South America

Uyuni Salt Flats, Day Two

Posted by Jim St. George on April 12, 2016

Posted in: Bolivia. Leave a Comment

A morning hike around this lagoon introduced us to fighting giant coots

On our second day out of San Pedro we continued to work our way north along the southwestern edge of Bolivia. The roads were still rutted and rocky and there was too much driving relative to too little hiking, but the scenery was great, too.

A close-up of the “giant” coots out on their floating nests. Don’t mess with ’em!

Enroute we happened across a couple rheas, large ostrich-like flightless birds that run around this part of Bolivia. We never got any decent pictures, but they’re a fun bird to watch. And to read about. They’re polygamous, with males courting up to a dozen female birds. Even more interesting, though, is that it’s the males, not the females, who protect the nest, incubate the eggs, and even tend the chicks. And then on one lagoon we hiked around we watched Giant Coots – another bird that, while relatively big is “giant” only in the context of other coots – fighting over territory. Our guide Danilo told how once he absentmindedly got too close to a giant coot nest and the birds went straight at him. Ain’t nature interesting?

At the same time, the human life could be confusing. We went into one tiny little village; just tiny, maybe a few dozen people living there. The Bolivian government had recently invested in building some new housing in this remote, isolated location and you could only wonder what life must be like in such a tiny, remote, isolated location.

The day included another great lunch out in the middle of nowhere. This was on a tiny lagoon with a big rock that bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Thatcher. Weird.

We’re here in what is supposed to be the end of the rainy season, but the rains failed pretty significantly. One result is that some of the quinoa fields are just devastated. From afar, quinoa fields in this part of Bolivia can be beautiful, big red squares in an otherwise colorless region. Without water, though, there were some really sad-looking plots. You can only imagine the impact it must have on local farmers who are already poor beyond most anything I can imagine.

A very sad quinoa field, devastated by the failure of rainy season rains

What else was interesting about Day Two? We walked the last mile or two to our lodgings, mostly just because walking is more interesting than bumping along the gravel roads. While we were walking you could hear big thunder rumbling across the landscape. Ultimately there was no rain, but the thunder was impressive.

And speaking of impressive, we went out after dinner that night to view the stars. Danilo had a laser pointer to show us some of the constellations, after which for the first time I could easily identify the Southern Cross, the southern hemisphere’s answer to the Big Dipper and North Star. Orion, Castor & Pollux, Jupiter – we saw them all, along with billions and billions of other stars.

The trip brought us right to the very edge of the Uyuni Salt Flats; tomorrow we cross in for two days. I’ll just add in anticipation that the experience was amazing.

A great little hike around this high plane lagoon

Mark on said hike

We even saw a lion on the hike, or at least a striking resemblance to the Ritz-Carlton lion logo

During our time in Chile & this area of Bolivia we’ve seen a bunch of these great green plants that cling to rocks. They take many, many years to grow to this size and are now protected in both countries.

Our guide Danilo taking a break, with a great view across Bolivia

I got pretty high, too

Another little hike took us through some Scotland-esque bogs. Or at least what I’m guessing were Scotland-esque, as I’ve never actually been there. Oh, and the good news about these hikes? The extra little pressure from my knapsack seems to have completely cured the back & shoulder pain I’d been experiencing ever since Nasca, back in late February. Yay!

Not all quinoa fields were wiped out by the failure of the rainy season. These sheaths of quinoa had been harvested and were tied up waiting … for something. The colors give you a sense of what a ripe, healthy quinoa field looks like from a distance.

No more shipping containers, for now, at least. Our lodging for Night Two was this old rehabilitated traditional structure made of local rocks with some cactus wood as framing.

Our isolated lodging for Night Two

Sunset out on the edge of the Uyuni Salt Flats. Later that night we’d get a great tour of the clear southern night sky.

Uyuni Salt Flats, Day 1

Posted by Jim St. George on April 11, 2016

Posted in: Bolivia. Leave a Comment

Traveloholics at a geyser field in Bolivia on our journey up to the world’s biggest salt flats

After a couple days hiking around San Pedro de Atacama our big adventure for the region is a five-day journey with car and guide up into the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia. The map here shows our route, starting from San Pedro at the bottom in Chile, going north into Bolivia, and then west to Iquique. It’ll take us a couple days to get up to the salt flats themselves, but in the meanwhile we’ll spend our days in some of the most remote regions I’ve ever been in; no wifi, no Internet, no electricity, and, for the most part, no people. The company we’re doing it with, though, does provide food and shelter so we’re not completely destitute.

Immigration at the Bolivian border. Does that just scream “Isolated!”?

Day One was a long day on terrible roads. Hours and hours on crazy, rocky, rutted gravel roads. It took a couple hours to get to the Bolivian border at one of the most remote border crossings you’ll ever see. The most amazing sight during that long ride was the bikers, a couple here, a few there, maybe half a dozen altogether. Intrepid and adventurous travelers riding bicycles, not motorcycles, with all their camping gear at 14,000 feet on those roads that were so brutal in a car. Mark thought they were crazy; I was jealous.

Unfortunately the day was a lot more about covering ground in the car than hiking. We stopped at a Bolivian geyser field where it would have been easy – and deadly – to fall in, and had a great lunch – a salmon salad, lettuce salad, good wine – our guide whipped up when we stopped at a flamingo-settled lagoon in the middle of nowhere.

This was our lunch break on Day One. The lagoon below has just thousands of Pink Flamingoes – real ones, not plastic. A pretty fabulous place to stop for lunch.

Flamingoes. Lots and lots of flamingoes.

The middle of nowhere. This certainly feels as isolated a place as you can imagine. Just miles and miles of high plains, mountains, and flamingoes. Lots of flamingoes. And here we’re going to be with no Internet for days while the Wisconsin primary plays out. We won’t know anything until days after the results are in!

We were curious what the sleeping arrangements would be. There are no settlements of any size at all up here and certainly no hotels. The company we organized the tour with said they use “shipping containers” for sleeping and eating, and sure enough when we pulled in toward the evening there they were: old shipping containers retrofitted as little cabins. Cots with great sleeping bags for the cold nights. Separate kitchen and bathroom shipping containers, all out in what is just the middle of nothing. Pretty cool, really.

After a long day in the car getting here, I hiked up above our “lodge” for a view of the area. Those are our shipping-containers-turned-accomodations. I loved being out there in the middle of just really nothing. If you look at the map below, this is the first star north of San Pedro.

Without Internet or even electricity there was no opportunity to load pictures or write this blog, so I’m doing it all now that we’re back in civilization. I’ll add more on our subsequent days over the next day or two, but there are a lot of pictures to load so it’ll take a while. For now, though, here are the rest of our pictures from Day One.

Here’s our route from San Pedro down near the bottom, over to the Eduardo Avaroa National Reserve in Bolivia and then north for three stops (two nights in the northernmost spot in Bolivia when we’re actually in the salt flats) then over into Chile before ending in Iquique

An early stop at a Bolivian geyser field was a welcome break from bouncing along on crazy unpaved roads

The bubbling mass of goo that would make a real mess of things if you fell in

Another view of our lunch stop

Flamingoes

Thousands of flamingoes

They get their color from eating untold numbers of little shrimp in the lagoon. Our guide explained that they spend pretty much the entire day, from morning to night, eating thousands and thousands of tiny pink shrimp. Strange way to live.

There are no trees at this altitude so this tree-shaped rock is a real destination

And then there are the strange signs. This seems to say … what? No birds? All those flamingoes out there seem to be ignoring the sign.

This was my favorite, though. I understand, they don’t want you pissing in the lake and fouling the natural environment. The two pictures at the top make that pretty clear.

San Pedro de Atacama

Posted by Jim St. George on April 9, 2016

Posted in: Chile. Leave a Comment

Late on our first afternoon in San Pedro de Atacama, up above Valley of the Moon

After a long bus-and-car journey, we got to San Pedro de Atacama, a small tourist-dominated town in northern Chile in the Atacama Desert. Very near the Bolivian border, it was in fact part of Bolivia until the Pacific War, involving Bolivia and Peru on one side versus Chile on the other, from 1879 to 1883. Chile won and thus took a significant amount of land from both Peru and Bolivia; as a result, Bolivia lost its access to the Pacific and became a landlocked nation. To this day there are parts of Bolivia that aren’t real friendly towards Chile.

The main reason to go to San Pedro – presumably the only reason unless you’re one of the 12 people in the world with relatives here – is to explore the Atacama Desert. Comprising about 41,000 square miles, the Atacama Desert is reportedly the world’s driest non-polar desert and makes up a significant part of northern Chile. To say it’s dry is really an understatement. On average, the desert gets barely over a half inch of rain per year, while in the central part of the desert periods of up to four years have been reported with no rainfall. Some of the weather stations in Atacama have never reported rain. That’s dry.

That’s some dry terrain we’re riding through

So what do you do in a desert like that? We stayed in San Pedro for three nights and in that time did three hikes and went horseback riding. The horseback riding was kind of boring; the horses were huge and beautiful Arabians, but all you did was sit on them while walking or occasionally cantering through dry, rocky terrain. It didn’t seem like anything we couldn’t have done on our own and enjoyed more without the horses. The three hikes, though, were all pretty exceptional. We were fortunate in that we’ve been up in the Andean highlands for weeks now and so we’re completely acclimated to the elevation. San Pedro itself is about 8,000 feet above sea level, with the surrounding hills and mountains reaching far higher. So while newbies in the area typically have to work their way into hiking in the area we could just jump right in.

The first hike was only 60 minutes or so, but was pretty amazing. The Valley of the Moon is about a half-hour drive out of San Pedro and looks as though you were, well, on the moon. In fact, because of the dry and forbidding terrain here, NASA tested an early version of the Mars rover here.

Here we are on the edge of a steep sand dune in Valley of the Moon, ankle-deep in the softest sand you’ve ever felt. Further down people were sand surfing, but we left that to the kids.

By far the coolest thing about the hike was walking barefoot on a hill through the deep sand; it was one of those “OK, this is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before” moments. The sand was so soft and dry, it was like wading in warm water, almost like there was no resistance on your feet. With the views of the desert and the mountains in the background it was just a truly otherworldly experience.

Cacti and beautiful scenery in our little canyon excursion

The second hike was down into a canyon through cactus-studded hills and along a beautiful little stream fed from mountain runoff. I wasn’t expecting to find anything like it in this driest-of-all-places desert, but it was beautiful (and pleasantly cool down in the shade of the canyon). I was amused, as we were scampering over and around rocks on pretty challenging terrain that while helmets were required on the horseback and bike rides offered in the area, they’re not on hikes like this. There was no question in my mind we were in a lot more danger of slipping and seriously bonking our heads on that hike than we ever were on the horses.

It was a beautiful canyon and a great hike, though it was a little surreal to be around so much water in the driest desert on earth

I wasn’t really leaning on that cactus, though you had to be careful not to slip while hiking lest you roll into something like that

Here we are, hiking through the canyon

Finally, the third hike was a good three- or even four-hours out into the vast nothingness of the highlands, upwards of 15,000 feet above sea level. The first stop, before we even got to the hike, was the El Tatio geyser field. At 14,200 feet above sea level the locals claim it’s the highest geyser field in the world. Whether that’s true or not, the central area is pretty impressive site, with lots of additional geysers spread around a wide area. Our guide was careful to let us know that the geysers are dangerous; just two months ago a woman leaning over the stone barricades to get a better picture fell into one of the geysers and died. Boiled like a lobster, you might say. So we were careful.

Me and our guide Danilo sitting in front of one of El Tatio’s many geysers. I was careful not to lean too far back…

From there it was off to a long hike through utterly isolated areas. All very exciting. The real highlight, though, was lunch (of course). They drove us back toward the hotel but then turned off toward the Puritama Hot Springs, a series of eight geothermal pools. Because our hotel manages the site, they reserve the top pool for just their customers and, as we were the only ones on the hike that day, we had it to ourselves. And by “it” I refer not just to the naturally heated pool, but an incredible lunch they provide, including pisco sours and wine and great food. It was really an over-the-top-great experience.

Mark making his way through the very high trails in the Atacama Desert

The hot spring pool that was awaiting us after a long and great hike

If they’re offering pisco sours for lunch, in a naturally fed hot springs, who are we to say no?

And the lunch spread itself – pork, beef, pasta salad, quinoa. That’s a great way to end a great hike. And the table in back, just barely visible, had the desserts and wine. Life is good!

I’d have loved to have stayed in San Pedro longer, as there are a huge number of hikes to do. But we were committed to going on a five-night tour up into Bolivia through the Uyuni Salt Flats and so we left early the day after that hot-spring-lunch trek north back into Bolivia for five days with no Internet, no electricity, and presumably very few people. So far, though, our decision to come down into Chile to see the Aticama Desert was pretty successful.