “eco-hostel” I have ever seen on the shoreline. I had a walk inside and admired the wood fired heaters and uninsulated corrugated iron ceilings. I suspect they pump their sewage straight into the lake as well!

Leaving the lake we went over a ridgeline and down to another lake with more Flamingos before crossing the windiest (and coldest!) plain I have ever seen and stopping at some rock outcrops including the “Tree of Stone” presumably carved by the relentless wind.
Another couple of hours drive and after an unscheduled stop which we though was a breakdown but was just a refueling stop involving a jerry can on the roof and a hose, we arrived at our destination for the night. The “Coloured Lagoon” was another salt lagoon and is meant to be quite beautiful with white salt and different coloured water due to algae but we didn’t get to see much of it because it was blowing a gale and it was painfully cold to go outside. The accommodation was pretty awful. A room with 6 single beds so one of the group had to sleep next door and the communal bathroom had 2 centimetres of water on the floor. There was a dining room with tables and chairs though so we bought a cheap bottle of Bolivian wine and played cards and celebrated Sarah’s Birthday.



19th
The next morning we were told to be ready at 4.30am to depart. It was sooo cold when we left the hostel and quickly got colder on the way to our first stop at dawn. A Geyser field! There was snow on the ground and we were freezing cold. I found out later that we were at 5000m asl which is a good reason to be cold! We tried warming our hands in the hot steam from a geyser which was quite nice and warm but being steam our hands got very wet and the rotten-egg stench of sulfur wasn’t pleasant! A short drive away we stopped again at some fumeroles which were hot water pools bubbling away in the snow.



Next we stopped beside another salt lagoon but this one had hot volcanic springs running into it. If our guide had bothered to tell us we were visiting we could have had towels and swimmers ready for a dip like many others. As it was we warmed our feet in a pool of hot water and watched the sun rise over the Flamingos and seagulls in the beautiful lake.
Last stop before the Chile border was at the “Green Lake” which was definitely more blue than green. Height was about 5050m asl with the nearby Volcano close to 6000m.
At the Bolivia/Chile border we paid an unexpected exit fee of 21Bs for an exit stamp and hopped on a mini bus to take us to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. Across the border the first thing we noticed was there were roads! Still dirt but actually bulldozed at some stage and with road signs and stuff! After only a couple of kilometres we reached a paved road which we followed for an hour descending a gradual decline to arrive at San Pedro de Atacama. After stopping at the border control building to have our dirty underwear rummaged through by customs staff looking for contraband we were dropped off in town and found a hostel.
This was a bit of a shock as we had asked an Aussie on the bus what the exchange rate was and were told it was 600 Chillian Pesos to the dollar. We were thinking this was AUD for the first day and commenting that it was more expensive than Bolivia until we looked up the actual exchange rate and found it was 410 Peso to the AUD! That made our accommodation about $60AUD a night and that was the cheapest place we found!