Miles and Miles and Piles of Salt – Uyuni, Bolivia

Miles and Miles and Piles of Salt
Uyuni, Bolivia

Our first sighting of Uyuni was as we descended from the hills on the way from Potosi. It is a small town situated on a flat desert plain, a town literally in the middle of nowhere, with nothing around but sand. Originally a staging post between the mines and the coast, It is now the Bolivian equivalent of Alice Springs and these days exists mostly for the tourists who, like us, come here for the salt flats.

We have entrusted ourselves to a local operator for a three-day tour of the flats and the Southern Altiplano, a tour that will take us to the Chilean border. Today’s itinerary is the salt, a vast desert of a thousand square kilometres. Oh, the pristine whiteness for miles and miles!

I was expecting a uniform white plain stretching away into the distance under a blue sky and reflecting the harsh glare of the sun so that it would hurt to look. The odd thing was that up close, the salt seemed to be formed of slabs like hexagonal paving stones, not an even pattern though, more like the markings of a giraffe. These were sometimes white, sometimes red and sometimes grey, but the raised edges were white. Looking into the distance, the salt did indeed look flat and white like a winter wonderland, an effect accentuated by the tourists in warm coats, hats and scarves.

Piles of Salt on the Salar

This wasn’t to be a whole day merely driving over whiteness though. Nice as the desert is, that could get a bit boring. On the edges of the flat there is a village whose residents are the only people allowed to extract the salt. They pile it up into metre high cones using pick-axes and shovels, then load it into lorries. Not far onto the salt, there is a field of these cones ready to be collected and all the tours make a quick stop here at this slightly odd sight.

Then they go to the Salt Hotel, a now closed hotel in the middle of the flat made entirely from blocks of salt. It’s quite a groovy idea really. The tables are made of salt and so are the chairs and the beds. At first glance, it all looks a bit like stone, but up close you can see than the bricks are salt and so is the mortar.

A tour like this really is the only way to see this unusual landscape although there were a couple of brave souls on mountain bikes. The disadvantage though is that all the operators have the same itinerary and you end up arriving everywhere at the same time as seven other Toyota Landcruisers full of tourists. So much for the peaceful majesty of a place like this.

Isola de Pescado

The unquestioned highlight of today was the Isola de Pescado. Situated in the middle of the bright white sea of salt, it is a hilly island upon which grow thousands of giant cacti. It really is one of the strangest sights and one of the highlights of our entire trip. I ended up taking far too many pictures of cacti with a shiny white salt background. The unusual thing about the island, I think, is that it is so easy to forget that you are hundreds of kilometres from the nearest water body because it does seem like you are on an island. There are gently sweeping cactus lined bays going down to the perfectly flat surface of the salt. Then you see somebody walking across it. It is an amazing place.