I will always remember my trip to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia because it took the best part of 5 whole days to get there. The journey involved a backstreet yellow fever jab in Buenos Aires, painful overnight buses, an encounter with a Greek conman at the Brazil-Bolivia border and an extremely sketchy flight from an “airport” where a 10-year-old issued the plane ticket and directed us to board the plane. This was South American travel in its realist, most-testing form.
Getting from Brazil to Bolivia
While in South America, I met up with a friend of a friend named Shannon; we got along well – probably because of our love for spontaneous adventure, and soon we found ourselves taking an impromptu flight to Rio. After a few days of partying and exploring, Shannon and I decided that Bolivia was the next stop – and that’s when things started to get a little bit crazy.
We had spent just over two days getting to Corumba on the Brazil-Bolivia border, but we made the huge mistake of getting there late at night – when everything shuts down, including border control. Just as we realised that we had landed in a Brazilian town with nowhere to stay and no possibility of crossing into Bolivia that night, a Greek man who had been “living in the area” approached us; I was skeptical of his ability to get us a room in his “friend’s guesthouse” and his “border friends” who could get us into Bolivia first thing in the morning, but it was late, we had been travelling for two days and we decided that it was safer to check out the guest house. A few minutes later, we were in the living room of a local house while the shabby-looking Greek Guy spoke to someone in the kitchen before collecting payment from us for the guesthouse owners. Before we knew it, we had a room for the night without making any formal reservation. Something definitely wasn’t right; this was someone’s bedroom in someone’s actual house, but with no real choice, we locked the door and decided it was better than being on the streets.
I can’t say I got much sleep that night, but when we did wake in the early morning, we didn’t linger. We took our bags and returned to the bus station. My friend did not have her Yellow Fever paperwork, and we thought we may need to use the Greek Guy’s “border friends” to cross without an issue, so we sat on the steps of the bus station waiting for him to see what he had to say. The next bit is a little bit hard to believe, but I am telling you that the following actually happened.
While sat on the steps, I looked up from the book I was reading and saw these cardboard boxes moving on the other side of the road; a few seconds later, the Greek Guy stood up from underneath the boxes and started to fold the cardboard away. That was the “holy sh*t” moment we needed to (1) realise that the homeless Greek Guy had just hustled money from us and a local family who had clearly agreed to give us a room for the night in their home and (2) to get up and walk (at pace without signalling alarm bells) to a the nearest local bus and jump on it. Goodbye to our Greek Guy… or so we thought.
About an hour later, we found ourselves waiting in a queue at the border so that we could finally cross into Bolivia.There was a lot of waiting around – these South American border controls are the kind where you rock up to a porter cabin, get the stamp and walk across into a new country… overly strict protocols didn’t seem to be the norm. While we were waiting, I catch sight of our Greek friend who is seemingly searching for us. Now, bear in mind that he would have had to realise that we weren’t at the bus station before catching a bus and travelling for about 20 minutes in order to find us. As he got closer to us, I muttered to Shannon, “pretend you don’t know him”, under my breath, and that’s what we did as he walked up to us and tried to convince us that we wouldn’t be able to cross the border unless we paid him. Fortunately, there were a few other travellers at the border that morning, and they looked at him with the same confusion and concern as we did had decided to fake in our attempts to get away from him. It worked.
To this day, I still can’t fathom how a man from Greece ends up sleeping on the streets of a border town in South America, but 30 minutes after this happened, the ordeal was over – for us, at least. We got through the border with no problems and momentarily celebrated our arrival in Bolivia… before encountering our next obstacle.
Salar De Uyuni
Our primary objective when we finally got to Bolivia was to see the salt flats of Salar De Uyuni; we wanted to get to grips with one of the most dramatic landscapes in South America. So you would, at the very least, assume that we had a plan to get there. It may surprise some, but we were winging this – absolutely winging it, so I’m not quite sure why were so disappointed when we rocked up to a shack-like ticket counter in the nearest town and they were not able to get us a bus ticket. But every problem has a solution, and a before long, we were in a car driving to an “airport”. In fairness, it looked like a shell of an airport that was in the process of being constructed, but there weren’t really any people. Again, it was odd. We sat down in a simple cafe area, and were soon introduced to a small family who seemed to be running the cafe. It was only later, when we walked a few metres down the corridor for boarding that we realised this family also seemed to be helping to run the airport. The young boy who had been helping his father to serve us food was now handing us our boarding passes and pointing at the fire escape which led us to the plane.
In hindsight, there was a lot of blind trust being given for our safety over those couple of days, but I think we were delirious with tiredness and seemed to laugh everything off while counting ourselves lucky for still making progress along the road. We weren’t able to continue on our journey when we landed in Santa Cruz so we showered, ate and slept in the city before taking on the final roads to Uyuni.
The next adventure came in the form of Bolivian buses. Picture a rundown, over-crowded bus packed with local Bolivian people crammed into seats and an aisle. Then picture Shannon and I squished onto metal seats – with me non-stop exclaiming how much pain I was experiencing in my butt bone while having my legs wedged in the air against the seat in front of me because they wouldn’t quite fit (Bolivian people seem to be relatively short). Now, hold that image and imagine this overcrowded bus coming dangerously close to cliff edges with dramatic drops. Then imagine, one week later, reading the news that a bus on that same journey actually did go off those cliff edges. Finally imagine, just as day breaks, your bus breaks down. And this single bus journey takes 26 hours when it’s only meant to take 12. And there you have it – the horrific ordeal.
We finally made it to Uyuni, went to the nearest shop to find some tablets for the altitude sickness we were experiencing, bought some wooly hats and a warm cup of tea then slept til the next morning.
Bolivia’s Train Cemetery
While in Uyuni, we paid a visit to the nearby ‘Great Train Graveyard, also known as Bolivia’s Train Cemetery or ‘Cemeterio de Trenes’ if you’re well versed in Spanish. This Bolivian landmark is home to hundreds of abandoned trains, or locomotives, many of which date back to the early 19th Century and were imported from Britain. But why are they there, you ask? Back then, there were plans to expand Uyuni’s train network because it is a key transport hub for many connecting lines in South America; however, the plans were pulled when tensions mounted between Bolivia and neighbouring countries and industrial momentum slowed. With these Blivian landscapes subjected to some incredibly harsh elements, the trains were ultimately left in the salt desert to corrode.
Uyuni’s Train Graveyard has a fascinating history, but what is equally as interesting is that no corporation has come along to monetise or fence off the area. This meant that we were free to roam amongst the trains in a wild, natural landscape. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.
The Salt Flats
Let me tell you one thing: the world’s largest salt flat in Salar De Uyuni is one of the most impressive landscapes that you’ll ever encounter. It was the sunniest of days even though the air was crisp when we finally got to see the beauty of the 4,000+ square miles of white, snow-looking ground that stretched into the horizon from every possible angle. Now, what is a salt flat, I hear some of you ask?
Salar de Uyuni’s salt flats are salt crust that remains from the transformation of prehistoric lakes, and it is magical. If you are there at the right time of year, there are parts that overflow with water, creating this mirror-like reflection across the plains, but this was something we missed out on. I looked up the pictures afterwards; it is a travel photographer’s dream.
Salar de Uyuni’s salt flats form one of the most extreme landscapes in all of South America, and you’ll be shocked to stumble across salt islands that are home to cacti, as well as a salt hotel that travellers now road trip to. So what does one eat while out exploring the salt flats for a day? Llama – apparently. Yep, our picnic lunch was an interesting one – eating chewy llama out of a tub. Definitely a lunch we’ll remember for a long time to come. Did we use the flat land to attempt some totally cliché pictures? You bet we did. We even bought a toy giraffe in the town beforehand to plan for the opportunity (bar the Snickers, the toy giraffe was all we could really get our hands on – this is going back a few years, prior to the evolution of the ‘Insta-traveller’).
Asides from one other quick city stop-off and an actual solo train journey across the white salt flats when Shannon and I parted ways, this pretty much sums up my Bolivian adventures… so far. Did I pretty much travel across the width of South America to visit explore Salar De Uyuni? Yes. Do I regret it? Not for one salty second.
While much of this particular South American excursion may sound like many people’s worst nightmare, this really was an adventure that I look back on fondly – despite the occasional ‘oh f*ck’ moment. I absolutely loved by time in Bolivia – I only wish that I had planned for it so that I could have explored more of the county.
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