Trip down the Altiplano. Part one. Dead end of civilization development. Walking Bare foot down the Sky. Extra terrestrial experience. Unreal reality.

I was planning to go to Uyuni town from La Paz. I wanted to find a guide and go to the Bolivian border through the salt lake and Salvador Dali desert.
Takaoka is the Japanese guy I met in Peru. He was following the same way several hours ahead. He said it took him more than 20 hours because all the roads were washed out, so he advised me to find another way.

I was told there was a rail road to Ururu. However, on the station they told me I couldn’t buy tickets because of some riots there. Indians blocked some parts of the rail road so nobody was let through. Yeah, something was happening because I noticed military patrols near government buildings.

Anyways, I thought that Indians could not stop me :) I passed the ceremony to become human-condor :) I took the bus… I turned to be more lucky than Takaoka because it took me only 18 hours. Although, they initially promised it to be only 11…

I easily found a car and an explorer to bring me further to the south.

Juan was waiting on me with his 4x4 next morning. He was ready for the trip with all the food and gasoline cans on the roof… I was surprised that his car was equipped with audio system supporting USB. I plugged in my music!!!

Aeeeeeee!!! You can’t even image the great feeling of riding a 4x4 down the desert when your head is put out the window and you choke with the air with the vibes of Tsoy or Bi-2!!! “Bolshie goroda… v kotoryh nikogda… ty ranshe ne byvala… Polkovniku nikto… ne pishet… polkovnika nikto…” (Big cities… you’ve never been to… Nobody drops a line to the colonel… The colonel is not waited by anybody…”

Our first stop was the trains cemetery… I saw an amazing picture as soon as we got there: there was the desert and a pile of rusty metal… That was the metal that was functioning hundred years ago… There are even short leftovers of rail road there… The rail road to Nowhere… I looked inside the locomotives and saw furnaces that burnt coal hundred years ago… Now it’s abandoned… I had a spooky feeling… That definitely was a dead end of civilization development… That looked like a scene from “Kin-Dza-Dza” or “Mad Max”…

Then we went to the Salty Lake… I had seen a deep white line on the horizon when we were very far from it… As soon as we approached it the line went bigger… My brain restarted when we reached it… Just imagine… Everything is deep white around you… It’s white till the horizon… It’s white like a snow field… The only other things in the picture are the sky and the heat… My brain restarted several times and that wasn’t enough to believe the white thing was salt not snow…

Getting ready to cross the salt lake

We were going down Solaris… I leaned from the car… My eyes were stuck by the whiteness… The taste of salt appeared on my lips… I felt like I was on a sea… The wind trifled my hair and I greedily swallowed the salty air…

Well, that was just a beginning… Couple kilometers later I saw something that really confused me… All the reality meters and my brain got frozen… There was water on the salt… There were only a couple centimeters of water… However, that water formed a giant mirror… The mirror with the sky and the clouds in it…

Hey, the sky inhabitants...


So you go… and you can’t see the end of the earth and the beginning of the sky… You can’t see the salt… It looks like you go down the clouds… I went crazy because of the seen things… I left the car… and started to run bare foot on the water… I felt the spiny salt crystals with my feet… I ran… jumped… and screamed: “I go down the clouds”… “I reached the sky!” “Gods, I’m here!” I just lost my mind...

Here it is… the sky...


Salt production


That's how the diary is being written...


The clouds are striked by head


Wind and Windmill :)


After I got enough of jumping and screaming we continued our trip… We visited Isla de Pescada with its giant cactuses… I don’t know the reason for my being obsessed with those big cactuses :)))





Then we went through the salaries where the surface changed again… there was no water any more… There only was dry salt with bizarre cracks… They lasted till the very horizon… It felt like we were on a Venus-mobile on the planet of Venus… The landscape was just unearthly…

We went further in a rush to leave the lake before the sunset… The sun went down the horizon… That was one more time when my eyes saw the picture contradicting with usual reality… The sky was dark… but the salt on the bottom was shining with white light… It seemed like the whole world was turned upside-down… The darkness was on the top and the light was on the bottom…

After 70 kilometers Juan pointed to the coast… When were close to the lake end I dropped 5 sol coin to the whiteness of salaries… I made a wish…

Part two: Life between 4 and 5 thousand meters of attitude.