More salt?

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I left Chile through the most well-trodden backpacker route ever – across the Bolivian border in a jeep, heading towards the Salar, or salt flat, of Uyuni, 4000 metres up on the Altiplano. The Altiplano does exactly what it says on the tin, it is high, and flat, and covers about a third of Bolivia. so once we were a whole two metres into Bolivian territory, we were served breakfast – bread, jam, cheese, tea, coffee… and a big bag of green leaves which we were strongly encouraged to add to our steaming drinks in order to ward off altitude sickness.

Welcome to Bolivia – land of coca.

The tour lasted three bumpy, dusty, baking days, and two icy, dusty, bitterly cold nights. We saw a white lagoon, a red lagoon full of flamingoes, and a, er, normal-coloured lagoon which changed colour completely within 20 minutes as the day heated up, ending up bright turquoise, which was astonishing. We saw rocks that looked like Dali paintings, one shaped like a tree, and we bathed in hot springs. We wrinkled our noses at hideous, sulphur-belching, mud-spewing geysers.

We saw a LOT of salt, about 12,000 square kilometres to be exact, with a depth of 110 metres. And in the middle of all that salt is an island – Incahuasi – “Home of the Incas” – which is just a big, spiky rock covered in ENORMOUS cacti that reach about 10 metres tall.

We stayed in a hotel made entirely of salt – it really was, we licked the walls – and the silly gringos tried to pay football ouside before realising that at 4000m their lungs were going to explode. We spent the first night utterly sick and sleepless at a freezing, lung-bursting 4500m, in a room which looked like a prison cell, and hideously lumpy beds which were apparently worse than prison beds (one of our fellow travellers testified to this – though he wouldn´t go into details…) and we ate quinoa soup and llama steaks and drank lots of coca tea.

The highlight of the trip was definitely the salar – blindingly white even through sunglasses – which distorts all perspective, hence hours of amusement with the camera.

Ha ha.

Enjoy.