Celtic Warriors - Chapter Three
Taking the Biscuit
A last hola, mis amigos, again from La Paz, where we have returned after a five day fantasia on planet Mars.
Or at least that what it seemed like! Our Journey began (rather too soon to soon after I sent my last email, but with time to squeeze in a few Pacefia beers a few less hours of sleep…) with our flight to Uyuni, in south Bolivia last Sunday morning. It was no ordinary flight either, - after a regular plane to Cochabamba we were dropped out on the tarmac for our onward flight to Uyuni, and back 50 years!! There sat a 50 year old DC-3, perched at a rakish angle, with stewardess in box hat welcoming the 12 or so passengers on board, - right out of Casablanca. Of all the planes in all the world you had to step into mine... It out that s is a new service, franchised to a tiny airline belong to a rich eccentric guy who likes old planes, and this is their first, fully restored and only back in service a few weeks ago!! His son was on board, and who wanted was offered a few minutes in the cockpit, while the propellers roared us over the mountains and desert to Uyuni. Fling over the town, which is just a tiny grid of streets in a little clump in the middle of the desert, everyone on the ground looked up to wave at the plane, and we landed on a dirt strip and taxied to where a group of landrovers was waiting for us!!
We met up with our travelling companions for the four day safari' a young doctor from antrim and his Scottish doctor girlfriend ,and a young Canadian couple, piled our bags and crates of water onto and ourselves into a toyota landcruiser that looked 0lder than the plane (and not as well refurbished!!!) with our driver and his wife, our cook, and headed out across the desert.
The first day was spent crossing the Uyuni salt flats, a most incredible and almost literally "out of s world" experience. This is e largest salt pan in the world, 12,000 square kilometres of perfectly flat brilliantly white salt, at an altitude of 3,600m. As the cruiser glided along, all sensation of distance and speed disappears, and an hour or so later, as we approached an island out in the middle of the “lake” it was impossible to believe that we weren’t going to have to throw a rope and tie up alongside. The island itself was even more surreal, a great volcanic bubbling pile of mud, now turned to stone, encrusted in peeling layers of fossilised algae. The entire island is populated by great tall straight spine-covered cacti, many over 8m high, and one over 12m. They grow at lcm per year, so these guys were OLD!!! Climbing up the rocky path (where the stone crunched and tinkled like glass underfoot), passing the strange standing cacti, and looking out over a vast deadly still pure white sea that extended in every direction to where snow covered volcanoes, some over 6,000m high, floated just above the horizon, it vas impossible to make sense of it. Words like "bizarre" and "surreal" were as close as we could get, but these words were well worn out by the end of our safari. The effect was not made any less bizarre by a lone cyclist, a tiny speck in sea, nor by a viscacha, which is like a large rabbit, with a long bushy tail (!!!) bouncing away from us across barren rocks.
Later in the afternoon we visited a village on the edge of the Salar where the locals make a living, as they have done for years, harvesting the salt. It's an incredibly manual process Involving lone workers with pickaxes out on the salar skiming the surface (the salt is over 12m thick in places) and building piles of damp salt which are collected by bicycle (or increasingly truck) and brought back to the village for drying, milling to fine grains, bagging little plastic sacks. We spoke to a woman whose job 1S to fill 3,000 1 bags a day, sealing each closed on a little gas heater beside her where she sat. She's one of the fastest, - average 1S about 2,000 bags a day!! The salt then sells at a few cent per kilo!