After a slightly prolonged stay in Sucre over the Easter week-end, during which the city was nearly completely shut down (mainly due to the regional and local elections on Easter Sunday), we made our way via Potosi towards the famous salt lake near Uyuni.
Potosi's "Cerro Rico", with hole like a Swiss cheese, literally a mountain of silver, has brought fame and fortune to the one-time largest (and probably richest) city in South America. Now it is compared (by the New Yorker) to the blighted Detroit: the glory days long gone, the city is a shining illustration of Bolivia's economic troubles.
After a lulling strip of brand-new asphalt, the road turned into a disastrous gravel road, announcing the tone for the days to come. Uyuni the village is very forgettable, we stocked up on water and food,...
...got the undercarriage of the car fumigated with diesel fuel (against the effects of the salt) and headed out to the salt flat.
What a fun day! Cruising around the white expanse, guided only by GPS coordinates pulled off the Internet or given to us by fellow overlanders, is a unique experience! With no "roads" to follow, you can make your own way, keeping a watchful eye on other 4x4s racing by.
Going a 100km/h for 50km without touching the steering wheel feels like flying, especially when the white ground and the sky start to merge in your vision. Very happy we made it here!
The Salar turned out to be the easy part. Our ambition was to cross through the desert of South-Western Bolivia to the Chilean Atacama desert and its oasis at San Pedro de Atacama. The map showed some sort of road, leading past lagunas, thermal features and fancy rock formations, always at altitudes above 4500m.
For fellow overlanders who want to follow us in our tracks: be warned! The gravel road, when it actually exists, is of the severe "washboard" type. In many areas, there are just tracks of previous vehicles, sometimes in deep sand, sometimes through vast fields of sharp and pointy rock-bits (eating away at the tires). Salty surfaces can be treacherous, there might be water and some sort of sticky slime underneath: to your shovels!
Another essential item is a good collection of GPS coordinates marking the waypoints from the exit of the Uyuni Salar to the Chilean border: in the absence of a road, of any sort of signs, or anyone to ask for directions, we would have run out of supplies before finding the way ourselves. I'll post the points we used (thanks to the Robin family who provided them to us) in the Infos & Tips for Travelers section.
Finally, a word of caution concerning the climactic conditions on the Altiplano: during the day, the sun burns through all but the highest-grade sun blockers in minutes; at night, temperatures drop well below 0°C.
While we were comfortably resting in our sleeping bags, the (water-infested) Diesel froze, calling for a messy procedure in the morning to evacuate the gooey stuff from fuel lines and filters. Use additives or put a little gasoline in the (Diesel) tank before heading out on this trip!
After all these cautionary tales, let's make clear that this was a truly adventurous and exciting trip, traveling through fantastic landscapes during the daylight hours, staying overnight in the complete wilderness with the clearest night sky ever witnessed (hardly any dark spots remaining between the billions of stars).
Now that we've had a decent meal and a warm shower in San Pedro, we're quite proud of our achievement: more than 600km off-road (and I really mean off any sort of road) in 4 days, with only minor technical troubles, through rough terrain and climates: way to go, team!
Our next destination will be the Mendoza wine region in Argentina, some 1500 km from here, hopefully on a perfect asphalt strip ;-)
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