Day 39 - Salt flats tour part 4: well-seasoned is how I like it

My body was in denial when I forced it out of bed at 4:30AM in order to get to the Salar de Uyuni salt flats to see the sunrise. I woke up quickly though, when a figure leapt out of the dark at me while I was brushing my teeth - it was Rude Guy from last night, who had dragged himself and his wife out of bed at this ungodly hour in order to ask if we could give them a lift out to the salt flats. “We’ll walk back after sunrise”, he claimed. I mumbled something about our car being full through a mouth full of toothpaste and backed away from his manic enthusiasm. Bundled in a full jacket + hat + scarf combo (it’s seriously fucking cold in the morning when you’re at 3600m), I joined my companions in the car. Turned out I wasn’t the only one rude guy asked, and we’d all managed to dissuade him from coming with us. Driving through the dark onto the salt flats, we crossed a huge patch of salty water where the road ended and the salt began. This is why a DIY drive to the salt flats is so difficult - if you don’t drive on the exact right spot, your vehicle will get bogged down in the salty mush. Luckily, Helmut knew what he was doing, and somehow instinctively kept driving through the salt flats in total darkness until we arrived at a good spot to watch the sunrise. This is what we came for. After 3 days of driving across some of the craziest landscapes I’ve ever seen, we finally set foot on the largest salt flat in the world.

Mysterious figure in the darkness


Pretteh colours


So reflective


So salty!

We shivered outside the vehicles as the light changed. In this spot, the salt was covered by a thin layer of water, creating cool reflections as the sun rose. This was also a good spot for a proof-of-principle of the time in high school when you learnt that salt crystals assumed a cubic shape - reaching into the water, you could pull out countless cubic crystals of salt stacked into cool pyramid shapes. Modesta had thoughtfully packed us a big drum of hot water, tea and 2 freshly baked cakes, and we all huddled around the cars warming up over breakfast once the sun had risen. Soon after, we headed off across the now-lit endless salt (NB: endless is obviously an exaggeration. Helmut knew the area covered by salt, and my science buddy and I had a nerdy moment where we HAD to calculate the distance across assuming a circular shape. We decided it was about 120km across.). Unfortunately, as it was the wet season and a large part of the salt was covered by water, it was too dangerous to drive across much of the flats. However, we did get to see the only hotel located on the salt flats, as well as piles of salt collected for culinary purposes. As the sun rose further, it became increasingly evident that Rude Guy would have literally died if he tried to walk back to the hostel. The change from freezing cold to scorch-the-flesh-off-your-bones was rapid, and it’s pretty much impossible for an inexperienced person to orientate themselves in the endless whiteness. 

Salt and llama, as far as the eye can see


Mmm... delicious...


Maybe ancient pyramid-building civilisations were inspired by salt crystals (or maybe pyramids are just really stable structures)


Team Helmut!

Our drivers managed to find us a nice dry spot where we could take some of the famous weird perspective shots before the sun was strong enough to vapourise us, and we had heaps of fun attempting to figure out how we could get shots that looked vaguely convincing. Unfortunately, the auto-focus on my camera makes these look not-so-great. One day in the distant future when I have access to photoshop again, I will fix the weird blurriness on these to make them look better.

Always getting up to mischef


K admittedly this one would have made more sense if the bottle was full...


Bad Jeremy! People are friends, not food!


Anytime I do something bad, it's because a tiny Jeremy told me to


Sick of his advice, I tried to eat him instead


Failing to eat him, I opted to squash him instead. And that was the end of Jeremy

After this, we were off back to Uyuni for our last Modesta-cooked meal and to say our farewells to the people we’d bonded with through being sequestered in one vehicle together for 4 days. We’d originally planned to stay the night in Uyuni before heading off on a 7 hour bus ride to Sucre, but one look at the shithole town of Uyuni (full of dust, flies, shady tour agencies, touts, and not much else) convinced us that a better option would be to get the hell out and go to Potosí (halfway between Uyuni and Sucre). Helmut helped us track down bus tickets for later in the afternoon by asking randoms on the street, and we spent an hour or so chilling out before heading off. We were pretty amused when we sat down in a park and heard a familiar grating voice come from a cafe behind us - it was Rude Guy, who had abandoned the rest of his tour, and chosen to sit in a shitty touristy cafe in a shitty touristy town and bitch loudly instead of going to look at cool stuff like thousands of flamingoes. I bet the rest of his tour group were much happier without him. 

A 3 hour bus ride later, we arrived in Potosí, where the steepness of the streets and the higher-than-Uyuni altitude hit us like a punch in the gut. To make matters worse, the bus station was a fair walk out of the town centre where all the hostels are, and we were way too groggy from our early wake-up to deal with trying to find a place to stay. We ended up at pretty much the closest non-dodgy looking hotel, and thankfully the price wasn’t too exorbitant. By this stage, after 4 days without a shower, I was willing to pay almost anything to be able to scrub the accumulated layers of grime and salt off myself. Showering had never felt so good.