The answers

Who? Me, six other MCC workers (both Bolivians and North Americans), and my friend Laura who came to visit me from the U.S.
When? April 4-13.
What? An “orientation trip”—MCC’s way to help us get to know Bolivia better by taking us to some other part of the country.
Why? Through museum visits, excursions, and meetings with other organizations, we learn more about the history, politics, and culture of the country we’re living and working in.
Where? This year’s trip was to the historic cities of Sucre (Bolivia’s constitutional capital) and Potosí (home of the mines that supplied Spain’s treasuries for centuries), and to the Salt Flats of Uyuni, where last entry’s picture was taken. (Scroll down to the May 19 entry to check it out.)

That picture was taken in a Jeep, into which we crammed the eight of us (plus our driver and tour guide, Noel) plus luggage and food supplies for a two-day tour of the salt flats. What looks like snow outside the car windows is actually 10 billion tons of salt—a layer up to 10 meters (over 32 feet) thick that, at 12,000 square kilometers (4,630 square miles), makes up the largest “salt desert” in the world. The sunglasses were to protect our eyes from the glare of an intense sun (at an altitude of 3.650 meters, or 11.9750 feet) reflecting off shimmery salt crystals. The orange-colored flowers hanging over the windshield of the Jeep were a personal touch of our driver’s. (Readers who have visited other parts of Latin America have probably seen something similar in public buses : garlands of artificial flowers, words of blessing, figures of saints.)

The following is adapted from a reflection I wrote for MCC on our tour of the salt flats:

Thursday the 10th and Friday the 11th: two days of contrasts. Entering the town of Uyuni, mud-brick houses on the edges of town started giving way to modern cafes and pizza parlors in the tourist area. There were visual contrasts: by day in the salt flats, the opposition between the salt’s endless whiteness and the deep blue of the sky; by night, the absolute darkness of the sky, perforated by millions of stars. There were temporal contrasts as well, such as seeing the millenarian cactuses of the Island of Inca Huasi after having sung along to classics of the ‘80s while traveling in our 20th-century Jeep. Other contrasts were harder to process: in the town of Colchani we rubbed elbows with people who collect and process the salt, selling for rock-bottom prices; as we left, we joined the dozens of other tourists, who had probably paid more for that day’s tour than those salt collectors earn in months…

In the late afternoon we pulled into the small town of Atulcha, where we would spend the night in a “salt hotel.” This is just what it sounds like, and is hard to believe until you see it with your own eyes : everything possible is made of salt. The walls are salt blocks; the floor is a layer of rough salt crystals; the beds are carved out of solid salt (with mattresses and bedding on top). The tables and stools in the dining room: you guessed it, all made of blocks of salt. (Zulma, one of our group, had us going for a while saying that the toilets were made of salt too, but this proved false—they were regular ceramic. Oh, well!)

Before supper, though, some of us decided to go exploring. We took some pictures of out lengthening shadows against the spare landscape, then wandered around the village, debating about whether the wolves and wildcats our tour guide had told Zulma about were real or a scare tactic so we wouldn’t wander off too far and get lost in the wilderness. On our way back we ran into two other group members, Lindsey and Chris, playing volleyball with the town’s two schoolteachers, and I joined them until the light failed. I never even learned their names, but I felt I’d needed a moment like that—a human touch to balance the impersonal feeling of being a tourist.

The eight of us crowded into one of our rooms that night at the hotel, and as we sat on the salt beds we talked about the day’s experiences. Two comments I especially remember were from Zulma and my friend Laura. Zulma commented on the fact that many Bolivians never have a chance to be tourists in their own country—to participate in a tour like this and get to know this part of her country for the first time was, for her, a privilege. Laura commented on the group itself—how she’d felt welcomed and been impressed with how its members treated with respect the people with whom we’d come in contact (an attitude not always demonstrated by tourists). I took that as a real compliment.

The next day was full of wonders: watching the sun rise over the salt flats; driving past herds of llamas and guanacos; coming within three feet of mummies of the Pre-Incaic period in the cave where they were found some years ago; seeing flamingos wading in a lagoon at the base of a dormant volcano; watching oxigenated water bubble up from between the layers of salt. Just before our Jeep drove off the edge of the salt flat to return to civilization, I looked back and tried to remember what I’d seen, knowing it was something I’d always remember but never quite experience the same way again.

Here are some more interesting facts on the Uyuni Salt Flats, from Wikipedia and a newspaper article I found online:

- 40,000 years ago, the area that is now the Uyuni Salt Flat was covered by Lake Minchin (also known as Lago Ballivián). The Cooipasa Salt Flat and lakes Poopó and Uru Uru are also vestiges of this enormous prehistoric lake. Uyuni is roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the United States.
- The origin of the name Uyuni is somewhat obscure. Some believe it comes from the Aymara word Uyu, which means “house” o “yard,” because Aymara-speaking tradespeople and cattle herders used to come through this area asking for lodging with the words Uta uyunipa.
- The salt flats are made up of approximately 11 layers that are between 2 and 10 meters thick. The surface layer of salt is 10 meters thick, but the Uyuni salt flat is a total of 120 meters deep, with layers of brine and mud.
- One of the minerals found in the salt flats, ulexite, is known as the “television stone” because it is transparent and has the power to refract on its surface the image of what’s beneath it.
- Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, the Uyuni Salt Flats make an ideal target for the testing and calibration of remote sensing instruments on orbiting satellites used to study the Earth.
- Compasses are not reliable inside the salt flats; the needle “goes crazy” because of the high mineral concentration.
- With approximately 60,000 visitors a year, the Uyuni Salt Flats are one of Bolivia’s main tourist destinations.