2005 November » The Global Guy

Monthly Archives: November 2005

Tarabuco Market

November 27, 2005 Posted in Bolivia, South America

Our arrival in Sucre on a Saturday turned out to be very serendipitous, as it allowed us to take a short bus ride over to the weekly Sunday market in Tarabuco. Up until recently, this was a very traditional weekly market for the locals to come and do their normal shopping. In the past few years however, the tourist industry (yeah, myself included) has discovered that this is one of the better places to see the colorful native dress, so the market has changed its character from strictly local food and goods to about 2/3 tourist trinkets.

The original locals aren’t very pleased with this arrangement, and I can’t blame them. In addition to having to deal with higher prices, they’ve become very defensive about having photographs taken of them. Street photography of strangers is always an ethically grey area, but these folks have made no doubt about their hatred of it. For a few bolivianos they’re happy to pose, but if they catch someone sneaking a photo without payment, it wasn’t unusual to see a few rocks being hurled at the offending gringo and his equipment.

Bolivia’s Railroad Cemetary

November 25, 2005 Posted in South America

On the final day of our tour, we headed towards our destination town of Uyuni. As we approached the edge of the salt flat we came across miners chipping blocks out of the surface and grinding the salt down into pieces that could be loaded into trucks for processing into ordinary table salt. Here we also came across places where underground water would seep up to the surface in brownish pools that the locals called the eyes of salt. If you stuck your arm in one of these pools, it would be covered with salt crystals as the water drained off and evaporated.

Once we arrived in Uyuni itself, the tour was pretty much finished, except for one final stop to an old train graveyard. Apparently Uyuni had been quite the railroad hub back in its heyday, but now all the old locomotives had been condemned to the desert, slowly rusting away and being used as a playground by the local kids.

Salar de Uyuni

November 24, 2005 Posted in South America

Rising early the next morning to a steaming cup of the ubiquitous third world Nescafe, we headed out towards what would be the highlight of the trip…the Salar de Uyuni.

As empty as a newborn’s imagination, it is a plane of shimmering white stretching from horizon to horizon, with only the distant outline of far away mountains separating it from the equally vast sky. Even with previous traveler’s tales fresh in our memory, having read about it in guidebooks, and even seeing photographs in the tour office, it was still surreal to stand alone in the vastness, facing away from one’s companions and transport, and to simply experience the sheer nothingness of it.

The genesis of the Salar was an ancient sea, dessicated into oblivion by the thin dry air of the Andean Altiplano. All geologic time has left behind is a meters thick deposit of white salt lying in stark contrast to the deep blue sky; a sun bleached dessicated corpse of this once majestic inland sea.

The salt naturally dries into hexagonal plates about five feet across, extending out as far as the eye can focus. Our group drove for hours, stopping occasionally to get out and take photos. Eventually we came to what gets my vote for the world’s most misnamed geographic feature; a cactus covered island of land in the middle of the salt desert called Isla del Pescado (Fisherman’s Island). We got out of the jeeps for lunch and climbed to the island’s highest point where the views in every direction were simply stunning. You could forgive your brain for the mixed messages it was sending; every experience tells you that there should be water instead of solid salt lapping at the shores of this lonely outpost.

Eventually we headed to our destination of the evening; a hotel built entirely out of salt blocks. Except for a few pieces of wood used for trim, everything in the building, from the floors to the furniture was constructed of salt. Even though intellectually I knew the composition of the building materials, I still had to lick the walls a couple of times to prove to myself that it really was the pure salt our guide promised.

The Atacama desert of Bolivia

November 23, 2005 Posted in South America

After a final night of sleep in a comfortable bed, James and I climbed into a pair of decrepit old Land Rovers with drivers who spoke next to no English, and had an apparent case of chronic sleep deprivation. Luckily, one of our group was a beautiful Argentinian named Karina who was fantastic in providing a running translation of what our guides were showing us.

After a quick stop at the Bolivian border for the usual formalities, we headed out into one of the most otherworldly landscapes I’ve ever seen. The colors in the rocks and mountains were some of the most intense possible, magnified by the bright blue sky, undimmed far from any sources of air pollution. We visited Lagunas Colorada, Blanca and Verde; a series of lakes whose water had been colored by minerals and extremophile microbes until they looked as if they could have come out of a Dr. Seuss story. At first glance you’d think that nothing could live in these waters, but each lake had a resident population of hundreds of flamingos, specially adapted for the altitude and enviroment.

After the first lake we had another couple of hours of driving, gaining altitude all the while. Eventually we stopped at a geyser basin called Solar de Manaña that had active steam jets, bubbling mud pots, and the constant smell of rotten eggs. The air was thin and cold (we were at about 15000 feet), and while there was a little hot stream we could have gone swimming in, no one really felt like braving the cold enough to get wet.

We stopped for the night at a ratty hotel where our driver fixed us a “traditional” Bolivian meal of spaghetti and tomato sauce. That evening we went hiking around Laguna Colorada (Red Lake) where we got even more photos of flamingos, and then retired for a surprisingly sleepless night due to the altitude.

Valle De La Luna

November 22, 2005 Posted in South America

After leaving Easter Island, James and I headed to the Atacama desert to take a more unconventional path into Bolivia. We caught a quick flight and bus to a town called San Pedro de Atacama. This is a pretty small little town that’s a hub for backpackers with not much more than cheap hotels and travel agencies. We booked ourselves on a three day trip to the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia that would take us through some of the deserts, lakes, and volcanic areas of southern Bolivia.The trip didn’t start till the next day, so James and I took an evening trip out to an area called the Valley of the Moon. This is a surreal desert area where the sandstone has been scoured by the wind over millions of years into just incredibly weird and beautiful shapes. There were gullies and caverns that had been dug out of the canyon floors that we spent several hours wandering around and exploring. At the end of the evening, we climbed a large sand dune with somewhere near a couple of hundred other tourists and watched a magnaficient sunset over the extinct Lincancabur volcano.

« Older posts