Overland to Uyuni II

Day two of our tour took us from our refuge at Laguna Colorado to a salt hotel just a few km from the edge of the Salar, passing through some spectacular desert scenery and past yet more oddly-coloured lagunas. It's a little hard to remember, after seeing your thousandth flamingo, that these creatures don't ever crop up at home, and not to start taking them for granted; but still they seemed a lot less photogenic on Day 2 than they had on Day 1. (Ironically, however, Day 2 granted us the opportunity to get a lot closer than Day 1, and resulted in my best shot of one all tour, below. Possible moral: shoot first, get jaded later?)

The highlight of Day 2, though, wasn't the scenery, as spectacular as it was. Rather, it was our driver rescuing what was in danger of becoming a bit of a tedious ride, with altitude-induced headaches and stomache-aches rampant, laguna fatigue setting in, and radio silence hitherto ruling the day, by queueing up, when we got back into the jeep after some photo stop or other, the most awesome collection of mp3s from his phone to the jeep stereo. It began with a song in spanish by ABBA, the sheer incongruity of which gave everyone a jolt of exuberant energy, and continued with a selection of English 80s pop classics followed by their very liberally translated spanish cover versions that ratcheted up our collective energy level such that we were in high spirits by the time we reached our salt hotel. The sing-along hits included two classics by Roxette, Don't Stop Believing, Dust in the Wind, Lady in Red, and a bunch of others I sadly can't remember now but thought awesome at the time. Seriously, it was touch and go there for a while, but Pedro pulled us through in style.

The "road". Pedro maintained that driving wherever he wanted was
one reason why he loved his country more than mine.
He has a point, I think.

Ye olde Arbol de Piedra, or Stone Tree. Likely
indistinguishable from the five million identical
photos on Flickr, but what are you gonna do.

Actually _using_ wipers is for suckers.

Planet Earth, or so they would have you believe.

Chillin' lakeside at our lunch stop.

The money shot, for those without anything greater than a 200mm lens.

Taking a breath

Well, my partner in crime arrives tomorrow morning, and for a month we will be traveling together from Buenos Aires all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, and back up again as far as Bariloche. Thus does the first phase of my journey come to an end, i.e. the Northern Chile and Argentina Solo Tour. I'm sitting around in a Buenos Aires hostel waiting for 2pm to roll around so I can check in and freshen up after my 20 hour bus ride from Salta, and am going dizzy sorting through photos of Bolivian lagunas and flamingos which pictures all start to look the same after a while, and so to give myself a break I thought I'd put a few words down dealing less with the Who, What, and Where and more with the So What. Lessons and impressions thus far, if you will. (Updates re the What etc. will pick up where they left of, not to worry; as for looking forward, I'm going to keep those musings to myself if you don't mind.)

First: traveling solo was tougher than I expected almost all the way along until I got to Argentina. Santiago was alright in terms of finding people to meet, but in the smaller towns (La Serena, San Pedro, and Uyuni), it was trickier (the three-day Salar de Uyuni tour was an obvious exception, but those folks all lit out for La Paz as soon as the tour ended so I didn't have them to hang out with post-tour). Possibly the difficulty is related to my avoidance of  the youngest and/or most party-oriented hostels. But I like being able to sleep when I go to bed, and anyway I wasn't really looking to meet the folks who hang around the hostel playing pool and drinking all day. Also San Pedro, for example, has people going on all sorts of excursions all day, often returning late in the evening; so even the active people weren't necessarily around to bump into. So maybe my itinerary also played a role; maybe solo folks don't so much go to small towns in the middle of the desert. At any rate, my sense is meeting fellow travelers is easiest while actually in motion: on buses or trains, in departure lobbies/lounges, in interminable lines at border crossings, or in the back of a jeep as you bounce down a dirt road towards something scenic. I don't know if it was just luck or what but virtually everybody I encountered in those situations in Chile and Bolivia was traveling as a couple. It made for fine conversation at the time, but the encounters weren't so easily converted to plans for dinner or drinks or sharing a cab or coordinating hostels. It was literally on the Argentinian border that things changed: I got off the train from Uyuni, was immediately accosted by two solo travelers who had met on the train, wanting to know if I'd split a cab with them to the border (I did); and then in line for immigration, we met a trio of other gringos who had glommed together under similar circumstances. And, as the gringo line -- which consisted of the six of us -- was by far the slowest one to be processed, we had plenty of time to chat and decide we enjoyed each other's company, and so we coordinated taking the same bus to Salta, staying together, and going out together that night and the next night. And when they left, I had no trouble finding another solo traveler in my hostel to accompany me out my last night. So I don't know if maybe Chile is for couples, or what, but all I know is it's been nice to have folks to hang out with in the evenings here in Argentina.

Second: at least seventy percent of tourists in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina are French. You can instantly tell if people are French because they all invariably have coats or packs by Quechua, which must be the French equivalent of MEC, or what MEC used to be, maybe, in the good old days. Also their guidebooks have French on the cover, which is an even more obvious giveaway. And finally, they smoke more than any other tourists. There have been a smattering of Canadians and a couple of Americans, but really, the French seem to have the biggest role in keeping the South American tourist industry afloat. (Though in Argentina, Argentine tourists may challenge them for that title -- there are a hell of a lot of domestic tourists here, likely for currency exchange-rate reasons.)

Third: the people of Chile are just plain cool. All of them. I want to be friends with them. They're not a condescending, stylistically sophisticated or particularly in-the-know sort of cool, either. It's more that they all seem laid back, and smile easily, and they speak lazy Spanish (dropping s's like galileo dropped the orange, to mangle a phrase) that sounds more relaxed than sloppy. I haven't interacted with enough Argentines yet to massively generalize about them, but I'll let you know when I do.

Fourth: taking the front row of a schmancy bus has its benefits and its drawbacks. Pros: more legroom, massive panoramic view, first to be served snacks/meals/tea/wine/whiskey. Cons: sound interference from the driver's radio; at dusk, an alarmingly loud and constant patter of large bugs smashing into the windshield. On the way here I had such a seat, but eventually switched to one further back for these reasons plus the fact that my seat didn't recline quite as far as it should have. It turned out, too, I had a better, less oblique view of the LCD screen showing movies, which was a nice plus. So, final lesson learned: front row great during the day, not so great overnight.

Overland to Uyuni I

The final tour I booked in San Pedro was a one-way trip through the lagunas, volcanoes, deserts and rocks of southwestern Bolivia to the Salar de Uyuni. If San Pedro was weird, the scenery here was just indescribable, and I won't even really try. Definitely, this is the strangest landscape I've ever been to, and short of visiting deep sea thermal vents and all the freaky critters they support, or actually making it to another planet (both of which eventualities seem extremely unlikely) I don't think I could possibly find myself anywhere more otherworldly.

For the detail-oriented among you: I booked with Estrella del Sur tours, one of only two companies running out of San Pedro that had a majority of positive reviews (the other is Cordillera; the various other outfitters have received a range of complaints from vehicle breakdown through to selling you off to another agency when their jeep isn't completely full). Our trip was fantastic: our vehicle was problem-free and our driver safe, sober, friendly and knowledgeable; the food was both overabundant and tasty, if not gourmet; and our salt flat hotel was located in a village and not in the middle of the flats, mitigating my concerns about its environmental impact (the one(s) in the middle of the Salar need to truck in absolutely everything and have problems disposing of waste).

The pix here cover the sights from Day 1, which started in San Pedro and made it, via the Lagunas Blanco and Verde, a thermal bathing pool, and a field of volcanic vents, to Laguna Colorado, where we stayed in a very basic but totally serviceable hostel/refuge.

Least official border crossing ever. Bienvenidos a Bolivia!

Fox at the border. Rare sighting, so they said,
but with the garbage thereabouts maybe less rare
than elsewhere.

Laguna Blanco, and the first of a billion flamingos. 

Thermal hot spring. Very enjoyable, especially as we were not there in
the thickest of the crush of other tours.

Boiling lava, or water, in one of many open vents of the Sol de Mañana
volcano/geyser field.

Laguna Colorado. That white back there is borax,
not salt. No idea about the red, green, black or grey,
but whatever they are, the flamingos didn't seem
too concerned.

Laguna Colorado.

Valle de la Luna, San Pedro

The other tour I took in San Pedro was to the Valle de la Luna, essentially into the centre and along the spine of some of the crinkliest of the desert scenery thereabouts. This tour started in the afternoon so as to give us the opportunity to watch the sunset from a long a ridge.

It turns out the crinkles are in fact sedimentary layers of volcanic ash and petrified salt, that were pushed up out of the floor of the desert a few million years ago and subsequently saw water and wind erode them into their current forms. There were a few impressive sand dunes, and a cave where you could head the ridge crinkle as it contracted in real-time due to the subsiding of the daytime heat, and some weirdo rock formations, until finally we climbed up a giant sand dune and long a ridge to find a perch from which to watch the sunset. This was the point at which San Pedro turned from pretty cool to very awesome for me. The geysers had been pretty bizarre, but this very informative and very spectacular excursion really took things to the next level.

Herewith, some photos from the Valle de la Luna tour. As always, click to enlarge.

Géiseres del Tatio

The first tour I took in San Pedro was to the Géiseres del Tatio, a field of geysers, fumaroles, and hot springs some 100km from San Pedro. Because the geysers are most impressive at dawn, when the air is still cold enough for the water vapour to be visible, and because the road there isn't paved, the tour buses pick you up at 4am and bump you along for nearly two hours before getting to the star attraction. It's cold as hell at 4000m above sea level, pre-dawn, but well worth the discomfort. Herewith, a few photos from that morning.

Click to enlarge.

 

The two San Pedros

Click the photos for bigger versions.

View from the bus, for hours on end.

More crinkly view from the bus, nearing the town of San Pedro.
That low plateau in the distance is not a lake; it's a salt flat.

San Pedro, patron saint of Chile's innumerable street dogs.

Spot the locals. (Just kidding; there aren't any.)

Atacama, desert and San Pedro de

When I woke up in the morning on the bus a few hours yet from San Pedro de Atacama, I opened my blinds a crack to see a barren stony wasteland stretching to a horizon broken only occasionally by brownish, equally parched hills. This was the Atacama desert, which stretches for over 1000km up the coast of Chile from a few hours north of La Serena straight on to Peru. Chile, I should mention, is as long as Canada is broad. The Atacama also stretches up over the Andes and into Bolivia and Argentina, though it may be called something different there. It is awesome and brutal in the original senses of both words.

San Pedro de Atacama, on the other hand, is (from the tourist’s point of view, and it’s very difficult to get any other point of view as a visitor there), a charming but horrid little oasis village which serves as the base of operations for all explorations of the desert’s more exotic features. Charming, because it’s all adobe, and wood signs, and a white-washed church; horrid, because aside from the church absolutely everything was tourist oriented. The adobe-walled, wood-signed shops are all, and I mean all, tour operators, overpriced restaurants, accommodation, or artesania stalls, and the only people in the streets are people with backpacks or people trying to win those people’s business. And in the downtime between excursions, you’ve got no choice but to wander the streets yourself. Or at least I didn’t: my hostel, while clean, safe, and friendly (and, for some reason, occupied almost entirely by French tourists, either couples or solo travelers), didn’t have the kind of spaces necessary for relaxing in either the heat of the day or the cold hours after the sun went down, i.e. indoor common space.

A word about the cold, for the curious: it’s cold, but it’s not, like, frigid. Probably got down to –5ish outside, most nights. Not as cold inside, though there was no heating, obviously. In other words not a big deal for Canadians (well, except Vancouverites, maybe), assuming they remember how to dress for the weather. I have no idea if it varies over the course of the year.

I spent three days in San Pedro, took a couple of little tours into the landscape that revealed all sorts of serious amazing weirdness hidden out of sight of the highway (about which tours expect future posts), and that was enough time there for me. I missed one or two things, and especially regret not having the chance to take a tour of the night sky, but it was approaching a full moon so the stars were not so spectacular anyway (he told himself by way of consolation). I left the town early Tuesday, bound for a three-day adventure in and around the Bolivian Salt Flats. I didn’t know it then, but I was going from weird to totally insane – not, mind you, in the original sense of the word.

SuperCama

Here is what you get when you book a “Cama Premium” or “Ejecutivo” or “SuperExtremeLuxury” seat or whatever they call the absolute top of the line on the Chilean bus company you’re traveling with:

• A wider seat
• A seat back that reclines just about 100% flat
• A leg-rest that not only folds into the legs-extended position as described earlier, but also flips up to a horizontal position, in line with the seat
• No-one beside you, if you go for the single-seat side of the bus
• A little mattress that an attendant will unfold for you when you desire to go to sleep and place on top of your now-horizontal seat-plus-leg-rest to make things that much more comfortable
• Pillow, blanket, and breakfast, as with most of the other classes, I believe
• Only six people in your section of the bus. The lower section, admittedly, making for a slightly inferior view, but you’ll be too busy sleeping to notice.

This was extremely exciting to me, given that nothing even remotely like this is available in Canada, and the ride from La Serena to San Pedro was 18 hours.

Pisco Elqui, or, the road not taken

The city of La Serena is not merely known for its proximity to the ocean. It is also known as the base for exploring the Valle d’Elqui, one of Chile’s most fertile regions and its undisputed capital of pisco production. Pisco is, as you might guess from the name, the key ingredient in the pisco sour, Chile’s national drink and source of much alleged friction with Peru, who also claim it as their own. Whether this friction persists today, I have no idea, but once upon a time it was sufficiently urgent for Chile to stake some incontrovertible claim to the name that they summarily renamed some town in the region from whatever it used to be to “Pisco Elqui”, and so it continued to be called today.
Whatever the case, numerous touring outfits in La Serena were offering pricey guided tours of the region, hitting all sorts of highlights for ten minutes apiece. Yours truly thinking himself a savvy independent (and not insignificantly frugal) traveler, decided that he could save a bundle by just taking the bus to the most distant point on the tour and the highlight of the region, the aforementioned Pisco Elqui, wandering around for a bit, and then bussing back. And so it went, just fine and dandy up the first part of the valley, which is incredibly scenic and all the more striking because though the landscape consists of semi-arid, brown scrubby mountains, the floor of the valley and the lower slopes of the hills are all given over to intensive agriculture and are carpeted in lush green vineyards (pisco is, they tell me, a type of grape).

Pisco vineyards near Pisco Elqui.

I got on the bus in La Serena at around 11am, so by the time we hit the towns in the upper part of the valley, it was probably closing on 1pm. This, undoubtedly, explains the sudden influx of school kids onto the bus at that point. At each village probably twenty students would get on, filling any free seats and then cramming into the aisle (I should mention this was a minibus, with maybe 20 seats) . The resulting decrease in visibility, and the corresponding increase in chatter, clatter, and excitement all around me made it impossible – impossible, I tell you! – to determine where we were, and so of course I missed my stop. It was one of those situations where you have a mounting sense of your ship having sailed without you, so to speak, and eventually it becomes unbearable and you swallow your pride and shuffle apologetically through the crowd with your very foreign day-pack and ask the driver in imperfect Spanish to confirm what you already know, and he does, and the bus slows, and stops for an instant to let you out and then rolls on and away, and you are on a dusty road some unknown distance from your one-intersection destination and you take a swig of water and begin.
And it would have been fine – I was only probably half a kilometer out of town, as it turned out – except that, somehow, I managed to miss the town entirely, and walk for another half hour, probably, back down the valley. And it was fine for fifteen minutes – recall, I had no idea of precisely where I was or how for the town should have been – but then it got slightly worrisome, because surely I hadn’t missed it by _that_ much. And then finally the road turned and I looked back and I could see Pisco Elqui nestled snugly into the hillside back _up_ the road, about where I’d started walking, in fact. It was both heartening and very deflating to see my destination for certain and yet to see it so far off, and uphill. With another swig of water, I started back.
It would have been tough going indeed, but luckily after five minutes I came across a gaggle of middle-aged women out of their luxury SUVs ogling the view up the valley; one of them spoke very good English and offered me a lift the rest of the way, which I gratefully accepted. They were from Vina del Mar, near Santiago, and would be spending a few days at one of the numerous very well-apppointed residenciales in Pisco. We made very pleasant small talk, arrived in Pisco in no time at all, and I thanked them profusely before heading off to explore the village and its legendary pisco distillery. It was all very nice, and the ride home was uneventful.

Mistral pisco distillery, Chile's oldest.

La Serena, the City by the Ocean!

From Santiago I moved up the coast to La Serena, an ocean-side town some six hours away by bus. Up the Panamericana I went, through mainly scrubby semi-desert with occasional breathtaking vistas of the coast. I opted to go with Tur-Bus, one of the two giant national chains (the other being Pullman) instead of one of the possibly cheaper myriad local options because I bought my ticket onward from La Serena to San Pedro at the same time and didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of two language-barrier-impeded transactions, let alone two lines and two differing definitions of what certain classes of travel constitute (there are a variety of options, and though their names are used by all the companies their implementation can differ dramatically). And so, I opted for semi-cama to La Serena, which on Tur-Bus meant a kind of glorified reclining greyhound seat with an extra leg support section, to allow you to get into the position that a stick figure on an economy airline seat numbering system might take: reclining somewhat, legs kicked out a bit. All in all quite comfy if sleeping is not a priority. For San Pedro, I went all out with Super Premium Cama or Cama Ejecutivo or whatever they actually call their top-0f-the-line offering that literally (seriously, though, really literally) gives you a bed on the bus. It was absolutely worth the extra cost; but details will have to wait for a future post.
And so: La Serena. The resort town is in fact comically distant from the actual ocean. There is La Serena, the city, and there is a godawful row of hotels on a nice if unexceptional beach, and there is a walk that takes no less than thirty minutes to get from one to the other.  Why the former even bothers to stake a claim to the latter is a mystery to me, though I understand Chilean tourists pack the place in summer. Not a mystery at all was why, despite being dimly aware of the distances involved (my sources pegged it as a twenty-minute walk, which I defy anyone to achieve), I elected to visit the ocean anyway. I blame Toronto. No, that’s not fair. I blame all land-locked cities. Surely it is not just me among their denizens who is unable to resist the siren call of the ocean when it beckons from so close at hand. Waves! Vastness! Salty air! When it requires just walking straight for twenty minutes to reach the confluence of all these and more, how could I resist? How could anyone who doesn’t live daily in their presence? Of course I made my way down that car-dealership-lined avenue, past construction sites, junk lots and (weirdly) a university. Of course, after twenty minutes, with the buildings at the shore still looking dishearteningly hazy, I stubbornly marched on. Having come so close, I was going to see that ocean, dammit; so help me I was going to bury my toes in that beach’s sand. At last I prevailed, and sat down heavily in the sand, and drank it all in, and gathered my strength, and got right back up and marched all the way back to the city proper so as not to miss my bus out of town. Long story short: not worth the trouble, but really, it’s not like I had a choice.

Santiago

I made it! After the months and weeks of preparing, and waiting, and then being so busy that the final approach of my departure snuck up on me before I could even catch my breath, I boarded the red-eye direct for Santiago. This after sitting distracted with anxious anticipation through Thanksgiving dinner, on account of the fact that I was leaving hit me for real maybe only an hour prior to the guests arriving, when I finally got around to making the necessary banking preparations.
And so: Santiago. Stayed at the Andes Hostel, which I recommend for its proximity to metro Bella Vista, Plaza de Armas, and Bellavista neighbourhood – which latter I didn’t get around to visiting and will have to hit when I’m back in the city in December. It was clean, it was spacious, it had a kitchen, and it was positively dominated by Brazilians, who glom onto each other more quickly and enthusiastically than any people I’ve ever seen. It was kind of hilarious to witness the progression from awareness to determined eavesdropping to confirmation of nationality to best-buds-for-life that took place when new arrivals entered the orbit of the Brasileros who were sharing my room. Somehow I was brought into the fold as well, despite speaking precisely two words of Portuguese (the not-to-be-confused “caipirinha” and “capoeira”), and to her credit one of my roommates did an excellent job of translating until well into the later stages of the evening.
As for the city itself, I found it shockingly easy to feel comfortable there. Granted, I confined myself to the historical centre, and even to a pretty small area within that, but it was cleaner, quieter, and prettier than I was led to believe. After the seriously overprogrammed lead-up to my departure, I made a point of taking it super easy in my first few days, and other than some semi-aimless wandering the only real site I visited was the superb Museo del Arte Precolombino. That place was awesome. 6000-year-old tiny little mummies from the northern desert, gorgeous ceramics from all over Latin America and all through pre-colonial times, and these extremely imposing large wooden statues, dramatically lit, whose spirits have no doubt doomed me eternally for having taken their photographs. Which, if that is the case, means I might as well share the result before the desert comes alive and claims me for its own once I get to San Pedro de Atacama.

Burial statues hanging tough in the Museo del Arte
Precolombino, Santiago de Chile.