Uyuni & the Bolivian Altiplano

Had a little trouble on the bus from La Paz to Uyuni which I´ll elaborate on later. In the end, it was supposed to be a 14-hour trip with no bathroom on board so the fact that the trip was cut short a couple hours after departure was kind of a blessing. After a quick hitch in the back of a dumptruck and a hundred-mile cab ride with a Bolivian couple who were quite kind even though I think the wife was a bit put off by the Peru warmup jacket Graham was wearing, we arrived safely in a frigid town called Oruro just before midnight, in time to catch a few other Gringos at the bus station who you will learn upon further elaboration weren´t exactly in our good graces. Tired, hungry, pissed, resigned to the fact that we would *not* make it to Uyuni for a tour of the Salt Flats the next day, we did what any self-respecting travellers would do at half past midnight in a strange, dead, boring town in the middle of nowhere. We went looking for a bar.

After nearly an hour of padding around and finding all of the recommended establishments closed, we finally asked a cab driver for advice and he pointed to a sign that said karoake/coca-cola. This karaoke thing is becoming something of a recurring thing and I wasn´t very excited but we were up against the wall and had little choice.

Immediately upon entering, we were confronted with two men passed out on either side of a booth with a full bottle of beer between them and three very drunk guys spooning pisco sours out of a plastic bucket with a ladle. All in all, it was quite comfortable, though, and we enjoyed a couple quiet drinks while we decompressed.

In a moment of unadvisable enthusiasm, the decision to have a third got ratified and passed, which would eventually prove to be our death knell. Somehow, in the process of ordering that third drink we got a little chatty with the locals and the next thing we knew were in a full-on bullshit session, covering everything from politics to sports to where all the girls were (¨tomorrow, my friend...the women all come on fridays...¨). We got to feeling pretty cocky, no longer annoying tourists but legitimately interesting world travellers with whom the locals were eager to interact and swap stories.

After a couple hours of this, and due in no small part to the horde of invitations to private homes and parties we received, it became quite clear that this was a gay karaoke bar. The guys were all very nice about it, but after the confusion was sorted out Graham and I snagged a cab and made it to our hotel in time to grab about 3 hours of sleep before waking up to sort out our situation the next day.

Boliva is currently being rocked by three kinds of protests: students bitching about university funding, different provinces bitching about the reallocation of seats in Parliament, and folks in the South bitching about the government´s broken promise to improve roads and railways near the Argentinian border. As a result, blockades have been set up along many roads connecting major cities, and we awoke to the news that our bus to Uyuni would likely be stranded in Oruro. Graham had a flight to catch in Chile and was on a tight schedule, but as long as I could make it to Uyuni I would have no time constraints messing up my tour to the salt flats. Our bus was at 7pm. It was now about 10am. We were very tired of being on busses every day and having fun every night and longed for some boring days of rest.

It was then that The Dutchman approached me.

He asked if I was going to Uyuni and I told him that I hoped so.

He said he had met a local with a jeep who could get six people there for $250. The local, he said, knew all about the blockades and could get us through.

¨$250 is a lot of money,¨I said.

¨Yes,¨ said The Dutchman. ¨But my driver´s name is Freddy and he has inspired my confidence. $40 per person.¨

That was enough for us, and we set out to find two more people. Travelling during the day, avoiding another Bolivian bus ride, and travelling with this obviously mad Dutchman and his girlfriend all added up to well over $40 in value for us.

A few minutes later, we spied a weary-looking British couple straggling around the bus station. We approached them, trying not to appear sketchy.

¨Do you speak English and are you going to Uyuni?¨ I asked them.

¨Yes,¨ they said.

¨Well, check it out,¨ I said. ¨About 20 minutes ago I met this guy, ¨The Dutchman,¨ and about 20 minutes before that he met this guy named Freddy who said he´ll take six of us to Uyuni for $250 but there´s no way I can vouch for any of these people, although they all claim Freddy can get us around the blockades and haul ass to Uyuni in 6 hours instead of the 10 that the bus takes, but I haven´t even met this Freddy and don´t really know what kind of shape his vehicle is in or if it´s safe.¨

The English girl reached into her pocket and said, ¨Do you want the money now?¨

As it turns out, Freddy kicked ass. We left town around 2pm and 30 minutes later pulled off the highway into a vast expanse of desert scrub and circumvented the blockade (which equalled to about 30 students stonewalling well over 50 vehicles in each direction) about 200 yards off the road. The drive south was beautiful, and after the pavement ended and gaveway to a dusty, windy unmarked dirt road we all gave thanks that we weren´t on that damn bus (which, as it turns out, left without incident at 7 on the dot when the protesters went home for the weekend.) At one point just north of Uyuni, we got out to pee on the Bolivian desert and I´ve never seen so many stars in all my life.

The Dutchman, it turns out, was a painter and furniture maker who waxed poetic on Goethe´s theories about color while the English couple weighed in heavily on the economics and politics of South America. It was a really good ride.

The next morning, Graham took off for Chile to catch his flight and I reunited with the Irish cousins, Paul and Tony, the Aussie girl, Amanda, and Tony´s new muli-lingual, multi-national squeeze, Melissa, who´d flown down from Brazil for the tour. Three days in the Bolivan altiplano touring the largest salt flat in the world and passing several impossibly-colored lagoons turned out to be the highlight of my trip so far. I´ll get pictures up at some point because words just can´t describe. Got dumped off at the Chilean frontier with Iman, a sweet and smart doctor from Queens who was also on our tour and prepared to cross into Chile for what would prove to be a very short stay.

Said goodbye, yet again, to Paul and Tony and Amanda, though the way things have been going I can´t help but think that there will be several more goodbyes with those folks in the future.

(those are flamingos)