Bolivia is in my (Bill's) mind a place of some interesting curiosities: highest capital city in the world, a poor land-locked country, and the place where the legendary bandit Butch Cassidy met his demise.
Mortal combat on the salt flat.
We didn't see any remnants of Butch but we saw things that were at least as interesting. The main attraction for us was the Salar de Uyuni, a massive salt flat at 12,000 ft elevation within the "altiplano". The altiplano is a huge area of land straddling Peru, Bolivia and a small bit of Chile with an average height of around 12,000 feet.
Fun with the panorama feature on the iPhone.
Salar de Uyuni is around 100 times larger than the US's legendary Bonneville salt flats where competitions for land speed records have been going on for a century. Salar doesn't have such races even though it would probably be an ideal place for it, higher altitude means less air resistance. Salar is host though to many tourists like us.
Salt and sky forever.
It is hard to explain why visiting a geographic feature that is so uniform ends up being so interesting but it is.
We flew to La Paz "El Alto" airport, at 13,323 feet it is the highest international airport in the world. China has a few domestic airports that are higher. We were up about 2000 feet from the already oxygen starved heights of Cusco. Luckily we were already somewhat acclimatized from spending some time at altitude in Peru, even still we were sucking wind with every step.
The small jet we fly out of La Paz, notice Huayan Potosi mountain stretching up to nearly 20,000 feet in the background.
Bolivia is one of the South American countries that practices reciprocity for foreigners... basically whatever your home country charges for entry they charge as well. In practice I understand this policy, but when you're standing there at the customs counter and the guy asks for $160 US per person for a visa... respect for their principle goes out the window and you end up pretty annoyed... and I guess that is the point. They could make it much worse by forcing you to get the visa before arrival, and also making you wait years like the US does for foreigners of many counties... We're lucky, pay some cash and walk on through. They made a big deal of having one copy of our exiting flight itinerary for each of us but eventually they relent and take our cash.
Latte art!
We end up hanging out at the airport for around 8 hrs, both of us are feeling pretty sluggish in the altitude and so we find a cafe and plant ourselves until our flight at 7 PM.
Being at an airport that is so high is interesting for me as a pilot, for a lot of reasons taking off and landing at high altitude is challenging. In the thin air engines don't make as much power, wings don't make as much lift so more speed is required to fly... more speed that is from those anemic engines. All this means that runways at these altitudes are very, very long. Coincidentally the 13,123 foot runway is around the same length as the 13,323 altitude. This is longer than any commercial airport near sea level. Dulles, JFK, and LAX are all a few thousand feet shorter. Even with this very long runway, you will not see any very large aircraft like 747s at La Paz for anything other than flight test purposes, 13,000 feet of runway just isn't enough.
Shallow climb angle coming out of La Paz
The take off from El Alto is eerily quiet, most take offs you have to labor a bit to talk to the person next to you, during this take off you could almost hear a whisper because the engines just aren't making much power. Then, the time spent on the ground gaining speed, what pilots call the take off roll, is extraordinarily long, and the subsequent climb is anemic.
After landing at Uyuni we get a pick up from our hotel and check out the town a bit. It is pretty much what you would expect from a small tourist driven town at 13,000 feet in the desert: dusty and run down looking.
Dusty Uyuni, our home for one night.
On the plus side there is a street vendor selling pizzas cooked in a mobile pizza oven. Pretty spectacular!
Street pizza, fresh out of the oven!
After spending one night we started the standard three-day tour of the Bolivian side of the altiplano in two Toyota Land Cruisers along with initially 10, then later 8 tourists. For suspense I'll say that some didn't make it!
The Toyota Land Cruiser with 250,000 miles, our ride for three days across the Bolivian altiplano.
Bolivia is full of hard luck stories, there were very active mines but the economics and the world war shut them down in 1942, the train cemetery is the very visible reminder of that past.
Derelict locomotives lying around for more than 70 years.
The tracks are there but the trains don't leave.
After stopping at the obligatory town for some forced handicraft shopping we finally get out to the salt flats. It is incredibly big and bright from the reflection off the white salt.
Cycling on the salt, good fun... tiring fun at 12,000 feet!
After driving for a bit we are given the opportunity to ride bikes across the salt flats for a few miles. It's surprisingly entertaining, but hard going, the bikes are exposed to this salt environment constantly and it shows, the gears don't shift, there is a lot of drag in the drive train and the brakes only sort of work. Still it's good fun to pedal around, and during the entire ride there is no sensation of getting closer to the edge of the salt flat, it's just enormous.
We ride for a bit and then they've got lunch set up for us on the salt flat. One of the stranger places I've had lunch. The menu is llama.
After lunch we got some interesting pictures from the reflection of a thin layer of water on the salt, the effect is pretty cool:
After lunch we rode for like 45 minutes and still, there is barely the perception of movement across the flat landscape.
We checked out a hotel made entirely from blocks of salt. They make everything out of salt here, the tables, the chairs, and even the mortar between the blocks in a slurry of salt that hardens to bond the blocks together.
Salt to construct everything, notice the chair backs are broken in many places, salt isn't a great construction material...
Even the mortar is salt.
Obligatory perspective photo shoot: The air is so thin and the surroundings have so few ques for depth perception that these odd photos look more real than you would expect:
There is also a sort of island, called Incahuasi, poking out of the salt flats that is covered with cacti and a few other plants that have a penchant for unforgiving environments. Being that cactus is the only wood available many things around the island are made of cactus wood. This is a bit depressing as the cacti grow about 1/2 an inch per year... so those signs, and trash bins represent centuries of work by mother nature. Some of the cacti are more than 1000 years old.
Incahuasi: An "island" in the sea of salt.
Coral arch on the island, notice the arrow sign made from cactus wood
The other interesting tidbit about this "island" is that it is largely composed of remnants from a coral reef, the Altiplano used to be the bottom of the ocean 200 million years ago.
We get some sunset photos and then we're back on... dry land? Not really... Level ground? No not level at all... the salt flats are actually the most level surface imaginable... Anyway, we exit the salt flats and wind our way up to our hotel. It ends up being pretty nice for the middle of nowhere.
Our hotel the first night. Private rooms and bathrooms and hot showers - luxury in the middle of nowhere.
The second day is filled with visits to various high altitude lagoons, odd rock formations, and along the way we even see some wildlife. Vicuna roam these high plans freely these days as they are no longer hunted. We see llama also, they are domesticated but also roam free as open range cattle.
"Stone Soldiers" that are the remnants of ocean coral that got lifted along with the altiplano thanks to tectonic plates colliding.
We ride south along the border with Chile and there is another train cemetery.
More abandoned trains, these are along the Chilean border.
Despite the tiny amount of annual rain fall there are green things occasionally. This plant is called yareta, it produces a pine sap like liquid that the natives would burn for fire, although it is now protected. It looks soft but its actually quite hard.
Yareta plant
Obligatory jumping on rocks photo. Active volcano spewing steam in the background.
Vicuna roaming the range.
We visited five high altitude lagoons, most of them are host to flamingos. They filter out algae with their beaks.
High Altitude Flamingos!
Rock that happened to get shaped like a tree from wind erosion. It was at one time buried under sand.
What they called geysers are actually just steam vents, we're at 5000 meters or ~16500 feet.
More vents
We spend the night in a rustic hostel of sort in dorm rooms, no running water but there is a fantastic outdoor hot spring with a great view of the sky. We're at 14,500 ft for the second night.
The third day is spent making our way to the Chilean border. We get a few great pictures on the way and after a bit of paperwork we're on a harrowing ride down a windy but paved road descending into the thick air of San Pedro de Acatama, Chile (at 8,000ft).
The last lagoon we check out turns out to be very mirror like and makes for some nice pictures.
Pano of the last lagoon we see
Finally we head across the border into Chile, on the first paved road we seen in days!
Bolivia was a great place to visit, amazing diversity, nice people, Spanish that is pretty straight forward to understand. Highly recommended. here are some video highlights:
Finally here is a picture of the group that made it:
The 8 that made it! No Andre, we have no idea who that masked man is...
There were supposed to be 10, but two Swedes didn't make it due to illness, altitude and GI... and one of them looked like death at the start... lesson learned: don't start a trip like this into high altitude unless you are feeling good!
The perspective pictures were hilarious!
ReplyDeleteSharon
I second that!
ReplyDeleteSuch a unique landscape.
ReplyDelete