5am and I am looking around the village in the early morning light. There is electricity to the various houses, many with earth floors, and I am wondering what they do for heating. There is a general absence of chimneys on the houses and there are no trees in the desert area for fuel and although it’s cold, this is summer, what do they do in winter?
Anyway, we are off on the ‘road’ again, this time heading straight back to the frontier. We passed by the lakes and the hot spring we had stopped at on day one, most of us just looking forward to reaching the frontier in as short a time as possible.
We arrived and had breakfast prepared for us by the drivers as we prepared to join firstly the line of people at the Bolivian side before transferring to the minibus that would take us the short distance to the Chile border where again we had to complete an online form – at least they have a very effective internet at the border which having connected to on day one, connected quickly again and I was able to pick up on some emails that needed my attention. So at the border it took at least one and a half hours to be processed and additionally we lost an hour returning to Chile. At the Chile border, there was a comfortably heated toilet which was a great relief to the several sufferers with over active digestive systems.
However, once we got going again it was only a little over one hour back to San Pedro – down hill all the way. And this is where it started to get a bit hairy for us and one other in the party as we had both booked flights from Calama for that afternoon. For us, our pick up time at Vicuña Lodge was between 12 and 12.30. Fortunately, we persuaded the driver to drop us off first when we reached San Pedro, which meant we got to Vicuña Lodge at 12.10. Of course, we did not know if the transfer had been and gone. However, standing outside Vicuña Lodge, my phone re-connected to their internet and I was able to phone the company – however, no answer. As mentioned previously, Lily the proprietor noticed us outside in the sun and invited us into the shade of her AC office, which was welcome. Lo and behold at about 12.20 the transfer showed up and we made the journey back to Calama in time for a 3pm flight.
This was clearly too tight and had it not worked out favourably we would have been stuck in San Pedro, with no accommodation booked, we would have lost the flight and had to re-book for another day on top of which we would have had to track down a local office of a transfer company to get us to Calama. Even though there are plenty of flights daily out of these airports, they all seem to be pretty full, so who knows how challenging that could have been. The advice is clearly to either book a late flight out of Calama, or plan to stay the night in San Pedro on the day of return from the Uyuni trip. Who knows what calamities might have ensued on the return, a puncture, break-down, accident, problems at immigration – simply too many elements over which we had no control could have scuppered our return to Santiago. However, it did turn out favourably in this instance and the flight took off on time, much to our relief.
It was also a relief to return to Santiago and get down under 600m. Back to airbnb, a decent warm shower, get the clothes in the washing machine and just to rest and recover from the past week’s adventures.
So, what about Salar de Uyuni?
The glossy brochure images are all good depictions of what you will see and do on the trip. The key advice is acclimatisation. Well, I don’t know how one achieves this when one is trying to pack as much into the allotted time, or how long it takes to become acclimatised to such an altitude. Certainly, the majority of our party suffered in one way or another, headaches, tingling fingers, nausea, fever, stomach trouble. In addition to this there is a lot of distance to cover in the 4 days, over rough tracks for the most part. So when you are feeling less than well, this is becomes arduous. Whilst there are some toilet facilities available at some of the rest stops, the majority of the time it is ‘los baños de las Incas’. Being without internet for lengthy periods of time was surprisingly challenging too, particularly as this was not an aspect that concerned me prior to the trip, it just goes to show how much we generally rely on the internet for communication purposes. Just because one is travelling, it doesn’t mean that work/life etc. back home goes on hold. The accommodation was clean, acceptable, the food was also reasonable for that part of the world and for those who wanted to eat, no-one would end up being hungry. Little local shops were available for beer, water or snacks purchases. The people themselves were friendly and helpful. The drivers especially so. Although they were Spanish speakers and were not officially guides, the did very well at explaining the various places we visited, the history and the communities that we passed through. They were always amenable to stop for photo opportunities or for any other requests, although they did try to keep us to the required schedule.
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