Uyuni: where roads (and maps) end
BOLIVIA: Some towns define desolation. Their haunting isolation suggests that you've reached the end of the known world. Uyuni might just be one of those towns.
The wind was incessant. Spindly tufts of grass bent over, almost touching the brown desert sand. The wind buffeted the little minibus we were crammed into, as if some unseen force wanted to shake the shit out of the suspension. The young boy beside me clung to his father’s knee with each sideways ‘shove’. We’d left Potosi in the morning, precariously descending the Bolivian altiplano, heading south-west on a winding narrow road full of switchbacks and the occasional side track. And then my destination came into view.
Few places conjure assumptions or perceptions of what the edge of the known world might have once looked and felt like; that place where maps ended. Then Uyuni appears and those cliched, preconceived notions of a Wild West frontier town come into view. Desolation doesn’t come close to describing this place.
Literally in the middle of ‘nowhere’, burnt out cars line dry, dusty streets. Stray dogs roam everywhere. Desert sand and discarded plastic bags fly by faster than cars, propelled by winds so cold and fierce, you think Antarctica must be just over the horizon.
Actually, the world’s largest salt plain is what lies ‘out there’: the 12,000 square kilometre Salar de Uyuni. Just white earth and blue sky as far as the eye can see: an expanse of the greatest nothing imaginable. And beneath it lies one of the world’s largest lithium deposit. The multinational mining stampede is only just beginning.
Back in town, streets are wide but mostly empty, dusted with a fine layer of salt that has drifted in from the flats beyond. Buildings huddle together, their exterior, cement-block walls faded and worn by the relentless sun, wind and cold.
There is no pretence in the urban planning; no adornment in the architecture; only what is necessary to survive. But some things haven’t. The train cemetery on the outskirts is a haunting reminder of dreams (what kind, I wonder?) long abandoned, where rusted, mangled locomotives are slowly reclaimed by the earth.
Air is thin; nights bitter under an ink-black sky. There are no distractions, nothing to dilute the experience of being here; just the stark reality of a quiet existence on the edge; a ‘quiet’ that feels ancient. There is little to no street activity at night. The muted glow of an unfurling Milky Way lights your way. At this time, you feel a sense of suspension between earth and the cosmos, and in this moment, this place, an unusual juxtaposition takes hold where you feel both insignificant yet intimately connected to ‘something’.
[Author’s note: That last paragraph was scribbled together while I was there in 2019. Revisiting my log today it reads a little clichéd, but I make no apologies for that now. It’s how I genuinely felt at the time, and given the intervening years, I’m not inclined to tamper with its original provenance. GD]
In sidewalk markets, a wizened cholita wrapped in a warming shawl sells tasty salteñas (a type of baked empanada) from steaming carts. She and her fellow market vendors exude a resilience, a stoicism and dignity seemingly at odds with the challenges it must take to get fresh produce in a fit state for sale here.
I’d started this adventure some three months earlier in Mexico City, with Santiago in Chile my final destination (a few weeks away at least). Yet on reaching Uyuni, it felt like I’d come to the end of the road, metaphorically, or literally, I was not sure.
Yet, despite its desolation, there is a strange beauty to Uyuni. It’s a beauty that reveals itself slowly, in the subtle play of light on the barren streets, in the way the mountains and volcanos loom distantly on the horizon.
This is not a place that welcomes you. In its harsh, barren locale, the enforced solitude makes you confront your own place in the world. And in that confrontation there is a kind of truth, as vast and unyielding as the salt flats that seem to stretch for eternity.
Why come here? If you want to go overland from Bolivia to northern Chile, you have no choice. It takes three days in a 4-wheel-drive to get from Uyuni to the other side of the Salar de Uyuni, where a line of active volcanos mark the desert’s western extremity, and also the Chilean border.
While few travellers take this overland trans-country route, scores of others head out daily on shorter, overnight loops of the salt flats before returning to Uyuni. It’s this tourism that drives the local economy.
Butch and Sundance came this way
As if to reinforce the wild, frontier nature of this place, back in 1908, a posse of four men set off on horseback from Uyuni—acting on a tipoff—and rode south for almost a day in search of two banditos with a high price on their heads. In the tiny town of San Vincente they found their targets in a hotel courtyard.
It was in the ensuing gunfight that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their mortal end. But unlike the glorified and romanticised movie finale, Butch, realising escape was futile, shot the Kid (who was badly wounded), before taking his own life with a bullet to the temple.
“Welcome to Uyuni. Check your weapons at the Sheriff’s office. The saloon opens at midday.”
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