Uyuni Salt Flats, etc.

Nov 11, 2016
8 min read

When I got to Uyuni, I realized I had miscalculated how many nights I should have planned to be there; everyone told me that there is nothing exciting to do in the actual town of Uyuni, so I should plan on booking a tour to depart the same morning I get there, and then take the bus to my next destination the same night the tour ends. However, my departing bus wasn't leaving for THREE nights, and the tour only lasts TWO nights, so I had to hang out in boring ol' Uyuni for a day. This actually ended up being an excellent opportunity to catch up on my blog, get my laundry done, and stay the night at a $7 hotel (that's right -- HOTEL, not hostel, baby! Wooooo!) and take a fabulous, perfectly-heated shower. No regrets.

There are about 200 different Salt Flats tour companies in Uyuni. (I meant for that number to be an exaggeration but I'm not even sure if it is.) On the recommendation of Kendal and Anna, reinforced by great TripAdvisor reviews, I decided to go with the 3D/2N Andes Salt Expedition Tours for 650 bolivianos (less than $100, not bad!). I was told by some haggle-savvy Irish travelers that I should not pay more than 650 bolivianos for the tour, even though the price listed on the Andes website was more like 1,050 bolivianos, or $150 USD, so I was proud that I secured a reasonable deal for myself. (I haven't put much effort into haggling for better prices so far, because everything is so cheap to begin with, it feels like borderline robbery. I figure the extra bolivianos will go a lot farther for my taxi driver than they will for me, ya know?)

When I arrived at the Andes Salt Expeditions agency the next morning to meet with the rest of the tour group, there was a couple from Sweden already seated and waiting. (It seemed that the man spoke Spanish but very little English; the woman spoke English but very little Spanish. I wondered if this was a conscientious strategy on their part, or just convenient coincidence for traveling South America.) Then a British man, Jasper, arrived, and shortly after him, FREAKIN' ROSE AND TIM from the Amazon tour showed up! It's actually not surprising that they signed up with the same agency I did, since we all got the recommendation from the same two charming British gals, but the timing was still pretty coincidental! They'd been in Sucre for the exact same post-jungle amount of time I had been in Rurrenabaque (2 nights), La Paz (1 night), and Uyuni (1 night). As always, great to see familiar faces (and cameras.... )

A Brief History of the Uyuni Salt Flats

Basically, the salt flats were created in the following steps:

1. Tectonic plates collided and pushed land from under the ocean way, way up to 12,000 feet above sea level.

2. Somehow, an enormous pocket was formed in this process, containing over 10,500 square kilometers of salt water, and forming a giant high-altitude lake-ocean-situation.

3. Since the amount of rain at this altitude was not enough to replenish the water the daytime heat was evaporating, the salt lake eventually dried up, leaving the ground covered in salt.

Wikipedia has a slightly different, and more sophisticated, explanation, but you only need to know the more accurate version if you plan on passing on this information to someone else. Otherwise, my version should be just fine.

Also worth noting about the Uyuni salt flats: they are very popular among photographers particularly during the wet season, because when it rains, the miles of salt turn into a gigantic mirror and create a truly magical visual phenomenon. Check out Google Images for "Uyuni Salt Flats" and you'll see what I'm talking about.

You might be wondering, "why do you need three days to see the salt flats?" Good question. You do not. We only spent the first afternoon driving around the salt flats; the rest of the time was spent making our way further south, stopping at several other photo-op sites, like a "train cemetery," several lagoons, unique rock formations, geysers, and hot springs. To be honest, the hot springs (visited on the third day) were the only thing besides the salt flats for which I'd recommend the 3-day tour over the 1-day tour. If you don't care about hot springs and you just want to snap some cool salt flat photos for Instagram, the one-day tour would be a great money- and time-saving option.

Banana-snapping: During lunch the first day -- which we enjoyed in a building made of salt -- Jasper opened his banana by snapping it in half. So then, of course, we all had to try this method, and it is stupidly fun. You just hold the banana with the curved part down so that it looks like a smiley face, and then use both hands to snap it in half with as much speed and strength as you can. If you aren't Hulk enough about it, you'll just end up squishing the banana, but we all did it successfully. I can't wait to show my nieces how to do this!

'Murica Represent: At the "salt hotel" where we had lunch, and a couple other sites along the way, people had hung their nations' flags. However, there were no USA flags waving at any of these places. I know Bolivia and the US have a complicated relationship, but I was surprised by this and I really wish I'd known this was a thing so I could have added the stars and stripes to wave boldly among the others.

The She-Wee: While we were in the middle of one of our salt-flat photo shoots, I realized I had to pee and there were no restrooms around. It seemed probably frowned upon to pee on the salt which would one day be consumed by people (then again, we were already driving and walking all over it), but more than that, there wasn't even a place for me to squat with some privacy. I mentioned my dilemma to Jasper, who suggested I invest in a She-Wee (or its American counterpart product, Go-Girl) soon, so that I don't have this problem again. Good call. We really should add this to the Bonderman Packing List.

The Latvian Cyclist: During lunch the second day, we met a woman from Latvia who had been traveling via her bicycle for TWO YEARS -- she started in San Francisco and had biked her way through Mexico and Central America, all the way to Bolivia. We were all in awe of how incredibly badass she was, and also suddenly very aware of how lazy and luxurious our travel experience of "sitting in a Land Cruiser all day, getting out once an hour or so to take photos for ten minutes" was by comparison. People like that are so inspiring, because they prove that we have a lot more freedom than we may think; you want to travel the Americas on your bike for two years? That's a thing. People are doing that. You can do that if you want.

Wine Thieves: The first night, we stayed in a one-story hotel made of salt. The walls were built with salt bricks, and the floors in the dining area and in our rooms were covered in salt. The hotel had a bar, but the hotel admin people who could have sold us the wine and beer had left the hotel around 9pm and locked up the bar. Jasper and I went for a walk around the town (which took literally 10 minutes to thoroughly explore), looking for a store to buy some wine or beer for our group to share. The only store we found had a sign on the door from the store owner that basically said "call my cell if you want something from the store." I guess business isn't steady enough to justify being at the store past a certain hour. Neither of us could call the number, so we went back to the hotel and devised a plan to get a bottle of wine from the locked bar. One of the walls of the bar (the wall that contained shelves of wine and beer) was shared with the kitchen, and it didn't reach all the way to the ceiling. Tim and Jasper figured out that someone (Tim, since he is the lankiest, longest-limbed of the group) could stand on the table in the kitchen, against the shared wall, and just reach over the wall and grab a bottle of wine. So that's exactly what he did. Lacking a wine opener didn't stop us either -- we just pushed the cork into the bottle, grabbed four glasses from the kitchen, and had a grand time drinking bandit wine in a hotel of salt. (We decided that, although it would be awkward if anyone asked HOW we got the bottle, the next morning we would tell the hotel administrators that we drank a bottle of wine and needed to pay them for however much it was. Good and honest thieves, we are.)

One amusing thing and two fun facts from my new British friend, Jasper:

- The way to impersonate an American is to be super enthusiastic about things ("That's A-MA-ZING!") and say "oh my god!" a lot. After becoming primed to notice these things in my own speech patterns, I gotta say... he nailed it.

- The term "posh" comes from the days where boat-travel between the UK and the US was very popular. Wealthy people from the UK traveling to the US would buy tickets for rooms that faced the sun, which meant being on the port side on the way to the US, and the starboard side on the way back to the UK: Port Over, Starboard Home. Fascinating, eh?

- Fancy/ old-timey places put WC on restroom doors, because WC stands for "water closet," which is what people used for a bathroom back in the day. Maybe some of you already knew this, but I've always been curious about the "WC" on restroom doors and it feels pretty great to have that mystery solved.

You will now be slightly more competitive at trivia nights. You're welcome!

PHOTOS

(graciously provided by Tim, Rose, and Jasper)

Just hanging out in the middle of miles and miles of salt, thinking about how bad I want to lick the ground.

(...or at least use it to rim a margarita glass.)

Shard of salt -- or, for the of you who enjoy a good but completely unnecessary word-smush, a "shalt."

It looks like icy snow, but has a much more prickly, and less sticky, texture. I'm pretty sure people have tried to make salt-men here, but discovered quickly that this is quite impossible. (Also: Look how tan my hand looks against the pure white salt!)

I call this one, "Edge of the Hori-ZEN"

"Yogi Beer"

This one is somewhat less convincing, but points for creativity, right?

"The Fight"

"The Flight"

Offering the "good game" high-five to a worthy competitor/predator. I can go have post-game ice cream now, yes?

This is what my name looks like written in salt-bricks. (You can stop wondering now)

Supposedly this island -- in the middle of the salt flats -- looks like a fish when viewed from the air,

so it's been named Fish Island, but everyone ends up calling it Cactus Island instead, because, well...duh.

It was easy to think of the Uyuni salt flats as basically a salt desert until I saw this. That's definitely a coastline.

This isn't a salt desert -- it's a salt ocean.

Tim handed me his camera to take a photo of him and Rose, so of course Jasper and I snapped a selfie with it first...

Photos like this make me miss having access to Instagram. I like to think people would have "hearted" the crap out of this one.

Flamingos at a 4,000-meter high lagoon!

No peeing in the nature. Must use toilets.

(Although I have to say, if you are a woman with a urine-stream trajectory like the one depicted below, you should get to pee wherever you want. Bravo.)

This is (aptly) named the "Stone Tree."

Apparently its sides/middle have been eroded away over a long, long time by wind...? I am confused about why the wind was always aiming for the bottom-to-middle parts of the stone and didn't chip away at it in a more even fashion, but I can't exactly argue with the fact that it just....didn't.