WEATHER: Rainy in the morning and 19C – Sunny in the afternoon and 22C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Getting to the salt flats was amazing
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Everyone was ‘off’ today and there was no ‘Christmas’ vibe.
WORD OF THE DAY: Bah Humbug
MERRY CHRISTMAS – HO HO HO
We woke to the sound of rain. Ho ho ho – bloody Merry Christmas. We had all day planned outside today and with the rain belting down it wasn’t shaping up to be a very merry day. Top that with me not being able to get onto Shelly and the girls on the phone my morning didn’t start too well. This was a major blow and I think that got me in the wrong frame of mind for Christmas. Add to the mix a sick roomie, really sick, I had a bad vibe that today was NOT going to be a great day. Things picked up after I made a phone call to Africa before we headed out in the 4x4 to head to the salt flats for the day. Jimbob would have been very proud of Kate, who had the ‘think positive’ attitude and pulled out her sunglasses and said the weather WILL improve. We drove for 40 minutes, to a small town where the salt was processed by families once it has been collected from the salt flats. This was where I had the opportunity to buy a pair of sunglasses, as apparently it was going to be bright out there. I had 3 options, a pair of Tiffany looking sunnies, a pair of Terminator sunnies and a pair of pink Poochie sunnies, so being the best of a bad lot I purchased the Poochie glasses for $4 to get me through the day. I am sure they are not UV protected, and will possibly burn my retina’s out, but at least I have a pair of sunnies. So after seeing the process of how the salt is processed to the final product.
From here our first stop was the salt mounds. This is where the workers are paid 10BOL (1.50) per mound to pretty much scoop the salt into piles ready for collection. The photos out here were already amazing and just like a Christmas day miracle, the rain had stopped and we could see blue sky coming in. Thank-you Kate for your positive thinking, which only enhanced the photos. The only down side was there was a lot of water from the morning and over nights rain, so we were limited to where we could walk (I guess you could have taken off your shoes) but I got some great photos here anyway. It really is an amazing place.
Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat at 10,582 square kilometers. It is near the crest of the Andes, and is elevated 3,656 meters above sea level. The Salar was formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes. It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with the average altitude variations within one meter over the entire area of the Salar. The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium. It contains 50 to 70% of the world's lithium reserves, which is in the process of being extracted. Of those, lithium is arguably most important as it is a vital component of many electric batteries. With estimated 9,000,000 tons (8,900,000 long tons; 9,900,000 short tons), Bolivia holds about 43% of the world's lithium reserves; [12] most of those are located in the Salar de Uyuni. Lithium is concentrated in the brine under the salt crust at a relatively high concentration of about 0.3%. It is also present in the top layers of the porous halite body lying under the brine; however the liquid brine is easier to extract, by boring into the crust and pumping out the brine.[13] The brine distribution has been monitored by the Landsat satellite and confirmed in ground drilling tests. Following those findings, an American-based international corporation has invested $137 million to develop lithium extraction. However, lithium extraction in the 1980s and 1990s by foreign companies met strong opposition of the local community. Despite their poverty, locals believed that the money infused by mining would not reach them. There is currently no mining plant at the site, and the Bolivian government doesn't want to allow exploitation by foreign corporations. Instead, it intends to build its own pilot plant with a modest annual production of 1,200 tons (1,200 long tons; 1,300 short tons) of lithium and to increase it to 30,000 tons (30,000 long tons; 33,000 short tons) tons by 2012.
The large area, clear skies and exceptional surface flatness make the Salar an ideal object for calibrating the altimeters of the Earth observation satellites. The Salar serves as the major transport route across the Bolivian Altiplano and is a major breeding ground for several species of pink flamingos. Salar de Uyuni is part of the Altiplano of Bolivia in South America. The Altiplano is a high plateau, which was formed during uplift of the Andes Mountains. The plateau includes fresh and saltwater lakes as well as salt flats and is surrounded by mountains with no drainage outlets.
The geological history of the Salar is associated with a sequential transformation between several vast lakes. Some 30,000–42,000 years ago, the area was part of a giant prehistoric lake, Lake Minchin. When it dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó Lake and Uru Uru Lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Salar de Uyuni. Salar de Uyuni spreads over 10,582 square kilometers, which is roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the United States. Lake Poopó is a neighbor of the much larger Lake Titicaca. During the wet season, Titicaca overflows and discharges into Poopó, which, in turn, floods Salar De Coipasa and Salar de Uyuni.
Underneath the surface of the Salar is a lake of brine 2 to 20 meters deep. The brine is a saturated solution of sodium chloride, lithium chloride and magnesium chloride in the water. It is covered with a solid salt crust with a thickness varying between tens of centimeters to a few meters. The center of the Salar contains a few "islands", which are the remains of the tops of ancient volcanoes which were submerged during the era of Lake Minchin. They include unusual and fragile coral-like structures and deposits that often consist of fossils and algae.
Salar de Uyuni is estimated to contain 10 billion tons (9.8 billion LT; 11 billion ST) of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons (25,000 long tons; 28,000 short tons) is extracted annually. All miners working in the Salar belong to Colchani's cooperative.
Our next stop was the Salt Hotel. As Salar de Uyuni attracts tourists from around the world and it is located far from the cities, a number of hotels have been built in the area. Due to lack of conventional construction materials, many of them are almost entirely (walls, roof, furniture) built with salt blocks cut from the Salar. The first such hotel was erected in 1993-1995, The Salt Hotel, in the middle of the salt flat. However, its location in the center of a desert produced sanitary problems, as most waste had to be collected manually. Mismanagement caused serious environmental pollution and the hotel had to be dismantled in 2002 but is now a museum and stop point before heading further onto the salt flats. This is where we stopped for lunch, that was prepared by a woman that travelled with us from Uyuni and it was a great spread of cooked chicken, vegetables, salad and potatoes. This is also where we got to start having a play around with the perspective photos and I have to tell you it is not as easy as it looks. I took a few with Omar and Paul and some ‘massive’ Oreo cookies and then we tried to play around with my Elmo that I bought, but was really hard and we gave up with the promise of putting on out thinking caps to try and get one with the red guy.
So with full bellies it was time to head further in again to the salt flats. As it is also a ‘highway’ as such it was cool to see trucks travelling on the horizon just like a normal road. It was certainly flat enough and wide enough to not hit/see another vehicle out there. It was so BRIGHT, if I didn’t have my Poochie glasses on I could see how it would be difficult to actually see.
With 2 other stops, this was where people got to go crazy with their perspective photos. There were Pringle boxes, decks of cards, dinosaurs, Oreo cookies, coke bottles and hairdryers to name a few props. I was a little disappointed as I didn’t get all the shots that I had hoped for and I this was one of sections of the trip that I really wanted to get some awesome photos I was really really disappointed. Anything that anyone took just didn’t work. I did get one good photo of Kate and I in a Pringle box and that is pretty much it. I was gutted. Add that to the crappy start and everyone a little off the whole day was a bit of a fizzer actually. Add the ingredients of missing god-daughters, a best friend and a glass of champagne in the hand; I think I really wanted to be anywhere but there.
There was a massive storm brewing, which the upside made for good photos with the white salt flats and the black storm clouds, but the downside was we had to haul arse to get off the flats, as they were holding a fair amount of water from the last days rain, we could literally get stuck if it rained too much. It was also due to the rain and the amount of water on the flats we weren’t able to visit fish island, but to be honest we had nearly been out all day, and I am not sure if we really needed to visit them anyway.
So with an hour and 45 minutes back to Uyuni it have me time for reflection and with the kind of day I had I was in that frame of mind where I was thinking of finishing the tour in 2 weeks in Santiago, doing something else for the 4 week gap I would have before picking the tour back up again in Rio. This was a BAD frame of mind, and I knew not to rush into the decision and that I was going to sleep on it before speaking to Mark, but this is what my Christmas day had descended down to. Not good thinking at all.
We did have one last stop 3 kilometers outside Uyuni and is connected to it by the old train tracks, the3 Train Cemetery, which is an antique train cemetery. The town served in the past as a distribution hub for the trains carrying minerals en-route to Pacific Ocean ports. The rail lines were built by British engineers arriving near the end of the 19th century and formed a sizeable community in Uyuni. The engineers were invited by British-sponsored Antofagasta and Bolivia Railway Companies, which is now Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia. The rail construction started in 1888 and ended in 1892. It was encouraged by Bolivian President Aniceto Arce, who believed Bolivia would flourish with a good transport system, but it was also constantly sabotaged by the local Aymara indigenous Indians who saw it as an intrusion into their lives. The trains were mostly used by the mining companies. In the 1940s, the mining industry collapsed, partly because of mineral depletion. Many trains were abandoned, producing the train cemetery. There are proposals to build a museum from the cemetery but have yet to have something officially done yet. It was pretty cool to walk around these old relics of the past that had just been abandoned. They were all rusted up, but the graffiti on the carriages was interesting to read with some comments on George Bush, to a love poem to crass words to tags. There was also a swing that had been built between 2 carriages and it was cool to just be swinging on it with the wind in my hair, a storm brewing, in the middle of nowhere in Bolivia on Christmas Day. A little surreal and liberating all at the same time.
We were back to the hotel just after 6pm and Gray had been cooking all day to get our Christmas Day dinner ready for us and what a spread it was. What that man can do with a gas burner and a portable oven is mind boggling. It was just a shame that the atmosphere of the group was about as exciting as watching paint dry, we all pretty much ate our dinner in silence before Gray cracked out the desserts, which was a mind boggling array of chocolate custard, chocolates, fruit and cheese and crackers. I’m not sure if we did actually thank Gray, so THANKYOU Gray and Mark for the effort that was out into Christmas dinner and a BIG sorry for the poor showing of gratitude, now that I think about it. It was a great meal, even if the company wasn’t as receptive.
So that was my Christmas Day – a mix of happy and not happy emotions. That is 2011 just about done and dusted for me and I am really looking forward to 2012. I have BIG and exciting things happening and I am just bursting to let the whole world know, but I just can’t let it out at the moment. I am just enjoying actually keeping a secret to myself, besides a small select few, reveling in it, the challenges it will bring and the massive change it will also make, I am up for it all and this is what I thought about as I laid my head on my pillow, it put a smile on my dial as I fell asleep.
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