Saltburn: tales from the Uyuni desert
Bear Grylls can do one – Bolivian grannies are surely the hardest people on the planet.
We’re one month into Bolivia, and if I were to try to sum up the experience so far, I'd say it's been a beautiful if slightly hairy adventure. The scenery in this country is completely wild and unmatched, but the tourist path is less obvious than in neighbouring Peru, and everything feels more extreme: the altitude, the weather, the distances, the poverty.
It is also a country of extremes: In the salt flats near Uyuni, we froze half to death, swaddled in layers of clothes and blankets in the most basic of unheated hostels in temperatures of -10 degrees C. Today in Santa Cruz, where I update this from the poolside of our very swanky Airbnb, it’s tipping 36 degrees with a thick smog hanging over the city from the country’s ongoing wildfires.
Personally, I've found the last couple of weeks exciting but challenging, mostly because I seem to be physically falling apart. La Paz was already sky high at 3,700m, and maybe there's a connection between the altitude and my deteriorating immune system, because the higher we went (La Paz to Copacabana to Uyuni and the Salar de Tunupa salt flats and desert) the progressively worse I felt.
I coughed and choked my way through meals and walks. I shivered and sweated my way through bus journeys and bedtimes. Out in the desert, I rushed frequently to outdoor bathrooms barely equipped for human use long after bedtime. I broke out with eczema and spots simultaneously, my chest ached and I wheezed for breath and finally the skin on my hands began to literally split open, forming cuts along every crease that bled with tiny movements as a result of the perishing dry cold air. It was a riot.
I promise I had a good time. But I think Alice and Dave (whose skin, I should say, also suffered) would both agree that the circumstances proved us all to be incredibly hardy.
We took a three-day, two-night tour from Uyuni town to the Salar de Tunupa, traversing the world’s largest salt plains and south through the vast Bolivian desert and Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa. Before setting off, I had very little idea of what it would be like – the itinerary we'd picked managed to be both detailed, with timetabling notes such as “stop for funny photos” and also mysterious (where were we staying that night??) – but whatever happened, we knew it would be cold out there at such high altitude.
Our preceding days in La Paz and Copacabana were spent hunting down warm garments with the best possible ratio of insulation to price point. At one stage Dave almost got into a fight with a woman selling gloves for 30 Bolivianos (about £3.30) after having previously seen the same ones for 25 (£2.80), but we got there, each of us arriving in Uyuni armed with gloves, hats, scarves, remarkably good value jackets and even some leg warmers to wear over our existing clothes. With hindsight all of this was futile, asides from those natty leg-warmers, since nothing could fully prepare us for the conditions experienced.
It mostly comes down to the fact that Bolivian buildings are not heated. Much like the rest of South America, homes are not equipped with such things as radiators, and like a lot of the warmer regions, many homes and hostels are without hot water. Which is fine in, say, Brazil, where the only two seasons are Summer and Hell, but the crazy thing about Bolivia is that the temperature in the desert plummets to -40 (that's degrees centigrade) in the driest season. Minus 40!! And people simply get by. I watched old ladies sitting outside at night enjoying street food from vans and chatting to their friends and thought, Bear Grylls can do one: these women must surely be some of the hardiest people in the world. There's no North Face or Patagonia outlet in these parts: they are clad out in layers of their own home knitted designs, often created in situ right there on the street while they soak up the chat and the cold.
Some of the restaurants in Uyuni town had the kind of portable gas fired heaters that posh restaurants in the UK might use outside for the summer evenings, except inside, and usually only one would be turned on as an afterthought, or possibly to save money (I’m learning that electricity here is disproportionately expensive for people, for political economic reasons I still don’t really understand.) Arriving at our hostel for our first night in Uyuni we were collectively unimpressed (Christmas decorations, sad vibes, miserable staff, no windows) but hindsight is a wonderful thing and really we should have been more appreciative of the fact it had hot water, plus some heating in the bedrooms (but only at nighttime). The hostels we were designated during our desert tour most definitely did not have anything of the sort.
There was a good level of camaraderie among our group, and we spent a good deal of time laughing at the madness of our situation – grown adults, all lined up in dormitory beds with our hats and coats on like Annie in the orphanage. I hasten to add that the temperatures for us sank to only (only!) -10 degrees, but at just below 5,000m altitude it felt bitterly cold, and breathing in that thin, dry air made it tough going all round.
Our tour began on a Monday morning after an hour or so of sitting and making awkward chat in the tour agency’s office while our drivers queued for petrol (another symptom of the very quiet but definite crisis going on in Bolivia right now). Our group of 11 was split into two jeeps, and since I’d previously made the mistake of claiming to speak Spanish, Dave, Alice and I were teamed with three older ladies from Spain and a very serious man called Edwin who was our designated driver. Edwin spoke no English, but gave off a hugely capable, macho energy that made all of us swoon (especially Dave) and whom we immediately felt we would trust with our lives (just as well, given that these desert tours have a bit of a bad reputation for safety).
The first stop was to visit a train graveyard just outside of Uyuni. Our guide for the duration was Danny, the kind of guy who attempts to make up for his lack of knowledge or personality by creating funny catch phrases that get old quite quickly (“everybody say, ‘sexy llamas!’”). But to give him his due, Danny did explain a bit of the history for us (this being day one) which was fairly gruesome: the trains used to run between Bolivia and Chile carrying silver in the mines in Potosi and salt and minerals from Uyuni to Antofagasta on the Chilean coast. But before they were introduced, traders used African slaves to walk the 900km journey carrying goods, before killing them upon arrival in Chile because it was too much hassle to have to transport them back again. Grim.
Having been thrown this awful information, we were then instructed to effectively go and play on the trains for 45 minutes, which Dave did with gusto and Alice and I warmed to. From there, we stopped off at a place to look at and buy salt (big industry in the salt flats, obviously, but so cheap and abundant it’s apparently not worth Bolivia’s while to export any). Then it was finally time to go and check out the source – and more importantly, take some classic perspective trickery photos for Instagram. Once again, to be fair to Danny I have to say this is where his skillset lay as a tour guide, even if he did get his thumb in most of the pictures.
The afternoon was spent visiting Isla Incahuasi, an island filled chocka with massive cacti (some of them 1,500 years old!) and mad views. It actually blew my mind to realise you can indeed have an island in a place with no water (because the salt flats used to be a lake ages ago!). It blew my mind more to learn, after chatting to one of the woolen-clad ladies selling tat on the shore, that people (she and a couple of others) actually live out there on the island – in huts first built by the Incas – 100km from anything, with no heating, in temperatures of -40 degrees. Some people, eh.
There was no time to sit and revel in our wonder at these things, because the sun was setting and Danny was itching to open some wine. Earlier that day, he’d necked a shot of 96 per cent alcohol (honestly, I saw the bottle) as part of a demonstration about how some religious ceremonies take place in the Quechua culture. No wonder he was keen to get the rest of us somewhere near his level. Parked up in the middle of the flats, surrounded by miles and miles of absolutely nothing but salt, we stopped to admire the colours and a couple of bottles of red, which did wonders to break the social ice and were very much appreciated given the rapidly falling temperature.
From that moment, things went wonderfully strange. Edwin, who had been silent all day in the driving seat consuming nothing but coca leaves (as is normal for most Bolivians, I should add), offered up his gear and to our surprise the three Spanish ladies jumped on it, so we did too. A brief pause here to note that chewing on coca leaves does not amount to snorting cocaine – it’s the same plant, but none of the chemical processes to make it a Class A drug have taken place, and it’s perfectly legal to chew or drink tea from the leaves all day long in Bolivia.
However. They do make your face go pleasantly numb. And suddenly Flo-rida was pumping on the car radio USB stick and the six of us were dancing in our seats. Which is why it didn’t feel as strange as it should have done when our drivers parked up outside a shop at the edge of the salt flats that also hosted a disco out the back.
The “disco” was completely empty – because we were in the salt flats miles from much of anything and also because it was about 7pm – but we got into the spirit of things very quickly, buoyed by the novelty of being able to buy bottles of wine from the shop front and take it straight out back to the party. I say party, the space had all the atmosphere of an English village scout hall and I might have been the only one dancing for much of the time we spent there, but anything to keep warm in a crisis.
Eventually Danny read the room and came to terms with the fact most of us were tired and cold and ready to get warm in our nice inviting “salt hotel” – a name that could surely only been given to the most sophisticated of accomodations. Unfortunately the “salt hotel” was neither sophisticated nor warm, but it was made out of salt bricks at least, which I suppose is the only thing it promised. Our group settled down to eat a shared pile of something that was generously referred to as a “sausage sizzle” by our four Aussie and Kiwi members, and then Alice, Dave and I finished off another bottle of red wine with a very nice man from Russia who had left his homeland because of the war.
The following morning, we dutifully emerged from under our many layers of blankets and coats to get showered and dressed for breakfast at 6:45am – especially admirable given the previous night’s wine consumption. Except as I left our room (late as per) to join everyone else, I was accosted by a furious guide from another tour group, who told me in a flurry of rapid Spanish that some of the guides had been out late drink driving in the desert, and that there may have been a crash, and that something something else that could have been “someone is dead!” but was possibly more likely to be “that’s how people die!” And then he stormed off.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information. I felt a bit shaken by the conversation but didn’t feel it was quite my place to announce the details to everyone, especially given that there was some confusion between me and the Spanish guide over whether or not Danny was implicated, because he was known by a different Spanish name among his non-gringo compatriots (also a bit suspicious) and I couldn’t say for sure what that was. So for a good few minutes I sat drinking my orange juice, listening to the aimless chatter of how well people did or didn’t sleep, thinking our tour guide really might be dead, and wondering what this meant for the day’s itinerary.
Eventually, in a nervous squeak, I asked if anyone had seen Danny yet that morning. They hadn’t, and when I asked the Spanish trio the same question it emerged that Danny had promised one of them he’d go out to get some medicine for her (from where I have no idea) but had not returned with the goods. In fact, the most dismissive of the three Spanish women reckoned, he most likely wanted to go back to the famed desert discoteque to drink some more ethanol and meet his weird desert mates. So there it was, I thought, there was the evidence. Danny was dead, or possibly in hospital, or worse, a prison cell, and I was the one in the middle with just enough grasp of Spanish to have to break this to everyone.
And then he appeared, of course, looking like dogshit, a full 45 minutes later than our arranged departure time. He gave a weak wave and an especially poor “Good morning sexy llamaass…” before scuttling off to make some frantic phonecalls. And so we packed up our things and bundled into the jeeps, pretending to be oblivious, for another day in llama land.
I delighted in the fact that Edwin and his similarly competent counterpart in the second jeep had absolutely no time for Danny’s hangover and bombed it across the salt flats with precision to make up for lost time. We stopped at a random town towards the edge of the desert and Danny rallied enough to give us a couple of sentences about quinoa, which Dave scoffed a dry mouthful of and almost choked to death, and then we were off on our merry way to see an active volcano and eat some llama sausages.
There’s nothing like a road trip to calm one’s nerves after a death-scare of one’s guide, and we settled in well to the fact that much of the following two days would be sitting in Edwin’s jeep of dreams and watching the world go by. Occasionally, he would pause the USB drive megamix to impart words of desert wisdom to whomever was sat in the front seat, who would then relay the information to the rest of us where necessary. Questions of any kind were met with a killer silence, which at first I assumed was because Edwin had no time for imperfect Spanish, but actually the Spanish ladies’ comments to him were met with just as much white space, so I think Edwin was just imparting exactly the amount of conversation that he wanted to at any one time.
Even so, we hung on to his every word – clearly this man was a genius and his understanding of cars, the desert, the landscape and all the life within in it pissed all over anything Danny had to offer. There are no roads in the salt flats or desert – I had assumed Edwin was leading our little convoy of two via GPS, but apparently not. His driver buddy told us Edwin knew the landscape so well he was able to cross it following the angle of the sun, and at night, the stars. We travelled more than 900km over three days and all felt very safe in our drivers’ care.
We made dozens of stops along the way, sometimes to behold sights of great beauty and sometimes, I suspect, to break up the long drives (and once on the way back to Uyuni to allow Danny 20 minutes to complete some mystery and definitely suspicious business activity) but all of it was enjoyable. We saw llamas and wild vicuñas, a desert fox and thousands of flamingos feasting in a lake turned red from minerals. We saw rodenty things that looked like a cross between a desert bunny and a giant chinchilla sitting on the most bizarre rock formations, plus of course 1,500-year-old cacti and prehistoric desert plants.
And as the sun was setting on day two, we saw some geysers far too close-up – “just be careful as you’re stepping over them”, Danny advised as we dodged columns of vapour streaming out of the 260-degree vaults in the bubbling ground. I was reminded of the geysers we visited just across the border in Chile back in December – those ones had cordons all around them and still three tourists had died after falling in.
Fortunately, not even Danny in his hungover state managed to boil himself alive this time, and we zipped off back in the jeeps to find that night’s hostel. We had reached 5,000m altitude and the air was bitterly cold, even before sundown. But luckily, where there are geysers there are so often thermal springs – and the knowledge that we had some to look forward to was what kept me going.
It’s a good job that hostel Loma Tara (2.3 stars on Google; “The worst experience ever!!!! I thought I would die by the morning because of the smell of human piss.” – Anastasia Smirnov, six reviews) is so close to a natural hot spring, because I doubt any of its guests are brave enough to shower under the single ice-cold tap provided inside the bleakest of communal bathrooms. By this point my mystery illness was getting the better of me, admittedly, but honestly I have never felt so cold for so long in all my life. The air temperature outside was past -12 and the temperature inside the positively awful hostel can’t have been much different.
Standing in our shared dorm and contemplating just how I would manage to get undressed to change into my swimsuit for the hot springs, I looked up and saw one of our Spanish carmates sitting in bed with her coat, gloves, scarf and hat on; wine and phone in hand, and I started to laugh with the kind of hysteria that only comes in moments when you know you might be losing it, or about to cry, or both.
We forced ourselves outside to the hot springs, the promised heat from which, we knew, might just keep us alive for the night. Getting undressed for them was a moment of great bravery that should not go unacknowledged, but once we jumped in – what bliss. The fact that surely everyone who had ever visited this place would be using this natural thermal pool in lieu of a bath was forgivable for the hour we spent feeling somewhat normal again. Not that there is anything normal about sitting in a hot spring in the middle of the Bolivian desert watching the perseids meteor shower overhead.
Despite all that mineral goodness I slept terribly as my body sought new ways to protest against this harsh existence and quite possibly the previous night’s “sausage sizzle” that had not agreed with me too well. The following morning we threw on more layers, resolving to wash once we made it back to civilisation – even the flamingos had frozen stuck in the lake overnight, as had Danny’s water bottle in the car that refused to heat up all morning.
And we could do it, because we knew that that godforsaken hostel was waiting for us back in Uyuni: the one with the hot showers, and the solid walls and the overnight heating. Oh how we would appreciate its sad, flaking paint and abandoned Christmas decorations once we made it back there later that day. Another lesson of travelling: luxury really does become relative.
Travel bits and tips from this week
We took an overnight bus from La Paz to Uyuni, arriving far too early in the morning. Luckily there’s a decent café that opens at 5am especially for all the night bus arrivals.
Our hostel in the town was Hostal Sin Fronteras, which felt a bit bleak until we returned and realised just how much we appreciated hot water. It had a fair few quirks though – namely, Dave and I were put in a tiny room with single beds during both stays, while Alice was given a big room with a double bed as a single traveller which was quite weird seeing as we were charged more than her. Just saying.
It’s worth shopping around for tours to the salt flats – and check the reviews, because there are plenty of companies with a bad rep for safety. We went with Quechua Connection, which was cheap but not the cheapest, and our drivers were great, but there are probably tours out there offering much better accommodation.
Our first night out on the salt flats was spent at the “Salt Hotel” which was not as glamorous as the name might suggest. At one point Dave asked a member of staff if he could buy a beer from the bar with cash money and she effectively said no.
On the second night we stayed in Hostal Loma Tara, as organised by the tour agency. Honestly I don’t know how it managed to even get two stars on the Google reviews, what a terrible excuse for a hostel.
On the tour we ate what we were given, which was a mixed bag. But in Uyuni we went out to Restaurante Laguna Colorada (nice, warm-ish, decent pizzas and veggie options) as well as Tika Restaurante, which was significantly posher than anywhere else in town and connected to the nicest hotel in town, too – which we gazed at longingly while we ate our llama and quinoa burgers respectively.