The Bitterest Place on Earth: The Salar de Uyuni

It's the day after Valentine's Day. I didn't get anything. No, I'm not bitter. But I'm thinking about bitterness just the same.

I'm thinking about bitterness in the ways most people don't choose to think about it. Most folks regard bitterness as something negative, something ugly, something to be avoided--not something to be sought out and not anything you would pay to see or experience. But I'm sitting here thinking about the positive qualities of bitterness, about its beauty, its usefulness and even necessity of existence, its naturalness. I'm not trying to be perverse by turning the idea of bitterness on its head like this. I'm speaking of what I know, what I've seen and experienced for myself.

In the landlocked South American country of Bolivia--a country that often gets overlooked in favor of its more tourist-popular neighbors such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, a country that many people end up in simply for the purpose of passing through--there's a giant, blinding white expanse on the Altiplano, so large that astronaut Neil Armstrong was able to see it from space. Armstrong assumed the great white field to be a glacier. But the great white field is not ice--it's salt. The Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world.

Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia



Close-up and texture of salt flat

The Salar de Uyuni covers over 4,000 square miles on the Bolivian Altiplano in the southeastern portion of the country. It is all salt from edge to edge, a Sahara desert of the stuff. Call it the bitterest place on earth. To give those who have visited parks in the western U.S. a better sense of Salar de Uyuni's size, the great Bolivian salt desert is about 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

Salar de Uyuni sits at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet on the Altiplano. Once upon a time the salt flat was a vast lake, or more of an inland sea. Over many centuries the lake dried up in the high Andean altitude and formed the salt desert we see today. But underneath the salt, ranging from several inches to several feet below, a remnant of the ancient salt lake lies in the form of a brine lake of about 7 to 70 feet deep. The underlying brine lake is rich in salt (of course) as well as magnesium and lithium.The Salar de Uyuni is in fact home to the world's largest lithium deposits, containing over half of earth's lithium reserves. Salt is also harvested from the flats, and blocks of salt are cut out of parts of the desert and sold or even used to build salt hotels for the tourists who flock to the desert throughout the year.

Salt blocks on the salt flats

Tunupa Volcano, before approaching Salar de Uyuni

Tunupa Volcano, Salar de Uyuni side

The nearest geological neighbors of the Salar de Uyuni, apart from miles and miles of extremely rugged Bolivian roads, is a series of volcanoes. And in the center of the salt flat are several "islands" that are actually the tops of volcanoes long ago submerged in the ancient lake that formed Salar de Uyuni. Isla Incahuasi is the one they bring all the tourists to, and for good reason as its an impressively surreal little oasis. Covered with cacti and coral, the island is home to the very rare colonies of wildlife found on the salt flat, such as the viscacha, a chinchilla-like creature you'll see hopping and hiding among the cacti on the island.



Isla Incahuasi



Cacti on Isla Incahuasi




View of salt flat from Isla Incahuasi



Viscacha on Isla Incahuasi

For the most part though, the Salar de Uyuni is devoid of flora and fauna, being such an inhospitable landscape. Its a huge tourist draw for Bolivia, however. Everyone who comes to Bolivia, even those passing through on their way from Peru to Argentina, wants to see the salt flats. People risk signing up with the hundreds of not-so-reputable tour companies in La Paz, Uyuni, and Tupiza who will tell you anything you want to hear (of course your transport is heated, of course your accommodation will have showers and comfortable sleeping quarters, of course the jeeps are reliable--sign here please) just to get here. The reality for most tourists who sign up for Uyuni tours is several days of jeep breakdowns, lousy to pretty good food cooked by your driver, no access to phones, Internet service, radio, TV, or any news outlets at all, ice-cold basic (to put it mildly) accommodations with no running water, no heat, and spotty electricity service. (At my tour group's first night's accommodation, we pulled up to a pitch dark walled compound kind of place made of salt out of which a Bolivian came running, jumped onto a stone wall beside the house, and grabbed two electric cables and began trying to pull and duct tape them together. We had a dinner there that took about 2 hours to cook and during which the electricity kept going out, plunging us into total blackness as we tried to eat.) Why? What's the big draw to such a place? Well, for one the Salar de Uyuni is a fun place to play all kinds of photographic perspective games like this:

Indeed, a word of advice for those visiting the Salar de Uyuni: bring lots of water, bring a warm sleeping bag, and bring props.

But along with this kind of fun is an experience that people are usually told to avoid. Too much salt is bad for your health. Bitterness is bad for your health. Don't become bitter, don't ingest to much bitterness, look for the sweetness in life wherever you can. To come to the Salar de Uyuni, even for a few hours, is to surround yourself in nothing but salt and bitterness and thumb your nose at all the warnings against them. Standing on the salt flat, swallowed up by a vast, blinding white landscape, tourists are struck by not just how inhospitable and surreal this great bitter desert is, but also how beautiful. The Salar de Uyuni is after all a natural place, not a blight upon the earth--just as I suppose tears are a natural part of life, as much as smiles and laughter.



The vast Salar de Uyuni swallows up visitors.

 

Dancing out on the fields of the bitterest place on earth.

For me, the most beautiful aspect of the Salar de Uyuni is the Aymara people's story for how the place came to be--a very different story than the scientific one given above. The Aymara tell of the three volcanoes that skirt the Salar de Uyuni: Tunupa, Kusku, and Kusina. Long ago, the three volcanoes were giant people. Tunupa was married to Kusku and it wasn't long before she bore his child. But one day Kusku ran away with Kusina, abandoning his wife and their newborn son. Tunupa was nursing her baby when she learned of her husband's betrayal, and in her despair and heartbreak she cried a sea of tears that mixed with her breastmilk and flooded the plains of the Altiplano. Bolivians and tourists alike owe this extraordinary landscape, unlike anywhere else on the planet, to a nurturing mother's milk and a scorned bride's tears. That is a travel story for the day after Valentine's Day.