NY Post Article

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Salt of the earth

BEN CRAMER lucks out and lives to tell about a road trip through Bolivia’s wild south

IMAGINE a world so cracker-dry, so flat and harsh and unrelenting that there’s no soil or water, no trees, no plants, no people, no buildings or roads. A world made up entirely of hard, crunchy salt.

If you’re thinking of some alien planet, come back to Earth. This barren landscape makes up the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, located high on Bolivia’s al-tiplano. Devastatingly beautiful, brutally inhospitable, it is also one of the world’s greatest road trips — minus the roads.

The Salar, once part of a prehistoric lake, is now a stretch of 10 billion tons of perfectly flat, crusty salt stretched over 4,700 square miles and surrounded by desert. At nearly 12,000 feet, the thin air makes exertion difficult.

When I decided to tackle this adventure with three friends, Brian, Oliver and Nick, all of whom live in Bolivia, we followed the guidelines to a T: We gathered the prescribed 55.5 gallons of gas, storing it in plastic cans on top of Brian’s Toyota Land Cruiser, a rough-and-tumble number with no back seats, weak head lights and a front window that wouldn’t close.

OOPS

We did everything right — except that we went without a guide.

We relied, instead, on a GPS device and a macho assumption by my ex-pat friends that their instincts were indisputably well-honed. Big mistake.

Our itinerary was similar to those used by Salar tour guides. It would take us west from Salar’s one formal entrance (20 miles north of Uyuni), give us a day and night on the flats, then take us south to the desert, where eventually we’d reach Laguna Colorado (a large, reddish lake) and Laguna Verde (a large, greenish lake), as well as some celebrated (and elusive) hot springs.

We set out from La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, and traveled 12 hours south and west on back-breaking “highways” (more often than not, cratered dirt roads). We entered Salar under a piercing sun, chewing coca leaves to fight fatigue. I ignored my suspicion that we were in over our heads.

The first night’s destination was Isla de Pescado, a cactus-tangled “island” of brown land —one of only a handful — on the otherwise white plain. With the sun beginning to set and no road to follow, we were officially panicking, until suddenly, the island appeared.

With the sun almost down and the wind howling, we scrambled to make camp. Nothing holds the heat on this stretch of earth, so temperatures plummet from the mid-60s to freezing in about an hour. We went to bed in long pants and hats.

By early morning our tents had become ovens; we hurried back into summer clothes.

Another two hours of dumb luck thrashing across the Salar was interrupted by a Bolivian army troop at an isolated military outpost pointing guns at us and demanding to see our passports. Eventually, we landed in the rocky, hilly desert.

DESERT LIFE
The desert supports a handful of species, from the usual (foxes) to the exotic (vicunas, a type of llama) to the surreal (pink flamingos).

But all that became somewhat unimportant as we scrambled to find a place to camp, eventually settling near a mountain that blocked the wind.

And then, on day three, on a steep incline in the middle of nowhere, the salt-encrusted engine of the Land Cruiser quit.

But luck was on our side. The Toyota started back up, and miraculously, we encountered a guided group. What’s more, the guide had the exact fuel filter we needed. (Sensing he had the market cornered, he jacked up the price to $4.)

On our final day, we drove south, past geysers that rival those of Yellowstone, to the Lagunas Colorado and Verde. And then, the jackpot: the hot springs. At 6:30 a.m., we shed our clothes and tip-toed through 40-degree air and over crackling ice to slink into the thermal waters.

Aaaaaah.