La Paz to Mars and Back

Post Written October 7, 2008

I arrived in La Paz, Boliva early on October 2, 2008 with about 36 hours to acclimatize to the nearly 13,000 foot elevation before heading on my first adventure to the Salar de Uyuni and other natural beauty in the Southwestern Altiplano of Bolivia. The altitude sickness hit me like fill in your favorite hard hitting analogy here and I spent most of the time in bed. I even puked once.











3 days in a 4wd SUV with 5 other tourists and a 12 hour overnight bus ride on each end to get to the tour and back.




I checked out of my hotel on October 3 and whimpered around the city, finally feeling a little better before heading off for the terminale de busses and a 12 hour ride to the southwestern outpost of Uyuni for an an amazing 3 day tour. The local bus arrived in Uyuni at around 6 AM on the 4th, which gave me enough time for some breakfast and matte de coca with some Belgian tourists before setting out on my tour at 10 AM. I spent the next three days and two nights with five other tourists, 3 brits, 1 canandian and 1 dutch, in a 4wd vehicle with our driver and gia, Alejandro and our cook, Nate, a lovely traditional Bolivan woman.






Our tour started at 3,700 M/12,000 ft and reached as high as 4,900 M or 16,000 ft. Much of the terrain reminded me of my dear AZ desert and other parts of the southwestern US but then there were sights that were completely mind blowing and out of this world....12,000 sq km salt flats...a blinding white expanse with a cactus covered island in the middle; partly frozen, brackish lakes, some red, some white, some green, depending on the mineral and microrganism content, full of flamingos..yes pink flamigos in frozen lakes; beautiful mountains, dormant and smoking volcanos on the Chilean border; foxes that sadly often had one broken hind leg, probably from traps, which is why they were approaching humans for food; llamas, and expansive, expansive, I mean hours and hours of cruising on dirt tracks for 3 days, expansive deserts.

Salar de Uyuni from the Isla de Inkahuasi

I now know what the valley of the sun, aka, once upon a saguaro forrest, Phoenix, might look like with no people. The tour started in a town called Uyuni. When the sun rose and I peered out of my bus window after a good 7 hours of bumping down dirt tracks feeling completely ill from altitude and dramamine, I thought to myself, ¨"my family is going to laugh their asses off when they find out that I travelled to South American and took a 12 hour, overnight, bus ride to basically see the same terrain I would get if I went home!¨ I will reiterate though, that there were no people and no roads, I imagine much like home 200 years ago. Once again...no roads...did you get that yet? A few hours south of La Paz, the bus left pavement for dirt tracks and we spent the subsquent 9 hours bumping down what were literally tire tracks in the sand. No street signs, no lights, just random tracks that would turn and crisscross at random intersections. I have no idea how anyone finds their way around! And that was the way to the main city where the tour started!!



The next 3 days were more bumping around back roads, very much reminscient of how we used to 4wd around Northern Arizona, taking the back road from Pinewood to Camp Verde on the way home from the cabin turning the 2 hour drive on I-17 into a 6 hour human popcorn maker. After a day on the Salar de Uyuni, which is like the burning man playa coated with a virgin snow of salt, we stayed in a salt hotel on our first night.

Salt "Hotel" San Juan, Bolivia
Well, really a small salt cabin with a common area and maybe 8 rooms. Literally, everything was made of salt blocks...the beds, the walls, the tables, the chairs. Only the bathroom was made of "normal" materials, for obvious reasons!. Anyway, one of my fellow travellers had a brilliant idea...she brought a bottle of tequila and a bunch of limes....because you know that if you are going to stay in a place made entirely of salt, then there are a lot of interesting ways to do tequila shots. Fortunately, I only had one...shocking, I know, but that proves that I really am suffering from the altitude!

The hotel was run by some people from the pueblo where it was located, San Jaun. San Juan is in the middle of nowhere and as about 400 residents who are mostly raise llamas and grow quinois. A llama costs about 200 Bolivianos to purchase ($30), which doesn´t seem like much but for perspective, the average annual income in Bolivia is $900 and probably much much less for the campesinos. So, imagine, a small village at 12,500 feet, in a desert Altiplano, with no obstructions in any direction, with no light pollution for hundreds of miles and clear desert skies.....the stars were effin brilliant, and because we are in the southern hemisphere, completely foreign to me! We sat outside and star-gazed from the top of the world!

Day 2 of the trek took us over boulder filled roads to a series of lakes created by mountain snow melt. The minerals deposited from the run-off keeps the icy waters from freezing and creates green, red and white lakes. The ultimate in the chain is the beautiful Laguna Colorado, named for it´s red color. The microorganisms that give the lake surface this rich red also color the 3 varieties of flamingos that call the lake home! Our basic accommodations near the lake were in the middle of nowhere.































The night was freezing so we headed to our sleeping bags early to get some sleep before a 5 AM start on day three to see geyers, soak in some hot springs and then hit the long road back to Uyuni.




















Anyway, I am now back at my hotel in La Paz and am joining the group that I will be travelling with for the next 21 days. I haven´t showered since the morning of 11/3 when I checked out of this same hotel as there was no hot water at any of our accommodations (or on the overnight bus rides) and it was too damn cold for anything other than a whore bath. The group that I am joining have all been travelling together for awhile now, up from Argentina, and I am taking over the bed spot of someone who is leaving. So, I am waiting for her to clear out so I can get into my room and shower!



Steve (UK), Beth (USA)

Diane (Holland), Heidi (UK), Sophie (UK), Marlo (CAN)