Uyuni and San Pedro de Atacama
My second story is really a string of stories over a four day period, but they fit together so it's here in one.
After leaving Potosi (which is quite a nice town, not as pretty as the spic'n'span clean Sucre but has a lot more character and vibe) we headed to Uyuni. From here we got a tour through the famous Salar de Uyuni and parts south to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile.
It was four days of extremely difficult weather. Unbeknownst to us, once per year a three-day giant windstorm kicks into the region of southern Bolivia and northern Chile. Our merry gang of swashbuckling adventurers just happened to be touring the region at the same time this lovely tempest decided to make it's 2005 appearance. So while visiting some of the most magical and surreal places on earth, we also had to deal with extreme cold and extreme winds and just all around misearableness outdoors. It made for a hard experience but I suppose in a way made the remoteness and difficulty of the terrain even more real.
Imagine being on a perfectly flat plain, only instead of praire grass and scrubby trees all you see is a white crust that goes as far as the horizon. The crust is blinding in the sun, crunches under your feet, and is only interrupted by small islands of rock and red dirt, and on the horizon by far off mountains. The Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Plain) once upon a time was a gigantic salt lake, which as the climate changed over the millenia dried up and left us a thick salt crust. The salt plain covers a large area, it took us about 4 hours to drive across it. It's four hours of surreal pleasure as you look through your sunglasses and see the glaringly white ground contrast with the dark blue sky, with a whole lot of nothingness and silence around you.
The salt plain still has some of the lake's old islands to tramp across, which even adds to the Dali like nature of the place. One in particular features gigantic cactuses and prehistoic coral rock (yes, actual coral as if you were off of Florida or Australia).
From the salt plain, we continued the second day down into the very southern region of Bolivia. The entire area is one big mountainous desert, with basically no water to speak of, extreme temperature changes (from around 60-70 degrees during the day to under 0 degrees at night), and when we were their, a big gale of a wind. The area is famous for its salt lakes, each a different color or smell due to volcanic activity and various types of algae. White, red, and green lakes can be found here, along with fumaroles and geysers and all sorts of really fun stuff to see. Not to mention the flamingoes (yes, flamingoes living in South America, which sounds just as weird as finding coral hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, but I witnessed both with mine own eyes).
The windstorm kicked in on this day and made the experience outside our Jeep a rather miserable one. The day basically passed with us running out of the Jeep, snapping some pictures, and then running straight back in out of the shearing, bitterly cold wind. Remember that I mentioned this area is a desert, thus the wind also brought waves of sand and pebbles (yes, flying rocks) through the air, which aren't nice to your face, eyes, mouth or camera. On occasion I would have to walk backwards into the wind to keep myself from getting pelted by small rocks.
At this point we were really looking forward to getting into San Pedro in Chile, which our guidebook represented as being a nice town. We had dreams of good food, beer, and warm weather since San Pedro sits in the Atacama desert. I think I have learned that having great expectations in these countries is a great way to end up really frustrated. Plus, I should have expected the difficulties to come based off my previous attempts to get into Chile. You might remember about a month ago when I was denied entry to Chile by an earthquake, landslide, and border protests in the span of three days. Fate apparently wants me to spend as little time in that country as possible. Anyway, the story continues...
The third day we got up very early and went out on the Jeep again, visited some more lakes, and ended up at the Chilean border (which represented the end of our tour). From here we happily set out in a bus down into San Pedro, each of us having enjoyed our tour through the south of Bolivia, but really excited to get away from the outback and into civilization again. Especially since, on this third day, the windstorm returned as the sun rose, and made us miserable once again. Like I said at the top, we weren't aware of the annual appearance of the windstorm, so we figured it was just regular weather for the regionk, and that once we got out of this high moutain desert and down into the lowland Atacama desert in Chile that we would be leaving the altitude and the windstorm behind.
Oh so wrong. We hopped off the bus at the immigration point in Chile, at a low altitude of about 7,000 feet (compared to on average 13,000 feet in Bolivia), and were greeted with walls of blowing sand. Whereas on the tour we had a Jeep to jump in and escape the wind, here we had to wait outside the immigration office in a long line and basically eat sand. Then, after the customs were finished, we had to walk through San Pedro searching for a hostel, again eating sand as we walked down dusty dirt streets (no pavement here) in a sandstorm. Absolutely freaking miserable experience.
So we had expected an afternoon and night of relaxation, and instead found the same miserable storm that we had been trying to escape from. Everyone had plans of staying a few nights in San Pedro, but after an hour of dealing with the storm (not to mention the lack of electricity, the winds had blown over some power lines), everyone in our group of seven had decided to get the hell out of town. Desert towns like San Pedro only exist because something nearby of interest also exists (in this case some geysers and interesting rock formations), but in such weather no tours or buses were going out of town to these places, so there was zero reason to stay in town.
The decision was made: four of our group bought bus tickets and left that evening for Santiago, the countries capital, 24 hours away by bus. Chile is an incredibly long country. The other three, myself, Sam, and Tanya, were all about going to Argentina, which was only 11 hours away by bus. Which leads me into my next story.
