sybarites

I only wish we had had the time to be more creative with our amateur videoing and dying battery.

On Tuesday night, we lodged at the driest hotel in the world. It was a building made entirely of salt, perched at 3400m. above sea level on the windy side of a hill facing a salt plain. The clothes that got wet in our backpacks (the water bottles strapped to the roof of our vehicle had leaked) were dry within a couple of hours.
The walls, beds and tables are made of bricks of crystallized salt and the floors are just loose, grainy salt. I had the idea that if I buried Marc’s 3-day-old socks in the sand, they might lose some of their moisture and, therefore, their “aroma”. I think it might’ve worked.
For a novelty thing, it was pretty interesting, and the view of the stars and the milky was exceptional, if freezing cold.

On a different topic, we went for a really enjoyable observatory night excursion while in San Pedro de Atacama. A French-Chilean couple has set up an operation just outside the town where they have several telescopes set up and offer a two-hour tour of the night skies of the south. We saw the true Southern Cross (not the one we thought we had seen in Patagonia), a view of Saturn up close and, most interesting, a couple of Magellan clouds, which are actually other galaxies. They are named after Magellan because he was the first European to sail far enough south to see one. I had never heard of them before. I had also never heard of melting a chocolate bar in hot milk to make hot chocolate, which we got at the end of the tour. I’ll be experiencing one of them again when we get home.

I just like this picture.

Our last day in Chile was our first day in Bolivia, which might as well be known as The Day of Extremes. We booked ourselves on a 3-day trip from San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni through some of the strangest, and most beautiful landscape in a pretty harsh climate. The first day out, we crossed the border dressed for heat; this was a mistake. The wind whipping across the high altitude desert was icy cold and even the sun didn’t provide much warmth. We quickly dug out our sweaters and jackets and even then, we were chilly with each exit from the truck.
However, with the arid cold came some extraordinary features. We drove past Volcan Licancabur, which I think last erupted in 2006 (?), and this is where we started feeling the altitude. It started with a bit of a headache, sort of like a dehydration headache, which got progressively worse as we climbed to 4800m. after lunch. We spent the night at 4300m. and each time I rolled over in bed, I was short of breath. At least this will be a good warm-up for Cusco (3600m.) and Macchu Picchu (2800m.).
We stopped at several lakes throughout the journey, but some of the nicest pictures we got were of Laguna Verde, green from the copper in the lake’s sediment. Amazingly, many of the lakes in the area are home to pink flamingos. I somehow thought they only liked hot climate but they were feeding in abundance at several stops. Apparently, it’s the red colour of the tiny shrimps that they eat that pinks them up.
At lunch on the first day, we stopped at a thermal pool which looked out into the scrubby desert. This was our first bath in a year and felt brilliant- especially because we knew there would be no hot shower for a couple of days.
Not so far from the thermal pool was a field of geysers and steam vents. Unlike other geysers I’ve visited, this one had no warning signs or barriers and we could, if we had wanted to, get quite close to the pits of boiling mud. We heard from another guy on our tour that a tourist fell into one of the 85C pits last year and, though they pulled him out alive, he only lasted another four hours. Our visit was highly uneventful.
One of the last stops before the piece de resistance of the trip – the Salar de Uyuni – was a field of marvelously eroded Dali-esque rocks. The result of centuries of wind erosion, these rocks became sculptures against a backdrop of brilliantly blue sky and red-coloured mountains. The area had a strangely Mars-ish feeling about it with wide rocky plains and distant, sometimes shimmering mountains. Incredible, really.
However, even these most amazing of extreme landscapes paled in comparison to the largest salt lake in the world…

After waiting for three hours for our Landcruiser to be repaired, we finally headed into the white plain that extended from our salt hotel to well beyond the horizon. The Salar de Uyuni is highest and largest salt lake in the world with an area of 12,000 sq km at an altitude of 3650 meters. It´s more than double the size of the salt lake in Utah. The smooth plain was a relief from the gravel ruts that passed for roads during the previous two days. Trucks race across the salt at highway speeds without rattling our teeth or knocking our heads against the ceiling. To protect from snowblindness, sunglasses are a necessity for all except the drivers who seem immune or possibly half blind already.

The blinding white landscape spawned creativity for many of the tourists who jumped, danced, walked on water and distorted perspective in hundreds of photographs and we were no exception. During the wet season the dry plain is covered with several inches of water that creates a perfect reflection of the sky, but we only saw a small pond.

Standing in the plain, islands of rock appear to float above the horizon because of the heat rising off the plain. We stopped at a relatively small island called Incahuasi (Inca’s Hope) to play in the salt and climb the rocks. The island is covered in large cacti and all the tourist necessities, such as a restaurant and gift shop.

I would never have imagined that such a simple landscape could be so beautiful and captivating.