The Salar de Uyuni - Pure Awesomeness

Current Location: Tupiza, Bolivia
Distance Cycled to Date: 16,752 km
Kilometres left until we reach Argentina: 85
Amount of Salt contained on the Salt Flat: 10 billion tons

The Salar is awesome. We just thought we'd start out with that. Before coming to Bolivia, we had read lots about how terrible the roads are and how difficult the cycling is. Some cyclists skip it completely, heading from Peru straight into Chile - however, we wanted to see the salt flats. That was really the only reason we came to Bolivia. And so we were very excited to be leaving Salinas and heading out to something we had been looking forward to since leaving home.

We realize lots of you already know all about the Salar de Uyuni, but for those of you who might not - it's basically 12,000 square km of flat, hard salt. It was once a giant lake, thousands of years ago - and from the edges, it still looks like a giant lake. The salt crystals form all kinds of different designs on the surface, some hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball, and sometimes just bumps like a frozen pond. We don't really know any of the science behind any of this... but it's pretty sweet. Picture a wide open frozen lake, so big you can't see the edges. And the ice isn't slippery. That's what it was like. When we get our photo album of Bolivia up, you'll get a chance to see just how awesome it is. We have some sweet photos... you just have to wait to see them. But it will be worth the wait - for now you'll just have to use our inadequite words to imagine it.

We left Salinas with our water bottles filled with Tampico citrus punch, due to the unavailability of bottled water, and started towards the nearest 'ramp' to get onto the Salar. The edges of the Salar are pretty soft, wet salty stuff, so you need to find an established ramp to get onto the hard stuff. We found one about 20 km from Salinas, and biked towards the blinding white Salar. Even with the ramp, we still ended up biking through a whole lot of wet salt slush, which we're pretty sure wasn't too good for our bikes, but after a kilometre or so, we were onto the salt. We looked around, and didn't really know where to go. It was flat and wide open, as far as you could see. Luckily the Danish cyclist we met the day before, Martin, had a GPS with the island in the middle of the Salar programmed in, so we turned the direction his GPS told us to, and started biking.

We biked and biked, stopping a few times to take pictures, and once to talk to a group of Dutch tourists who we thought could be walking across the Salar, but turns out were being picked up by a couple jeeps any minute. So we kept riding, and it seemed like we made hardly any progress at all - miles went by without the landscape progressing, and finally, after hours went by riding along the featurless salar, we arrived at Isla Incahuasi, the cacti studded island with a restaurant, and a refuge for cyclists to sleep in. The three of us had a great dinner of steak sandwiches and llama burgers while all the other tourists had to leave the island and head back to the 'mainland', and then had a great sleep in the roomy refuge with great views of the sun sinking into the salar. Yep, being a cyclists certainly has its advantages.

The next day we seperated from Martin, with us heading to Uyuni and some supposedly great pizza, and him heading down towards Chile over a different route. So we started east, finding a well marked trail that we hoped would lead us to Uyuni. We stopped after just 35 km when we spotted some dislodged slabs of salt that we thought could work well as seats while we ate lunch. Some had already been pulled up, and we arranged them into a nice bench to sit on while we ate our peanut butter sandwiches. As we were eating and looking around at all the brick-like slabs, we thought to ourselves - we could build a fort out of this stuff! And so, we did. And it was awesome. The entire salar is one flat, featureless landscape except for one or two hotels that have been built near the edges, out of salt. And now, there is also one fort, 35 km east of the Isla Incahuasi. It started small, with us making a circle of bricks, and then building up. It was like building a snow fort out of hard chunks of snow, except that it was pretty warm during the day, and nothing would melt. It kept getting bigger and bigger, and we worked out how to get a roof on top of it. It sort of became a salt igloo, but a very solid, and well built one. We are pretty much first-rate engineers when it comes to salt construction.

After finishing in only 3 hours, we decided after putting in so much effort, we might as well sleep in it as well. So we built a little 'yard' for it, and redesigned our chairs outside, and it became quite the homely little place. It was probably the most fun we've had on this entire trip.

That night we pulled out our sleeping bags and thermarests inside, and while the temperature plunged far below zero once again outside, inside we were kept nice and warm. Hardly even below zero in there! The next morning we left a note and some sheets of paper to create a mini-logbook inside, and put them in a ziplock bag, along with our website and email address. So hopefully, maybe someday, we'll hear from somebody else who spent a night in the igloo. It might even be sooner than we expected, because the next morning as we were reaching the edge of the Salar, a tour group in a jeep stopped beside us, and asked if it was us that built the igloo. They stopped to take pictures, and thought it was fantastic. We couldn't have been happier.

We ate lunch in Colchani, just off the salt flats, where we found out every tourist group heading out to the Salar stops. We could hardly get any of our sandwiches down, as we were constantly approached by people asking us about our trip. It was another celebrity moment for us, that was actually pretty fun. We gave out a lot of cards with our website, and hopefully it can work out to a few more site visits, and a few more donations as well.

Minuteman Pizza in Uyuni was a place we had heard of while we were still in the US, from other cyclist's blogs. It was supposed to be some of the best pizza in South America, so we were anxious to give it a try. Turns out to be true - it was excellent. The first night off the Salar, we went in and ate 2 large pizzas, and polished off 3 litres of Coke that night as well. It's fun having a cylist's appetite. We planned to take a rest day and get up a blog the next day, but when a strong wind and dust storm hit town, the electricity was out all day long. We discovered that we use electricity for pretty much everything we like to do on a rest day - that is eat at restaurants, and use the internet - so it was a pretty poor day. And then the next day Jeff got sick, so we stayed one more day. And then the next day I was sick, so we stayed one more. We had difficulty deciding what route we would take from Uyuni - but finally, we decided to head down to Tupiza and straight to Argentina. It was the most direct route, and to be completely honest, we both were quite anxious to get to Argentina. We've likely built it up in our minds to be far better than a country ever could be - but we're tired of constantly being sick, searching for half-decent food, and dealing with these kinds of roads. So - after a couple surprise rest days, we found the road heading south.

The Salar was awesome - the days that followed it weren't. So, rather than taint this entry with that negativety, we'll have to save that for the next entry. Soon we'll catch up to where we are. And speaking of catching up - we finally have our Southern Peru album ready to go. If you don't remember, we spent a few weeks travelling around with our parents, hence the many non-cycling photos. But they're still pretty sweet, so we thought we'd share them. Enjoy.