Salad de Uyuni // 8th Apr 2005

Hi everyone

The time here once again for the ever-present ramblingly long travelog to land in your inbox. Hopefully this one should be shorter than most; for a pleasant change I'm going to omit most of the dull, boring details that usually pepper these pages and just give you the interesting bits. Radical, I know...

I arrived in Uyuni via a night train from Oruru a few days ago. It's a funny little town, a sprawl of two-storey buildings in the middle of the desert, whose existance is almost entirely based on gringoes like me coming to see the salt plains. Plus there's a military base, which pipes out the sound of soldiers shouting chants almost all day long. You can't take any photos of anything vaguely military-focused. They play the national anthem at 8am every morning; you can be arrested for not standing still and showing respect. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, a WWII-style air-raid siren goes off, although nobody pays it any attention...

So, why have I chosen to come to this little town, with its scorching heat during the day, windows that frost over at night, and dust that gets absolutely everywhere? The big attraction is the salt plains, which I've been dying to see for absolutely ages. In fact, now that I've been there and done that, I've ticked the Big Three off my South American list: Cristo Redemptor (the large statue of Jesus in Rio) and Macchu Picchu were my other two myust-sees. From here on, the route I take and the things I see are purely whimsical.

A little geography lesson...
The salt plains were originally a massive saltwater lake. This evaporated and left a huge expanse of crystallised salt, now known as Salar de Uyuni. The layer of salt itself is about 40 metres deep, and the area covered by this of salt is absolutely immense. It's all flatter than Holland, with the occasional ‘island' popping up out of nowhere. You can get snowblind from the whiteness of the place (my three-pound Brazillian sunglasses mysteriously went missing during my bag's stay in the left luggage room of Macchu Picchu, so my eyes were protected by a delightful pair of Bolivian-market-bought Hasselhoff-in-Knight-Rider-style black aviator glasses, which cost nearly one whole pound). If you're into things that are phenomenal, Salar de Uyuni has to be near the top of the list of things to see.

I took a jeep tour around the general southwest Bolivia area, including the salt plains, as is the custom for tourists in these parts. Like a safari, but without many animals. The landscape was simply stunning, amazing, huge and surreal; really quite indescribable. In the Salar de Uyuni we stopped at the curiously named Isla de Pesca (Island of Fish), which was (obviously) covered in cactuses, and without a sign of any marine life whatsoever. It made for some fantastic black and white pictures though.

Other things we saw over the three days included volcanoes, deserts of multiple colours, big areas just like the backgrounds of Salvador Dalí paintings (but sadly lacking the strange guns jumping-out-of-tigers-jumping-out-of-fish-jumping-out-of-etc), hot springs, geyzers (I couldn't get my mind out of cockney mode here), lakes of red, green and blue, hundreds of flamingoes, martian-style landscapes, and a whole bunch more. The area is overwhelmingly beautiful. I'm hoping to get some photos online within the next couple of weeks. I dare say that even then, the strangeness of the place probably won't be conveyed fully.

On the second night we stayed in the worst place I think I've ever been to. Even the cheapest of Bolivian hostels has such basic things like running water and a consistant electric light source: but alas, not here. A seriously ugly concrete shack with thatched roof in the middle of the Bolivian antiplanes, without heating and only posessing thin blankets, I wouldn't exactly call the place hospitable. As guests we had no control over the electric lightbulb in our room. When we were told there were five minutes before lights-out (which seemed strangely like being at a boarding school, or in a monastry), I went to get a candle for the simple purpose of being able to see what we were doing. The lady frantically scurried around the general kitchen/administration/bedroom to find the shortest candle she could. Eventually I was handed two thirds of a used candle for our cramped room of six people. That should have been just about be sufficient for the night; but I was under strict instructions not to use more than half of the prized paraffin stick. Understandably, none of my roomates believed we had been rationed in such a stingy way until first thing in the morning, when the hostel lady burst in and snapped the candle in half, taking the prime share of it away - assumedly to remove the temptation of lighting indulgence from us. Candles aren't that expensive in the UK, and can't be more than a few pence here, where eveything costs about 10% of the UK price...

Really, that place was the pits. We were slightly concerned about the exposed thatched roof in our room; there's a particularly nasty disease that's prevalent in the poorer parts of South America. Basically, a certain type of beetle lives in thatched rooves and adobe walls – the preserve of the poor in in this part of the world. Occasionally, they fall onto beds and bite the sleeping occupant (usually a baby). This passes on a nasty disease, which harbours dormantly in the body for over ten years. There's no real way to tell if you have the disease, except that eventually your heart expands and you die. Your insides turn to mush. While you have it, you can pass it on in the same way as AIDs. And because it only affects the poor, no vaccine has been developed (who's going to invest in people with no money?). The refreshing thought of disease-ridden falling beetles didn't aid easy sleep; nor did the hellishly uncomfortable beds with spiky (probably rusty) springs that dug into the back or the general freezingness. But we all survived.

Throughout the three day trip, our driver Ernesto had the habit of parking right in the way of the best photo locations – if there was a particularly good view, you could rest assured that a big, dusty Toyota Land Cruiser would be in the way, and that impatient Ernesto would be urging us to hurry up and take our damned photos so he could get to the final detination and talk to his mates sooner.

What was the most photographed item on the whole trip? You guessed it – me. Early on the first day, I had the fantastic idea of standing on top of the jeep in order to be photographed playing my electric guitar, wind and blowing my hair and shirt like a real promo shot. I thought this would make a nice one-off photo. The whole group seized on this idea enthusiastically, and every time we came across a poignant scene – big rocks in the middle of nowhere, vast expanses of desert, etc – we'd stop to take our normal photos before someone would pipe up with ‘What about one of Ollie with the guitar?' and sure enough, I'd hop out and pose for a plethora of digital cameras, plus my own. Not that I minded, of course. I think I have enough moody rock and roll shots for an entire album inlay. I think I'll continue this theme wherever I go – prepare for photos of me in front of Easter Island heads, Tahiti beaches, Sydney Opera House, Angor Watt, etc, in the same pose with a beaten-up guitar. The same photo, but in a hundred different locations...

A strange thing happened to me the other day in Oruru, where the last email was sent from. It was Sunday morning, and not a single shop was open. I was innocently sitting on a park bench reading a fantastic book, when I was approached by a man who was smartly-dressed, except for the fact that his businessman's shoes were full of holes. He smiled, bode me good day and shook my hand. It's quite normal to be accosted by people trying to convert you to Christianity, sell you domestic cleaning products, or merely beg for a little cash. Normally my response is ‘Lo siento, no hablar Espanol' (‘I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish'). If this doesn't work, saying ‘No entiendo' (‘I don't understand') and throwing them a distinctly puzzled look until they go away tends to work a charm. But this guy didn't give me a chance. He immediately started talking about Arnold Schwarzenneger, Jon Claud Van Damme, George Bush and Tony Blair in the same sentence. He kept referencing a ‘city of light' and ‘Ave Maria'. In his hand was a wad of A4 pages, each with an identical 5-point handwritten list of indescernable content. He made a point of ripping up one of these sheets while talking, apparently to illustrate a point, then another a couple of minutes later. Then three of these sheets were ripped up at once, which took considerable effort in terms of clumsilly re-jiggling the large jumper also in his arms whilst trying not to drop the other sheets of paper. Once the three pieces of paper had been ripped, it seemed the speech was over. I was once again bode good day, and the man proceeded to go to the bin and rip up the bits of paper a bit more before disposing of them. Then he just walked off. No request for money, no saving of the soul and – even more miraculously, when I checked my bag, nothing had been stolen. When he left, he still had a considerable amount of paper in his hand, presumably to lecture other unsuspecting people with.

I think I've found something even worse than the despised Stephen Segall movies on public transport – the other day I was subjected to a Bolivian film about a bullfighting priest. The whole thing was shot in that dodgy early technicolour – the one in which people appear to be made of orange play-doh, and the soundtrack had apparently been put through a guitar overdrive pedal. The train's video operator was obviously very proud of being able to show off a nationally-made film, so the volume was excruciatingly loud, while the next movie (though admittedly awful), in English with subtitles was quiter than a gnat's whisper. That's the way it goes...

Thus brings us to the end of this correspondance. What's next on the cards for Mr. Palmer? I only have another couple of weeks in South America, with a final destination point of Santiago in Chile. Tonight I am leaving Uyuni by night train for Villazon, which is on the Argentinian border. I hadn't planned to go to Argentina, but talking to other travellers it sounds like there's lots to see, there are cheap steaks and Buenos Aires is apparently the world's coolest capital city. The great thing about having a flexible schedule is that I can go anywhere I want, pretty much when I want.

Farewell (until next time). Keep the emails rolling in, I love recieving them...

Ollie

PS – once again my intentions of a short email tragically failed before they could even begin. Apologies.