Entering Bolivia was breathtaking. Literally. The border with Chile, next to the volcano Licancabur (surrounded by mines, by the way) is at 4,500m, higher than than I had ever been and implying going up over 2,000 m. in less than an hour from San Pedro de Atacama. A nice way of preparing us for what was about to come.
We changed cars at the border (Bolivian authorities don't let any commercial vehicle from Chile enter the country; part of the excellent relations between both countries :) and the spectacle began: lagoons of all colors (red, blue, green,...), hundreds of flamingoes, natural hot-springs (where only 3 of us ventured in), daliesque rock-trees, viscachas (a big rabbit with long tails), vicuñas, volcanoes,... and all that spectacle at over 4,000 m!!
The first night we slept at around 4,300 m, in a "refugio" (shelter) with no heating in the rooms, despite the fact that the lowest temperature recorded there was a mild -25°C! It also meant my first encounter with Bolivian toilet facilities: an outdoor bathroom (well, it wasn't outdoor, but you had to walk in the open to reach it) with no light, no toilet paper and no flushing tank.
I don't know exactly what it was. The altitude, the cold, the constant talk about the symptoms of altitude sickness or the fact that some of my five roommates (and a guy from the other car) were already experiencing them. The fact is that my digestive system decided to go for a test-ride of the most basic toilet I had ever seen. In the night. In the middle of the night.
So I tried to find my flash-light and my toilet paper in the dark, and run for the door jumping over all the bag-packs trying not to fall and not to wake up the few of us that had managed to sleep. At least when I went for the bucket of water to flush the toilet it was not frozen, as it was when another person tried the facilities later in the night.
Before entering the Uyuni salt lake, we went through a military control, where they checked our passports again. That was the first sight of the basic conditions that people have in this country, since they offer to buy cigarrettes or fruit from us.
We finally arrived at the hotel where we would spend the night, and the best thing was that it truly looked as a hotel. And a very original one, as it was completely made of salt: the walls, the floor, the tables, the chairs,... Everything was made of salt! Something that also made the use of salt shakers completely unnecesary: simply scratch the walls :)
That night we had a wonderful dinner including quinua soup (a very tasty Altiplano cereal I had never tried before), but half of our group was sick the morning after. More than the food, I blame a group of local kids that appeared after dinner battering their instruments in the hope that some music would eventualy come out of them. It did not happen, but we took some cute (and soundless) pictures of them.
On the third and last day, after visiting some outstanding pre-Incan mommies in the caves where they were found, we finally reached the Salar (salt lake) de Uyuni, the largest in the world (larger than the entire Comunidad de Madrid and 3 times the size of Luxemburg). Truly impressive, although we didn't get to enjoy the waterly reflections it offers when it has rained on the previous days. Even so, driving for over 100 km. without noticing the landscape around you change and losing sight of the horizon in certain directions was quite an experience.
We had lunch at the Isla del Pescado (Fish Island), populated by hundreds of giantic cactuses (some of them over 10m high) and for the first time in our trip we listened to some Western music. I love South-American songs, but I believe that even the most radical "cumbia" fans would agree with me that 3 days in a row listening to the same tape of "Sagrado", an apparently popular Peruvian group, was a bit too intense.
We continued to the old salt hotel, located in the middle of the salt lake and now only allowed to serve food, and then proceeded to the area where salt is being extracted for commercial purposes. According to Juan the salt always regenerates, so it will never run out, but I'm not sure many scientists would agree on that.
After taking some pictures of the pyramids of salt waiting to be loaded on trucks, we headed for Uyuni, the first real Bolivian city I visited. I found 3 things quite surprising about this place:
1-The amount of garbage and plastic bags that covered thousands of square meters on the outskirts of the city.
2-How many people were dressed in traditional clothes.
3-The lack of harassment, as no one approached us to try to sell us anything.
And of course, we had our first taste of the agitated Bolivian politics, witnessing a massive protest of teachers claiming such diverse things as salary increases, the return of the coastal area that Bolivia lost to Chile over 100 years ago and the nationalization of all gas companies.
It was also in Uyuni where I had to confront for the first time the only truly scary aspect of Bolivia: electric showers. Water and electricity are anything but an attractive combination, so when I saw the two electric wires going directly to the device pouring the water over my head, it took me a while to gather the necessary courage to get under it.
Electric showers are extremely popular in Bolivia, ironical in a country that produces more gas than it can consume. Most electricity in Bolivia is produced in gas plants, so it seems quite inefficient (and expensive) to use gas to produce electricity to warm the water when you can use gas directly for that purpose. But one of the first things you learn in Bolivia is the futility of trying to find a logical explanation to many things that occur in this country.
But other than experimenting with the electric showers, there wasn't much to do or see in Uyuni, a rather shabby place, so I decided to take a bus to Potosí the next morning.
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