Into the beyond: Salar de Uyuni and goodbye to Bolivia

Driving into the Salar is not quite like anything else. A South African woman we'd chatted to in Potosi a few days earlier described it as like driving into heaven. And even for secularists, this turned out to be no hyperbole. Half-flooded bone white salt flats stretching out as far as the eye can see, met by a vast pale blue sky, occasional reflections casting the clouds beneath your feet just as they suspend overhead. And even with land rovers dotting the horizons, lumbering out daily - ceaselessly - into the distance with their eager tourist cargo, the landscape is so vast, so epic and so silencing, it seemed to render our strange, ant-like little odysseys merely irrelevant, rather than intrusive.

Leaving Oruro had been a little messy, our having given little thought to just how mobbed things would be on Monday as virtually all of Bolivia barrelled out from the heart of Carneval madness and back towards work, sobriety and life outside the dance. There were no available seats down to Uyuni until at least Wednesday or Thursday, it transpired. After a quick re-appraisal of our options in the midst of the evacuation camp that was the small city bus station - there being little left for us in Oruro but debris, the stench of beer and urine, and extremely expensive accommodation - we scored the last seats on an afternoon bus back down the road to Potosi. A de-tour that would at least get us halfway there and hopefully towards more transport options. So once again we entered the chilly, dark streets surrounding the Cerra Rico and, after a night back in a Koala Den dorm, were Uyuni-bound the following morning.

You would not find yourself in Uyuni for any likely reason under the sun if not for the Salar. I say this of few places but poor dishevelled and wind-battered Uyuni presents as a godforsaken land bereft of most charms; if it was not for the fact it lies on the edge of some of the most remarkable scenery in Bolivia, it is hard to imagine travellers pausing even for the night. Low-rise with a feeling of abandonment, the Western town with tumble-weed coursing its arteries, Uyuni figures on the itineraries of virtually all foreign tourists to Bolivia for one reason only and that is the Salar loop. Jeep tours of the startling salt flats, geyser field and lagoons which litter its hinterland, just over the border from the epic landscapes we'd explored on the Chilean side during our Atacama stay a month or two before.

Arriving into town on Tuesday, then, booking a tour for as soon as possible was our priority, with our days left in South America now numbered. The problem being that, as with many such activities in Bolivia, the quality of tours is a tricky thing to assess and the trade almost entirely unregulated. And unfortunately, in the case of Salar loops, the dodgy end of experiences tends to veer far beyond the typical complaints of the pampered 'my pasta was overcooked and the bed springs were broken' brigade towards 'the driver was drunk/the jeep in front of us overturned' variety. Rare perhaps - not as rare as they should be, with long driving days typical and tiredness and drinking not uncommon. We had a couple of recommended agencies to aim for, but with Carneval still ongoing and tipsy revellers intermittently parading Uyuni's dusty streets with brass bands in tow (the kids, as ever, ready with the foam spray), both were shut on the afternoon we arrived. And then turned out, unsurprisingly, to be booked up until later in the week. So in the end we just took a punt. Wandering into the pleasant enough signed up for the next morning. A day and a half feeling more than enough in Uyuni itself, we then booked a night bus for the day of our return, planning an exhausting Uyuni-La Paz-Arequipa exit strategy to ensure we got our final week in Peru.

Our two evenings in the pleasant little Hotel Avenida thus passed with some bad wine and good cable. Buying the former on our first night, we paused for a good five minutes at the counter of the corner shop for the eleven year old proprietress to finish tracing her picture before selling us the bottle of red; clearly and unsurprisingly disgruntled at being left on duty while everyone else was out getting battered with Pachamama.

And Thursday morning we loaded up the jeep with our driver, a cook, a Catalan rock climber and three young Austrian women and set out in convoy with a jeep-load of party-loving French bohemians already merrily cracking into the beers at 10am. With Uyuni, there is no gradual movement out of town - you simply turn the street corner and that is it: town to no town, you fly straight out into the wilderness, as the road disappears into gravel track and the forlorn wide streets vanish in the rear view mirrors.

The 3 day tours typically begin with the Salar itself, the world's largest salt flat that extends across over 4000 square miles of Bolivia's south-west and remains at a serious elevation of over 3.5 thousand metres. Flamingos and other exotic flora and fauna are a huge draw and the lakes (black, blue, pink and green), mountains and thermal fields that cover the lithium-rich terrain constitute a peculiarly stunning alien land, as well as an under-utilised economic resource for Bolivia.

However we were setting out to go in reverse, covering the long, long drive south to begin with the lakes and thermal springs before working our way back up to the Salar itself on day three. This ended up working well for us, as while the salt flats themselves are always full of tourist vehicles, at most other stops we had the place to ourselves. Nonetheless, the tours in general make for a drive-heavy trip and day one in particular was pretty cooped up as we tore through the dry desert-scapes for hours on end, pausing at lengthy intervals to pour out of our jeep - the legs of whoever was doing their time in the cramped back seat row creaking painfully as we disembarked to examine some other-wordly rock formations, pink laguna or to pursue ethereal and displeased flamingos across a barren shoreline. 

But these silent, eerie landscapes were always worth the aching joints and hair-raising speeds across uneven dirt roads, without fail. Jagged rocks rising out of the earth in random communities, like primordial Stonehenges, and salmon-hued Martian lakes dotted with thousands of flamingos trotting in the distance - alone and sovereign in their strange land. We spent our first night at a huge, desolate stone refugio near the Laguna Colorada, where the six of us commandeered a tiny little orphanage-style dormitory with ill-fitting window panes. After a tasty lasagne dinner (Maria the cook having overcome her initial grumpiness at the news of my vegetarian affliction to produce a very pleasant line in quinoa and veg substitutes) and a few free bottles of wine produced by our driving team, we headed off to sleep, wearing all our clothes to guard against the bone-chilling temperatures, ready for the 4.30am start in store. 

The geyser fields on this side of the border were a fascinating juxtaposition to the beautiful, deadly pistons we'd encountered in Chile in January. While the latter had been gorgeous beauty queens lit up in the freezing blue dawn skies, guided by a knowledgeable and safety-conscious Canadian-Chilean, the Bolivian fields were a ghoulish, simmering cauldron of fire and brimstone, barely visible in the overcast pre-dawn haze. And this being Bolivia, of course, we wandered around the boiling, spluttering fissures in the earth's core freely, like the dappy little sheep we are, only being cautioned once or twice by drivers through the dark billows of steam, when they spotted someone staggering cavalierly amidst the lethal caverns while snapping through their camera lens (mentioning no names, oh love of mine...)

As dawn broke we approached the thermal baths, where we paused only briefly to admire the views, still all too frozen through to even contemplate the removal of layers, even if the springs were not crammed full of other tourists bathing in a veritable soup of of traveller-grime.... After a tour up to the astonishing Laguna Verde, where the reflections of Volcano Licancabur are as lovely as any sight we've seen and where we all wandered mutely, pausing to sit and stare from various rocky outcrops, we returned to a deserted baths. Clever clever Oasis, we thought as we tucked into a good breakfast spread of pancakes, corn puffed granola and yoghurt and gazed out at the 8am sun. With only ourselves, the happy French troop and maybe one other group, we then had the spring to ourselves as 9am hit in and the sub-zero night finally entered into a blazing sunshine morning lighting up the frosty, steaming altiplano. Now, by this point in the trip we'd hit baths in the Chilean El Tatio geyser fields, as well as in the appropriately named Agua Caliente in the shadow of the Macchu Piccu hills. And both were more than a little grim when you really paid any attention to the through-traffic they were seeing. 

But not the Termes de Polques. Filtering in and out naturally through the rocks, the water was clear, hot and backed by stupendous views. Your basic altiplano paradise. The Austrian girls and I clumsily peeled off our fifteen layers of clothing, socks, hats and scarves behind a shed to change into bikinis and by the time we were all gazing out into the distance, we could happily have splashed around all day.

But all things must end: 'Vamo!!' came the familiar shout as the sternly efficient Maria loaded the last of the breakfast dishes into the Mary Poppins-like supply stashes of the jeep boots and we reluctantly dried off and stepped back into sun-baked jeans and trainers. The rest of day two passed in another procession of exquisitely lonely lakes, mountains and rock formations. We had lunch in the epic constellation that contains the Arbol de Piedra and mercilessly papped more flamingos at the Laguna Hedionda. You take one step forward, they take two steps back and so it goes. 

Minding the off-sales

The night was spent at the tiny hamlet of San Juan. Arriving too late for our first guesthouse option, Maria was most disgruntled to end up at a far busier place where every space in the kitchen and dining room was to be fought for tooth and nail and the hostel shop largely manned by five year old children. But arriving in the first onslaught of some 8 or 9 jeep-loads that evening, we lucked out by lobbying our drivers for better rooms than the tiny broken bed spaces we were initially allocated. The French leading the revolution, of course, and sweeping us more docilely obedient Europeans along in their fabulous wake. Dinner was the Bolivian smorgasbord of Pique Macho and everyone was in good spirits, putting away a good few beers and merrily toasting our driving team.

Train cemetery outside Uyuni

Day three brought the Salar. We stopped first at the odd little 'Train Cemetery' which hordes dozens of decrepit old steam locomotives - a strange graveyard to the Industrial age full of late 19th and early 20th century vehicles which used to transport minerals to the now lost-Pacific coastline (those damn Chileans, still unforgiven in this land). Tourists clamber over them now like monkeys and with most tours including little guiding per se, it is hard to know what to make of them until you research the sights later. And then they are all the sadder, left rusting to dust on the Uyuni plains, the lost coast hundreds of miles away and the industries they served eroded.

The Salar. Half-flooded in rainy season, the routes through the plains are limited in February and you barely make it out to the edge of the expanse. But it is no less awe-inspiring and the chatter dies away as you approach. We clambered up onto the roof for the slow careful drive through the thinly flooded approaches towards one of the salt hotels (an environmental controversy in themselves). There are little words I guess, as you gaze out, and we wondered how indigenous Bolivians perceived this ethereal white sphere. 

Because despite the tourists, dashing around manically with cameras and engineering ever more elaborate perspective illusions across the flat lunar plains, it feels silent. And silencing. You are enveloped here, just as you are in some mountain ranges, and the sublimely indifferent and bizarre beauty of the world is  palpable and heavy. 

We left Bolivia two days later after a madcap chase back up the altiplano and back-to-back night buses, pausing only to catch our breath and stock up on gifts in rambunctuous La Paz. But the Salar and its environs linger. And there is something comforting in the thought of it sitting there still, silent and vast, as we dive back into the frenetic mazes of our little lives. Something powerful and old, something inaccessibly Bolivian.