A Stark Flamboyance
Extremes in climate and beauty accompany a road trip across the largest salt flat in the world: Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
by Shruthi Lapp
After weeks spent mummified in layers of down and wool, I peel away four layers of socks to let my toes breathe. I let out a gasp as I see my feet for the first time in almost a month. Every inch of skin is peeling, and my toes look like some sort of rodent has been gnawing at them.
I laugh.
Bolivia has a way of pushing you around, hardening you until you crack, and then removing layers that leave you raw but stronger.
Just a few weeks ago we were in the hot Peruvian jungle, and these past few nights have been a bone chilling journey up, to, and across, the altiplano, leaving us painfully aware of how unprepared we were for the altitude and cold.
I believe the word ‘surreal’ was created on the Salar de Uyuni. Enormous groups of flamingos, called a flamboyance, noisily congregate across vast, mirror-like salt flats that stretch to the horizon past enormous geysers and up to towering, multi-hued volcanoes with their broken summits covered in ice and snow.
It feels primordial.
This is probably the closest I will ever get to time travel.
Every modifier is dialed up to its maximum expression. The bright flashes of life contrasts with the stark landscape, and the deep silence is broken only by the piercing gusts of wind that build and barrel into our van like a bulldozer, nearly toppling it onto its side.
The winds begin after sundown and increase through the night until early morning. I tell my partner that the wind is doing its best to rock us to sleep, and the hot water bottle I slip into my sleeping bag feels more like a survival necessity than a luxury.
As we continue our journey across Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, mornings take on a salvific tone. Mornings mean warmth. Mornings mean food. Mornings mean we can emerge from our cocoons to a cerulean blue sky layered on the sugar white salt flat with slivers of purple mountains in between like a jam oozing out of a layer cake.
Mornings mean human touch and the end to necessary nocturnal sequestration in our sleeping bags. Mornings mean panoramic mirror images created by standing water that fuses the ground and the sky into one endless dreamscape.
Mornings mean coffee, breakfast, and plotting our next “island hop” to a far-off distant hill covered in cactus, the remnants of long-gone coral reefs that are the only sanctuary for plants away from the salt. Each island is full of hidden wonders: fossilized dwellings and forests of plants out of a Dr. Suess book, scattered about like someone decided to make a garden of “desert-y things”.
We settle into a daily routine of exploring that lasts well into golden hour. Salar de Uyuni is just under 4,000 square miles and feels endless, and the only limitation we have is fuel reserves and saving enough to make it back to the tiny petrol depot.
At dinner hour we pick a slightly elevated campsite where we stop to make camp and watch the sunset and to take in another eternal, grand show. As the sky turns from red to orange to pink to purple to blue, I see the Southern Cross rise above the horizon.
The bright, unhindered starlight is reflected in shimmering whites and blues, and seems to lifts the entirety of the Earth up to meet the Universe.
We climb inside our van and burrow under the blankets.
