The Desert Trip

We arrived to Chile, San Pedro de Atacama after another never ending bus ride. Chile was a great surprise in the positive sense - things were working, on time, service was excellent and in general the feeling was very different from the other Spanish speaking countries we visited so far. Though we arrived to a village in the middle of the Atacama desert you could indulge in all the goodies one can dream of after a long bus ride: a hot shower, excellent restaurants, Internet and an extremely relaxing middle-of-nowhere feel. We did not plan to spend a long time there as the idea of going to the Atacama desert was mostly rooted in the idea of taking a 3 days 4 wheel drive jeep trip through the desert to Bolivia.

So we enrolled to one of the various gorgeous trips around San Pedro to see the moon-like landscape, the sunset and the rise of the full moon. Which was on the other hand preventing us to participate in the famous astrology expedition - as the Atacama desert being the driest place on Earth providing the clearest sky for astrological and astronomical studies. Check out the ALMA project, it makes me feel like starting to educate myself in astronomy and move there to participate in the research. Maybe we have a chance to hitchhike in the Galaxy some day and not rely only on our dearest friends, the dolphins :))) So the following morning we set on a trip for the coming 3 days during which we crossed the highlands of the Atacama desert, arriving to Uyuni in Bolivia.

So on the 16th of October 8am we were on front of the Bolivian travel agency waiting a good half an hour before anyone local arrived - so long Chile, welcome to Bolivia :) We departed finally around 9 am with a bus to the Bolivian border, where 2 jeeps were waiting for us - all together 12 people. The groups quickly developed into an Irish-English only group of 6 and into a more exciting cocktail of 2 Swiss, a Japanese, a Spanish, a Polish and of course one endangered specimen from Hungary. (South-America is also a place where the border guards are staring at my passport and looking for visa information for 10 minutes before admitting that I have the right to exist, moreover to enter their country without a visa.) During the first day we cruised through a volcanic landscape with lagoons colored by different minerals and beautiful pinkie flamingos. We also had the chance to submerge in a natural hot spring, strongly recommended by our guide as we could not hope for hot water for the rest of the trip... But I am not going to waste words on the first 2 days of the trip because I anyway could not describe them better than the photos.

BUT the third day! That was beyond my expectations; we woke up at 4 am to see the sun rising in the salt flat of Uyuni. Imagine 10 meters of pure salt with a surface resembling to a frozen lake except that it had huge cracks over its surface. And imagine that all you can see in 360 degree is the same whiteness with some volcanoes in the distance. And silence. So thick that you can touch it. And absolutely no life. I have never saw my shadow as long as 50 meters when the first rays of light made its way to the horizon! And when the sun finally raised it is so blinding, that you cannot keep your eyes open, it is as hot as in an oven and the sun roasts you despite of the 30 factor sunblock. Crazy. By 7 am we arrived to the Island of Fishermen, which is in the middle of the salt flat full of cactus of 10 meters high and hundreds of years old. We spent hours of staring into the whiteness, making crazy photos playing with the unusual visual effects the landscape offered. Finally we visited a former salt hostel on the edge of the flat which is effectively built of block of salt. To our amusement we came across 3 guys on bicycle crossing the desert and one of them was Polish!!! Yes, there are much more crazy people than we are...

Arriving in Uyuni after 5 days of Chilean and Bolivian deserts was a bullet in our heads and as a result all 6 of us shaken together in the jeep and sleeping in the same room throughout the entire trip decided not to split but collectively escape to Potosi. Only we were quite unprepared to take a bus ride without a road and to arrive to the city situated above 4000 meters, the highest city in the world :)