Friday

Surreality In Bolivia

The Salar de Uyuni in Southwest Bolivia
The area around the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat in southwestern Bolivia, is an other-worldly landscape of hallucinogenic visions and poses some difficult questions. For example: How did 10 billion tons of salt get here? Why is that lake green? Why are there thousands of pink flamingos living more than two miles above sea level? Why am I looking at steaming geysers and bubbling mudpots while freezing my butt off? Why is that lake red? But the question that I’m struggling with the most is: How is it that I am navigating an island of petrified coral, covered in cactus, in the middle of a sea of salt…at 12,000 feet above sea level?


The Salar de Uyuni is the remains of prehistoric Lake Minchin, which lost all its water via absorption and evaporation over 40,000 years ago. As the water disappeared, it left a perfectly-flat layer of salt covering 4.085 square miles, roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the U.S. state of Utah. As the Andean altiplano was pushed up by the forces of plate tectonics, the Salar reached its present-day elevation.

Laguna Verde
We took a 4-day jeep safari starting in Tupiza and ending in Uyuni, the town that shares its name with the Salar. The first day was spent riding through the Lipez, a desert-like area in the farthest southwest corner of Bolivia, that resembles many areas of the U.S. southwest. We passed silver, gold, tin and antimony mines amidst thousands of roaming llamas, alpacas and vicunas (and one Andean ostrich). We also saw an odd animal called a viscacha, a rabbit-like creature with a long curly tail. The second day we passed hundreds of pink flamingos traipsing through lakes of swampy ice and borax. Three types of flamingos are indigenous to the swamps and marshes of the altiplano: the Chilean, the James and the Andean flamingos. By late morning, we arrived at Laguna Verde, a lake sitting in the shadow of a volcano, which keeps it’s green appearance due to the high arsenic content of its waters. After lunch and a dip in some thermal hot springs, we passed more volcanoes and flamingos and arrived at Sol de Mañana, an area of intense geothermic activity with steaming geysers and bubbling holes of mud. We carefully walked around the perimeter of the area but had to quickly retreat to the jeep due to the intense wind and cold. We spent that night on the shore of Laguna Colorada, a large lake that gets its red color from the profusion of algae blooms in the water. The third day we traveled past more snow-capped volcanoes and stopped at the Stone Tree, an eroded volcanic rock in the shape of a tree 25 feet high. We spent that night in a salt hotel, an inn made primarily of blocks of salt. Our beds were platforms of salt and the dining area boasted dining tables and block seats made from salt. When no one was looking, the kids and I licked the walls of our room to verify their saline content (trying not to think about how many previous guests had done the same).

My legs form a very long shadow at sunrise
We woke at 6:00 am on the fourth day and drove out to the middle of the Salar to watch the sunrise. The kids and I took pictures of our extremely long shadows, which stretched hundreds of feet to the west. We ate breakfast on the “shore” of Isla Inca Huasi, also known as Fish Island for its fish-like shape. Inca Huasi is an island covered with petrified coral and cactus that was once in the middle of ancient Lake Minchin and now sits in the middle of the Salar. The cacti are relatively new; we’d heard that they grow about 2 centimeters a year, so none could be much more than 1,000 years old. We climbed to the top of the island to see white salt and blue sky in all directions.

Any land of coexisting extremes like this one -- hot, dry, swampy, steamy, salty, windy, cold -- is bound to raise questions. Our 4-day jeep safari through the Salar answered some of them for us.

13 comments:

  1. This sounds absolutely astonishing. (Also sounds like an excellent school project; your children get the best education - so hands-on.)

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  2. The historical perspective makes this very interesting.

    I recall that flamingos like the soda lakes in East Africa. But the icy water makes me think how cold their poor stick-thin legs must get.

    It isn't a far stretch of the imagination to accept how this amount of salt has been deposited. And the coral also.

    But I have always had trouble getting to grips with the fact that the 'white cliffs of Dover' are made of the skeletons of tiny marine creatures - that is a lot of creatures.... no?

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  3. I cannot wait to get here and see it for myself!

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  4. What a fascinating post! I have never been to South America, and this sounds like it must go on the Must Do list.

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  5. Sophie,
    It is an amazing country and the Salar is only one part of it. The Bolivian Amazon, the Andes, Lake Titcaca, Potosi...there is lots to see in this country.
    Jason

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  6. David,
    Re: Dover...yes, it's a lot of little skeletons. The flamingos don't seem to be bothered at all by the cold, indeed they fared better than we did.
    Jason

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  7. Travel Chica,
    Yes, you should make it a priority. Perhaps the most under-appreciated country in Latin America.
    Thanks for commenting.
    Jason

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  8. Vera,
    The nice thing is that Bolivia is relatively unpoiled and word is slow to get out. It is up there with Peru and Guatemala as the most interesting Latin American countries. (all three have some of the highest %'s of indigenous population, as well)
    Jason

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  9. Oh wow, how cool! We're heading there this week - have been looking forward to Salar de Uyuni for months!

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  10. This just made my list of MUST see destinations. Stunning, and I really appreciated that you answered all the questions :-)

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  11. Wow and I thought we were the only ones with a "salt lake city." We're not as unique as we think we are, eh? Sounds like fun!

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  12. Nice effort, very informative, this will help me to complete my task. Thanks for share it keep it up.

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