The Salar in Bolivia

So I am back in Peru. Bolivia was amazing, and I wish I had more time to spend there. The highlight of my trip was visiting the Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flat. It is approximately 4,085 square miles wide and is the remains of a prehistoric lake that dried up around 40,000 years ago.

There was an island in the middle of the salar that we went to visit filled with cacti and fossilized coral. I as i walked around I amused myself by envisioning that at night little iridescent, translucent ghost fish swim around the dead coral; sort of mimicking the way the humming birds swam through the air, hovering around the cacti during the day.

There is a small area of the salar that is still covered in water. It grows during the rainy season, but last week it was just the size of a small river. But living in this small salt river were about 50 flamingos. Don´t ask me how flamingos can live 4,000 meters in the air, in the freezing cold (it reaches 20 below in the winter nights), hundreds of miles from the ocean. But they are there.
After seeing the salar, we drove through the desert that inspired Dali`s paintings, saw a pink lake, and a forest of more fossilized coral.



I also found out (after I finished the tour) that the reason the tour companies can afford to buy the Land Cruisers that shuttle the tourists around the salar during the 4 day tour is that they double as cocaine couriers. The salar is in the South of Bolivia and sort of runs along the border of Chile. Many of the companies pack a bunch of cocaine into the cars and later give the packages to the families that we stay with at night so that they can take them across the border to Chile where the coke is sold a quadruple the price it would be in Bolivia. Hmm.


The other highlight of my time in Bolivia was my trip to the collective mines in Potosi. Our group bought a bunch of cigarettes, dynamite, and coca leaves (the leaves that are used to produce cocaine) for the miners and headed up. Potosi is the highest city in the world and so the miners, while underground, are all working at altitude. They work 8 to 13 hour days and don´t eat anything other than coca leaves while they are underground. The miners also carry out all the minerals under their own power. Some of them carry everything on their backs. Others have carts that they push along the tracks that run through the mountain. About every 20 minutes we would hear a distant rumble and our guides would start yelling at us to get off the tracks. Suddenly out of the pitch black two or three guys would apparatein front of us, running at full speed and pushing their mineral cart in front of them.

After crawling through the mines for a couple of hours, we gave an offering of coca leaves to Tio (spanish for uncle) and then sat around drinking with the miners who were getting off work. Tio is a lump of minerals formed roughly into the shape of the devil. The miners always give him cigarettes (he likes filtered best)and coca leaves as gifts. They believe that he governs the space under the mountain and that by giving him offerings they can ask for favors (i.e. safety or prosperity). Every time we took a drink of the 99 proof alcohol that the miners like (yes, we were still underground at his point) we first had to poor some of our drink on the ground for Tio. The next drink went for Pacha Mama, or mother earth. And so on...

So that was Bolivia. Ghost fish and lakes, devils under mountains, cocaine and coca.