In the middle of Nowhere, Back in Time, and Going down a big hill really fast

Uyuni

From Tupiza I took a nightmare jeep to Uyuni. Where upon I met a guy I really liked who ran a tour agency with a 3 day tour to the Salar and the Lagunas and Volcanoes around Uyuni. Perfect I thought.

The jeep arrived an hour late and it was slanted forward to an alarming degree. We got on and set out on a fairly decent road. 20 Minutes into the trip we realized that the jeep barely had any shocks left and we could only go about 30 km an hour maximum. It was depressing but bareable to see the other jeeps shoot in front of us. 20 Kilometers in we stopped at a really small town, which happened to have the world´s cutest baby llama. Here they put a tarp underneath the engine of the jeep and stuffed grass in the air vents. This was getting to be pretty shady I thought. After a long wait we all piled back into the jeep to begin our journey. Except the jeep wouldn´t start. 3 Hours later, David our guide decided to go back to Uyuni to get a new jeep. Great. While he was gone our old jeep worked again, we all decided we´d had enough of this travel agency and demanded to go back to Uyuni. Our other guide begged and pleaded with us but we insisted. On the way back the engine died twice, and started to smoke. Halfway home we ran into David who tried to guilt trip us into staying on. We ended up arguing for half an hour on the side of the road, and then 2 more hours in his office to try to get our money back. In the end we still had to pay 15 dollars for a disaster story.

The 5 of us decided to book it to another travel agency where we got a tour for the next day-this time with a reputable agency in our guidebooks.

When we got there the next day at 8 AM our guide and his wife (our cook) were there. The jeep looked pretty good, for the others it was a problem that neither señor or señora ramirez spoke english, for me it was perfect as I got to talk to them the whole trip-though translating did become tedious. So off we set, myself, our guides and two couples- Ben and Beth from England and Al and Ruth from Ireland. Ben was a very weird kind of guy who didn´t like me very much I don´t think, perhaps because Beth and I became friends during the hours in the jeep. Ruth and Al on the other hand were absolutely terrific! They made jokes, teased each other, and were very easy to get along with.

Day 1 took us out of Uyuni through green valleys into the true altiplano. For much of the day it was like we were driving through a lunar landscape, a complete red desert of absolute nothingness. The jeep tracks from previous tours stretchd out endlessly in front of us, while on one side La Montaña de Siete Colores showed off her brilliant display of colors to us.We passed various lagunas, all of them different colors, nestled beneath volcanos filled with pink flamencos whose wings were of the most brilliant red when they spread them. That night we stopped at a very basic alojamiento. We had electricity for 2 hours and no running water. But we did have toilets (flushing them involved using a bucket of water and pouring it into the pan)! The beautiful Laguna Colorada (bright red) that framed the building along with the clear night sky at 4000 meters filled with stars made it easy to bear.

Day 2 can only be described as a marathon, made all the worse by the fact that it was my day to sit in the back. If you imagine the jeep as a plane, the back was like economy sitting next to a fat person right next to a smelly bathroom, the front middle was simple economy, the front left behind the driver also economy, only this time next to a skinny person and maybe you got a great deal on your ticket, and the front right behind señora Ramirez with a little bit of extra leg room and a window that went down was like Economy Plus. Upgrades to Business or first class not avaliable.

We got up at 5 AM and were on the road at 5;30. First we passed sulphuric geysers shooting up steam about a hundred feet or so. It was eery walking among the pits looking at boiling mud shooting up steam. It was very cool however when the sun finally cleared the mountain ridge and poured the light through the steam. After that we departed for some natural hot springs. Where we soaked in blissfully warm water and drank tea. It was nice until about 10 other jeeps showed up and the shallow and small basin became very crowded. We then went to Laguna Verde which wasn´t green at all at that time of day and were heading out to our night stop 12 hours away. In total we were in the car 16 hours that day.

Fortunately our night stop was at a very comfortable hospedaje, with hot water, a few extra hours of light, and great beds. It was also nice to know that the next day, our last, wouldn´t be quite so arduous.

Day 3 was the day we all looked forward too. The reason that people go on these long uncomfortable but spectacular jeep tours. By 8 in the morning we were on the edge of the Salar. A gigantic salt flat covering more than 20,000 thousand square kilometers. Here we could see salt baked onto the earth for as far as the eye could see, it was impressive. Even more impressive though was when there was a thin layer of water on top of the salt reflecting the sky perfectly. It was like driving across the world´s most gigantic mirror. We were all quite impressed with señor Ramirez´s ability to drive across the flats with absolutely nothing to guide him until we saw a far off hump, this was our mid-day destination. This island, which seemed desolate from afar, had the strangest catci growing on it. Some, growing over 12 meteres high, were quite simply extraordinary. Here also, taking advantage of the lack of background we took some very funny ¨3D¨ pictures.

Finally, right on the edge of the Salt Flats we came to the Salt Hotel. Which used to be the only hotel built entirely of Salt. Now, due to problems with the sanitation, it´s a giant souvenir shop. Just to go in you have to buy an overpriced bar of chocolate. From there we came across salt pyramids piled across the flats. Our guide explained to us that this was the shape they piled the salt so that it could dry before they came to load it into trucks.

Back in Uyuni, I couldn´t wait to leave. Unfortunately the trains weren´t running as the workers had gone on strike so I was forced to take a long torturous night bus to Oruro and then La Paz. The bus was crowded, with tons of people standing in the aisles. It stopped every 5 minutes to let someone off or pick someone up, and finally it was freezing cold. If I hadn´t brought my sleeping back I wouldn´t have been able to manage.

La Paz

From the moment I arrived in La Paz, early in the morning half asleep on a foggy day, I could tell I had never been in a city quite like this. La Paz only has about a million inhabitants, but the city is BUSY. The mountains surrounding the entire city force people to live in a very dense area. The traffic, cars and pedestrain clog every narrow street.

The colorful crafts markets mix with the street markets of produce and everyday items to create a tableau of noise and activity. Then of course there is the ¨Witchcrafts Market¨ selling things like the Ekeko statue, this statue of the god of goodfortune and plenty features the diminutive pot-bellied Ekeko smiling cheekily as usually a cigarette dangles from this lip. But the market also sells slightly more gruesome things such as Llama fetuses, said to stave off bad luck in a house if buried under all 4 corners.

Besides wandering the busy streets soaking in the atmosphere-replete with police officers armed like members of the SWAT team on every corner, I visited a very good museum on the history, culture, influence, and medicinal properties of the coca leaf.

And of course I did the most exhilirating thing of this trip, if not of my entire life. I mountain biked down the world´s most dangerous road.

The World´s Most Dangerous Road

Known affectionately by the guides as the Death Road, this is the most dangerous route in the world. Descending from 4700 Meters above La Paz to 1200 Meters ( a drop of over 2 miles) in  roughly 70 KM, this road sees an average of 30 cars plunge off the side each year, and roughly 1 in 15 bikers breaks a bone. In the last 6 years, 12 bikers have also died.

We started out where the road isn´t too dangerous yet- it is paved and has 2 lanes. We bombed past views onto low valleys at 60 KPH, it was exhilarating. After about an hour and a half straight down and 30 minutes climing back up again we had our first crash. A girl in our group somehow crashed on a virtually flat section, bruising her shoulder and requiring 20 stitches on her knee. Minus her and her boyfriend and the support car, we continued on only to have someone go flying into a cliff 10 minutes later. Luckily for him he was OK. Eventually we got to where the paved road ends and becomes a winding 1 ¨lane¨ dirt road.

As we started down, I was baffled that we hadn´t had to sign a waiver. The road was barely wide enough for a car, yet alone a car passing bikers, and we were sandwiched between rock hard cliffs on the one hand, and a vast empty space on the other. Peering over the edge of our first cliff I could see nothing but fog, it was only later as the fog lifted that I realized that the cliffs that would be so easy to fly off of dropped anywhere from 250 to 500 meters straight down. We proceeded a bit slower than before, having to pull over to let trucks pass us. Fortunately on about half of the blind curves we had to take there were little kids with posters- green meant go ahead and red meant stop. Plowing through waterfalls that literally cascaded onto the road we got a section where the cliffs were slightly more gentle and the road was wider. Here we got to tear down the road taking curves as fast as we could, plowing through streams in a kind of controlled chaos. We were in control, but barely, it was absolutely thrilling.

Finally muscles quivering we got to the end. We had a momentary reprieve as we showered and ate a really late lunch. Then we had to drive back on the same road at night, 14 of us in a mini-bus. When the road disappeared from the window and I was left staring out into darkness, I was terrified and thought about how absolutely insane this was. But it had to be the greatest thing I´ve ever done.