Bolivia Blur

Alas, we can see the bottom of our pot of gold. Every country we’ve visited has kept us longer than we had planned and now we need to book it to Buenos Aires to get the van and us back to North America (to start saving up for the return to the countries we’ve missed). Our plan from here is to stuff the car into a box in BA, travel by bus through Uruguay and on to my Dad’s house in Southern Brazil. Then we’ll fly to NC to meet the car, pack our stuff into the trailer and visit folks on our way to Vancouver. Of course Moab is on the way – anyone interested in meeting us out there?

Upon crossing the border into Bolivia it was immediately apparent that the pace of things here are just a bit more relaxed. I had to wake up the border guard to get the car paper work done. Probably a boring job considering everyone just went around the other side of the building with all their goods piled high on the trici-taxis. The large sign proclaiming the need to declare your goods was an amusing detail. Then a local policeman tried to charge us for crossing the bridge, which we had already paid someone on the other side. On the advice of the immigration guys we just drove by him, he gave chase for about 20 meters on foot until we disappeared around a corner. Had he run a bit further he would have caught us stuck behind a parade that covered the entire street with people in amazingly colourful indigenous regalia, gold and red and yellow, playing pan pipes and dancing.

We soon get to our first police check point. This is a gate across the road and a small building. We sit in the van for a spell waiting – nothing. Finally I get out and walk over to the building, this is apparently how its done! He says I need to pay a voluntary amount of 10 Bolivianos. I say that’s too much, half distracted by the porn calendar posters hanging up behind him, and end up giving him the 1USD. On the smaller roads the local traffic would just drive under the raised gates, and upon seeing us the cop would walk out, lower the gate, and walk back into his shack, evaluating how much of a donation we are worth. By the time we got to Tupizza, in the south, Kim gets into a very un-Canadian argument with the cop about the terrible condition of the roads and the lack of signage and that she’s just not going to pay. Actually, I guess that’s very Canadian, expecting every thing to be in order and just so.

The paved roads in Bolivia are excellent, much like Peru’s. Unfortunately the main attraction that I wanted to see is the largest salt flat in the world, the Salar de Uyuni, and it is not on a paved road. A quick squiz at the map and the Salar looks bigger than lake Titicaca and the 500km of secondary road was no deterrent. The pavement ends just south of Huari. The beginning seemed much like any other dirt road and we decided that the reports of needing a 4x4 were exaggerated.


We spent the night near the road just south of Rio Mulatos after a long day of washboard and river crossings.

The sunset was great and then there was the silence. All you could hear was the blood running through your ears. I just sat for an hour listening to the silence. While eating breakfast after a great night in the altiplano I said ‘hey look, emus!’ Kim, the biologist, looks up sleepily from her oats and says, no, those are just llamas. Then she looks again, drops her oats and lunges for the binoculars. Emus!

Then came THE detour. A sign said ‘this way for the direct route to Uyuni’ Here the road started following river beds, this would be the case for a quarter of the trip to Uyuni, and deteriorated into tracks across the desert and river crossing that created bow waves that washed up onto the windscreen. This is when the joke ‘this looks like the main road’ started, Kim would say this anytime we were on a track that looked like it had been used in the last year. At a high point we actually pulled out the binoculars trying to see anything at all. We spotted a village in the distance and headed for it. Upon arriving a guy comes running out to greet us. It turns out he’s been waiting for days for a ride to Uyuni, and he knows the way. He says its just three of them and I see two kids next to their packed bag. Sure I say, that shouldn’t be too much extra weight for Tortuga. He’s practically kicking up his heels as he runs back to collect his wife, mother in law, everything they own, and the two kids (I guess kids don’t count). They fill the entire back of the van. Thank god for the new air-springs! This is when Tortuga really came through, climbing slick rock, ploughing through hundreds of meters of soft sand, climbing impossible ravines. It really reminded me of a 4x4 trip to Moab with David – except we didn’t have any beer with us here. I know if David were here that would never have happened!


The Salar didn’t so much appear, as the ground in front of the distant mountains disappear. Then the horizon started turning white. I knew the last two days of goat tracks across the dessert would be worth it. We deposited the family on the main road in Colchani, the entrance to the Salar. The Salar isn’t like the salt flats in the US, its actually the remnants of an ocean and is still 100 meters deep with a ½ meter crust of salt on top. There’s the danger of going through but we decided if we followed other tracks we should be OK on our way out to Isla Pescado an island made of petrified corral and covered in huge cacti, pretty surreal, 70km across the salt. Getting onto the salt is reportedly the tricky part although everything was nice and dry for us and it was pretty easy.



Right at the edge there are guys piling salt into neat little piles to dry, by hand of course. Driving on the perfectly flat salt with its hexagon pattern is amazing. We kept wanting to call it ice. Arriving at Isla Pescado, thank golly for GPS, we parked on the shore on the opposite side of the tourist area thinking this would be free. It’s not, 10 Bolivianos each that goes into a fund for the local community, this year its for electrification of the village

We spent the evening riding bikes, cooking, listening to the silence, enjoying one of the best sunsets of the trips and watching the Salar change colours with the changing light. And we ended this wonderful day in a very decadent way – watching Battlestar Galactica. Thank you Darcey for giving us the idea to download them through ITunes.