Bolivia´s Southwest Circuit

This past week we left Chile, embarking on a tour of Bolivia´s Southwest Circuit. What is the SW Circuit, you may be asking?

The southern border crossing with Chile, near San Pedro de Atacama, is at roughly 4800 meters. That´s 15,700 feet folks! We were all having a hard time breathing and had to walk at half-speed everywhere to fend off exhaustion, respiration troubles, and headaches. All us gringo tourists were divided into groups of six and packed on to Landcruisers, all our packs wrapped in a tarp strapped to the roof. We proceded to drive into some of the harshest, most barren landscape I´ve ever experienced: a high desert, with very few plants, extremely windy, and very cold and dry.

We did see several amazing salt lagoons, complete with flamingos (they're not just for front yards in Florida) and llamas feeding on the banks.

Unfortunately, headaches abounded on the first day and the cumbia blasted over the 4wd´s sound system by our driver, Jonah, didn´t help much. That night we were treated to one of the worst spaghetti dinners ever to be eaten (how do you mess that up?), and slept in a dark and dingy refugio without hot water, electricity for only a few hours, no shower, and lots of wool blankets. I will say we were a good group of people. Despite the conditions, everyone took it really well. Everyone on the trip was from somewhere different in Europe, although someone joked they were happy about the absence of Germans. Apparently they get a bad rap. There were reps from France, Belgium, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain. We played a card game called Shithead which was fun to try to explain, translating from language to language until everyone got it.

The next morning didn't start off much better. It was cold, breakfast was horrible, and several of us (including me) were still feeling ill from the altitude. Luckily we were at the highest point of the journey. It was all downhill from there, and as the altitude dropped, our spirits rose (maybe it was the ABBA CD).

We passed several more langoons, interesting rock formations innexplicably in the middle of nowhere (erratic rocks, perhaps?), and scenery that increasingly resembled New Mexico and Utah.

We (including Jonah) stopped for a beer in the small village of San Juan, which existed only to farm quinoa, one of Bolivia´s most important crops, along with potatoes and coca. Next we moved on to a small salt flat, just a small taste (so to speak) of what was to come.

A much larger taste was the salt ecolodge we stayed in that night. This was a refugio made almost entirely of salt!! Salt blocks comprised the walls, the chairs, the tables, and even a small bar. The best part was the salt crystals that made up the floor. It was like walking in the bottom of an aquarium (without the water). Every morning the care-takers raked the salt to remove the footprints and get ready for the next group. And this place had hot water and a passable dinner. All right!

After a great night's sleep and a breakfast made much better by the introduction of Mark's and my peanut butter, we set off into the salt flats. I'm hardly going to try to explain what this was like, but I'll say it was very, very white. Very big, and very white. It was almost like being in the ocean. Landmarks that we drove to (there were several islands of regular soil, rocks, and plants in the salt) never seemed to get nearer, even as we drove 60 miles an hour towards them on no road whatsoever. Well, there were a few tire tracks to follow.

I got to drive the Landcruiser. Yes, that's right, I GOT TO DRIVE THE LANDCRUISER. I was totally joking when I asked Jonah the day before if I could drive, and when we got to the salt flats, he offered to let me drive. In fact, he let each of us take a turn. At first he sat in the front seat, but later he sat in the back seat and was talking to us and inspecting my LP Bolivia book while Mark tried to figure out where the hell he was going. Can you imagine this behavior in the US? Are you kidding me? Yeah, like everything else down here, there were no waivers of responsibility or anything.

Needless to say, we stopped several times and got some astounding pictures.

As the day went on we made our way to the east side of the flats to a village called Colchani. This is where the really nice, expensive salt hotels are, and where very poor souls harvest the salt, 10 Bolivianos (less than 2 USD) for every 1000 kg they harvest. To put that in perspective, my backpack weighs about 15 kg, 67 times less. We ate lunch and finished the trip in Uyuni at the Cemetario de Trenes, a strangely intriguing place where old locomotives and train cars are left to rust.

Welcome to Bolivia!