Salt flats, Chile and Argentina so far.
In recent weeks our eyes have been assaulted with a succession of pretty amazing sites all prefixed with the moniker ‘World’s…… ‘. In my last post I recounted how we’d visited the World’s largest canyon/highest capital city/highest city/ largest high altitude lake/most dangerous road/worst mine etc and to this list of general wonderment we can now add ‘World’s Biggest Salt Flats’ and ‘World’s Most Arid Desert,´ both courtesy of a tour taken from Uyuni in the of South Bolivia, our next stop following departure from the extremely pleasant city of Sucre. After a full days worth of being relentlessly jiggled in a crappy bus we finally arrived at Uyuni; a charmless tourist mecca whose every inhabitant seems intent on selling you pizza. Thankfully, we’d sorted our tour tickets out in Sucre and thus bypassed the tour agency gauntlet in favour of settling to the far less odious task of sleeping, preparing for what was meant to be an early start the following day.
View over the city, Sucre.
After sleep we organised ourselves for pick up only to be left waiting on our 4×4 for 45 minutes. This inauspicious start was further worsened when our car’s steering wheel began to smoke, a process which led us to be hussled out the car so our driver could figure out why our transport was starting to resemble Bob Marley’s hot boxing shed. Whilst our vehicle for the next few days was in the process of immolating itself we got on with the business of meeting our 3 fellow passages, who turned out to be a delightful Bolivian mother son combo and his Chilean girlfriend on holiday from Santiago. They were so lovely that within 15 minutes we’d been told that if we had any accomodation problems in the Chilean capital we were welcome to stay with them. Whilst Chilean/English international relations were rapidly improving a replacement car turned up to belatedly whisk us off to our first destination, a train graveyard located a few kilometers out of town. Upon arrival we were confronted by the ìmpressive vision of 20 or so rusting steamtrains with tourists busily clambouring around. We, of course, followed suit and thus began the process of taking an obscene amounts of photos of the starkly beautiful surroundings.
Train Cemetary, where trains go to die.
After we’d finished messing around in the corpses of Thomas the Tank Engine’s friends we set off for the salt flats proper. Driving into the salt flats we were confronted with the remarkable scene of white plains stretching far into the horizon, with only specs of mountains seeming to indicate any end. Being faced with this near sublime scene we did what seemingly every British/Australian groups do; utilise the distorted perspective in order to take photos of us shitting each other out and generally dicking around. We weren’t the only ones and a quick glance around revealed dozens of people lying flat on their stomachs taking photos with props, trying their damnedest to harness nature’s wonder for amusing facebook shots.
Vast expanses of Salar de Uyuni.
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Reboarding our 4×4 we set off an island marooned in the middle of the salt flats called ‘fish island,’ a place where the only thing that grows are huge, oddly shaped cactuses whose alien appearance sent me into another flurry of photo taking. From here we rocked up to our hotel for the night, a hotel made entirely out of salt which we quickly confirmed by licking the walls.
The next day saw us visit a series of brightly coloured lagoons with pink flamingoes padding around serenely inside. This riot of colour was simply incredible, without doubt one of the most stunning places I’ve ever visited. Leaving the flamingoes to strut away we ventured into the Atacama desert, the most arid place on earth, where we stopped at 5000m to have a wander round whilst the drum and bass we’d put on blasted from our speakers. Our car had one of those magic tape mp3 devices leading us to rock the salt flats pretty hard to a bizarre combination of the XX, Animal Collective, Girl Talk and the aforementioned drum and bass. When it was the Bolivian’s turn we listened to a lot of Beyonce, with Paul attempting to channel her spirit by aping her moves from the single ladies video. It quickly became very apparent that Paul is about as Bootylicious as Anne Widdecombe.
Flamingo Lake complete with a layer of salt.
Whizzing off we left to view the celebrated ‘rock tree,’ which, as the name suggests, is a rock that looks like a tree. Despite featuring heavily on salt flat postcards this site was a total dud as the authorities had seen fit to fence it off, meaning the predominant symbol of the salt flats now looked ridiculous. Making up for this disappointment was the fact that the huge rocks surrounding it were easily climbable so we spent our time scampering around pretending to be Tom Cruise from the beginning of Mission Impossible 2, though hopefully in a less dickish way.
Laguna roja, algae responsible for the colour change.
The final day we rose early in order to see the sun rise amidst huge sulphurous geysers before leaving for yet another thermal bath, our fourth in this trip so far. In fact we’ve been to so many that I secretly think South America is conspiring on slowly cooking us in stages so that we can be feasted on at the end of our trip. Not wanting to be slowly boiled alive Arthur and I took shelter in a cafe whilst Paul took a step closer to being a South American Hannibal Lector’s dinner. After visiting one more lagoon our tour concluded and we were dropped at the Chilean border where we were caught a bus to the Chilean town of San Pedro where we went through the normal immigration hullabaloo.
Our expectations of Chile had been pretty high, related to the fact Chile is the second most expensive country on the continent (Bolivia is the cheapest). At first the difference seem to be marked, instead of the usual, shoddy and ageing bus our transport was a new Mercedes and instead of cracked roads we found ourselves on smooth tarmac, a change that elicited a small cheer from within our bus. Unfortunately, this promising start to Chile went downhill quickly when we arrived in San Pedro, a small, horrendously overpriced, tourist town whose adobe brick houses looked close to collapse. It has earned its place as a tourist hub due to its location in the Atacama desert and close to a variety of attractions. During the 3 days we stayed there we could not, however, afford to go to barely any of these sites apart from a couple: Death Valley and the Valley of the Moon. These strange rock formations at these sites were interesting but ultimately underwhelming in comparison to the salt flats, that was until we witnessed an incredible sunset from the top of a huge sand dune, our vantage point ensuing that the lowering sun framed the surrounding desert and volcanoes in dramatic shades of pink and red. It almost made up for the fact that San Pedro was a dump.
Valle de la Luna at sunset.
Leaving San Pedro (happily) and Arthur (sadly, he couldn’t change flights so had to mission it back to Peru), we headed down South on a 16 hour bus to what we had been told was the country’s premier beach resort, La Serena. Arriving on a gloomy day we quickly decided that La Serena was a pretty underwhelming town. Making matters worse was that our accommodation, the cheapest in town, was owned by a total mentalist who had a petty rule for absolutely everything. The ‘hostel’ only had 4 beds, with the remaining space taken up by plethora of cheap and nasty antiques. This arrangement coupled with his wierd demeanour gave the impression that it was a house owned by someone who hated backpackers.
Leaving our hostel we set off for the beach stopping off on the way at one of the town’s main attractions, a gaudy lighthouse which smelt unnervingly of piss. We quickly tracked this smell down to a cannon which stood proudly at the front of the structure and seems to have been used for generations as a safe piss point. Also enhancing the experience was two fat people trying desperately to suck each others face off. This combination ensured that this scene one of the most distressing we’d experienced, making the any grinding poverty we’d encountered seem like a charming Richard Curtis film where Hugh Grant plays the bumbling lead in comparison.
Departing La Serena the next morning, after just one night where we hung around with a Dutch couple taking the piss out of the owner in secret, we took a 7 hour bus ride to Valparaiso, the country’s biggest port and apparently the best place to go out in Chile. Thankfully Valparaiso managed to save our sinking view of Chile being a vibrant city with some great street art, ace nightlife and picturesque hills to explore. Whilst here we split our time getting horrendously drunk and walking the streets. Of particular note we were lucky enough to track down one of the few clubs in South America which didn’t play the musical crime of Reggaeton but instead the much more agreeable mix of drum & bass and dubstep. Good stuff.
Residential hills of Valparaiso.
Our final destination in Chile was Santiago, a city we immediately took to as the city had clean streets, a pleasant climate and all the trappings of modernity (including drinkable tap water!) that we had been missing over the previous 3 months. Our hostel, located in the heart of the bohemian area of the city, was also incredible and inhabited by a nice bunch of people who we spent the next few days hanging around with. Whilst here we got extremely drunk on 2 of the 3 nights again, spending our sober periods exploring the city. During one of one sober periods we went to one of the numerous coffee shops staffed entirely by scantily clad women. These places are called ‘cafe con piernas’ (coffee with legs), and seem to be a strange Santiago quirk, with these coffee shops ranging from the fairly tame to virtual brothels. Despite opting for a reasonably tame one it was hard not to feel slightly awkward sitting amongst smartly dressed, and often ridiculously fat, business men who were holding hands and chatting with these women, no doubt whilst their trusting wives held fort at home, it all felt pretty sleazy.
Santiago skyline.
Leaving Santiago and Chile, after 5 nights in a row going to bed past 5am, we left on a night bus for Mendoza across the border in Argentina, The border crossing was easy but long, with us shuffling around between the hours of 2am-4am whilst our baggage was checked. Arriving in Mendoza we celebrated our arrival on our first night by feasting on the twin pillars of Argentinean culinary culture, beef and red wine. Absolutely delicious and a welcome contrast to the chicken and rice diet we’ve spent much of our trip on. Mendoza is known as wine country and the following day we hired bikes to go on a tour of the wineries in the region. Annoyingly we started late due to the bus stop being moved but when we set off in the early afternoon sun we had great time, getting progressively more drunk as we hit up numerous wineries and a beer garden.
Touring the wineries, Mendoza.
Moving on from Mendoza we took an 18 hour bus bound for Bariloche in the Argentinian lake district. Managing to fend off deep vein thrombosis we arrived at a slightly bizarre town that seemed to be of a pastiche of everything Swiss. The reason for the swiss love in, consisting as it does of a multitude of chocolate shops, wooden lodges and gigantic St Bernard dogs, is the surrounding area, which is gloriously alpine in its appearance; snowcapped peaks tower over crystalline lakes and pine forests making every view a potential chocolate box cover. Being poor due to the ridiculously high bus prices we spent much of our first day hitting up all the chocolate shops due to the fact they give out free samples, this being about all the entertainment we can afford. The next day we set about hiring bikes and going on one of the most glorious bike rides imaginable. Seriously, it was stupid nice .
Bicycles in Bariloche.
Rounding off, all we have done today is sell one of our kidneys in order to raise the funds to take a 26 hour bus journey south to the town of El Calafate. As well as being soul crushingly long it costs $100, our most expensive journey yet. That’s about it and I will now apologise about the banal list format of this post. The time between posts has got longer and cramming it all in takes a stupidly long time and I struggle to be bothered by the end. Added to this the wine is so cheap here doing anything but drinking is hard. If things continue this way next time I might just write a place name accompanied by a one word description. We’ll see, bye.
