13.10.2004

Salt crust on the Salar de Uyuni Click here to see more photos!

After a boring, not planned day in the small town of Uyuni, today we set out on this tour to explore the southwest part of the country. Actually we wanted to start a day earlier, but the other participants of the tour had not arrived so that we got quite bored for a whole day being stuck in little Uyuni.
But this morning the hostel was quite busy. Many of the guests wanted to take a 4-day-tour so in the end there were 3 jeeps leaving. We ended up in a jeep together with an Italian couple and 3 guys from Spain - which was good for us to practice some Spanish…
The first sight we passed was the train cemetery, that we had only expected on the last day of the trip. It is situated only a short distance from Uyuni itself and we could have easily killed the boredom of the previous day with it, if we only had known… The light certainly makes it more interesting earlier in the morning, but we only got there at around 11 a.m. From there we had to pass Uyuni again to leave it to the north towards Colchani. The inhabitants of Colchani are the only people that are officially allowed to harvest the salt of the Salar de Uyuni. But anyway, it rather seems to be penalty than privilege. We saw a 13 year old girl filling the salt bags for sale. She is doing that every single day for as long as 12 hours, filling 1500 bags each day and only earning as much as 13 Bolivianos for a days work (which is around Euro 1,30!). With old lorries the salt is transported from the Salar to special ovens where it is dried - the men there work 24 hours in shifts. After the drying process it is ground to fine powder and then it is the little girl's turn to fill up the bags. Everything is done by hand, even the loading and unloading of the trucks.
But before the process in the village starts the salt is being dried already in the open on the Salar. When we kept on going we saw hundreds of little white pyramids rising up from the endless plain ocean of salt. At this point the Salar seemed to me still rather brown or grey. But just a little further towards the "Isla del Pescado" in the centre of the Salar the "white gold" (as it was described on the bags that the little girl was filling) was gleaming very white indeed! The plain's surface was covered by what looked like a wide net of polygons forming crusts around their edges. These crusts appear after the rainy period when everything is still covered in water which then slowly evaporates leaving behind the pattern we were able to see. The "Isla de Pescado" is situated in the middle of the salt ocean and is called the "fish island" because when you look at it from the air it apparently has the shape of a fish. But for the usual tourist who only gets to see it from the ground, it rather should be called the "Island of the cacti", for this is what it is covered with all over. The cacti are growing as high as 12 m, are very old and quite impressive with their long, strong prickles. We also had an amazing view from the top of the island across the gleaming white salt onto the surrounding mountains. By the time we got back to the jeep our guide had prepared some lunch for us after which we kept driving across the Salar for another two hours.
On the edge we could get a little taste of what to expect from the roads on the following day. After the smooth drive over the Salar we finally bumped our way along pretty bad routes for another thirty minutes before reaching the "Hotel del Sal" where we would spend the night. This hotel is totally made of salt which is excellent for the climate of the region, since during the day the salt collects all the heat of the sun and sets it free again at night. And so we had a cosy warm night there, even if outside it must have been freezing cold!