Alice Newitt

Day 15: Potosi to Salar de Uyuni

I owe that truck stop on the way to Potosi an apology, this was the end of the world. Uyuni felt like it should have been a town in the American wild west called One Horse. The roads were made of sand, all the buildings looked abandoned and the town council appeared to be the pack of dogs that roamed the streets.

We had travelled to Uyuni in a similar one to the one that took us to Potosi, smoke and all. Despite being so high in altitude, the landscape had become much flatter and more arid. I loved these journeys: whilst everyone else dozed I gazed out of the windows, every turn of the bus bringing a slightly different landscape into view.

Uyuni too, would turn out to be one of the my favourite places on the trip, despite (or perhaps because of) it’s one-horse-ness. As we ate lunch in a strangely rock and roll restaurant called Lithium, our guide told us many of the dusty, run-down exteriors of the buildings were a lie: inside the buildings were ornate, elaborately decorated, their owners cleaning up in the narcotics trade with this town being a gateway for the route across the salt flats.

There not being a whole lot else to do here for those of us not in the drug trade, I made the most of one last night of hot water and soft furnishings ahead of the three day salt flat and desert crossing. From my hotel room, I could see a train line which I assumed from disused, until in the morning when I was woken by the sound of a train. I looked out of the window to see a freight train slowly passing through town, the containers going on and on and on, and the train on its way to who-knows-where.