Walking on Water

Montecitos in the salares, with salt miners in the background.

The Salar de Uyuni is a mindfuck. One moment your eyes see a massive frozen pond strewn with piles of snow. The next minute the world shifts and you're sliding across a sheet of glass, bisecting huge diamantine sugar cubes. Then you're standing on a mirror that blends together the land and the sky until there really isn't a horizon anymore, just blue.

The Salar (salt flat) was Jenni's and my first stop on a three-day tour of the Uyuni desert in Southwestern Bolivia. Because the rainy season has gone late this year (it usually ends in March) the salar was flooded. As a result, we weren't able to drive more than a couple of kilometers in, slowly, so that the salt water wouldn't splash too far and damage our engine. But the reflective surface of the flats was eerie amd beautiful, and we were able to see workers harvesting the wet salt for consumption - raking it into montecitos (little mountains), letting the water drain out for a week or so, and then loading it into dump trucks to take into town for processing. The salt forms in these strange three-dimensional squares with another hollow square in the center. I ate a lot of it, and Jenni judged me.

Rows of quinoa ready for harvest.  All of the pictures I took from the car are weird and off-kilter because the roads were so bumpy.

The following day we drove across the altiplano and into the desert, ending up at an elevation of some 16,000 feet. (La Paz is at a comparatively weaksauce 12,000). On our way we passed through fields of quinoa in colors like a New England fall or a paint catalog- light butter yellow, firetruck red, twilight purple. It's harvest season, so there were hundreds upon hundreds of bunches drying in the sun by the side of the road. The stems are covered in tiny flowers that crumble in the sun, leaving behind the hard, edible little seeds.

The geysers.  What you can't see is the mud bubbling up from the cauldrons, or the force with which some of the geyers shoot out steam.

The last day we woke up at 5:20 and were on the road by 6. It was brutally, insanely cold - somewhere in the 20s, our driver Franz estimated, and definitely way below freezing. The frost persisted until well after sunrise. As the day warmed, we drove across the most stunning scenery yet - plant-like rock formations cut by the wind, a patch of geysers shooting steam from bubbling mud, and a series of lakes, including one called the Laguna Verde and one called the Laguna Blanca. Neither of them were actually their promised color because there wasn't enough wind to stir up the minerals that provided their respective colors. (Borax for the white lake, a combination of iron, arsenic and lead for the green lake.) But by the time we made it to our last stop, the wind had picked up, and the Laguna Colorada was swirled with red, which you can only sort of tell from the picture, and filled with flamingoes, which again, you can only sort of tell from the pictures.  We had our lunch there, a picnic out of the back of Franz's 4WD, and then rode the five hours back to Uyuni.  A very bumpy bus ride later, Jenni and I are back in La Paz. 

The Laguna Colorada.  The blurry bits around the edges of the lake are flamingoes.

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