“This one’s got a bit of oomph, so be careful,” Robin, a Dagenham-born Bolivian citizen, warns me as he hands me the key. I turn it in the ignition and listen to the satisfying purr of the motorbike’s engine. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden a bike and, at 650CC (the bike’s a yellow and black Suzuki DR650), the engine’s a little bigger – OK, 13-times bigger – than I’m used to. It takes a powerful lurch forward as I pull away and I stall a couple of times. I take it around the block to get the feel for it, then Robin and I set off from the Bolivian town of Uyuni for what has to be one of the most unique landscapes on Earth.
The Salar de Uyuni has 10,500sqkm of brilliant white, almost Arctic landscape, an estimated 10 billion tons of salt instead of ice and snow. It’s 20km on a bumpy road from Uyuni to the salt flats. Truck kick up dust and deep sandpits do their darndest to wrestle control of the bike’s tyres out from under me. The outer edges of the flats are slushy as it’s been raining, and a shallow layer of surface water perfectly reflects the clear, light blue sky. Men with shovels load trucks with perfect pyramids of collected salt. We pause while Robin tells me the local legend for how the Salar de Uyuni was formed.
“They say the lake was created by Tunupa, the mountain goddess,” he says. “She had a love affair with Oruso and they lived happily and had a child. But another mountain goddess came along and wanted the attention of Oruso. She seduced him and ran off with him. Tunupa cried when she found out. She was breastfeeding at the time. The salt tears and milk from her breast mixed together and formed the salt desert.”
Riding the salt plains
The bike roars beneath me as I open the throttle. Any hint of dirt or dust from the land disappears as we ride deeper in. The landscape sparkles. In fact, its luminescence presents a problem. The gleaming scenery, with light bouncing around in all directions, has been known to cause sun-blindness, headaches and other health problems for visitors. There are high rates of early onset blindness among the people who work here.
Psychologically, the terrain is strange for a biker – it looks so much like ice and snow, it seems crazy to be riding at 120kph across it, as if the bike will slip and slide at any moment. Actually, it’s quite firm.
“You think it’s going to slide,” Robin says. “But it’s more like riding on concrete than ice. There are some bits you have to power through, where there’s some water on the surface, and other areas where it’s smooth or even crunchy. The ground’s always changing.”
We ride over long, smooth sections, other areas where crystallised salt has made bumpy mounds like anthills, and, stranger still, parts covered by a giant mosaic of naturally formed hexagons. Extreme changes in temperature at this high altitude (3640m) cause the salt to expand and contract, forming holes in the surface where saltwater bubbles through. The largest hexagons are obstacles to avoid but, at our speed, the bikes just soar over the smaller ones.
We pass a salt hotel, the original and only remaining one on the salt flats. Due to the venues polluting the salt lake, building on the flats is now forbidden. The newer salt hotels are built around the edges.
The 80km from the hotel to Incahuasi island – a rocky spot in the middle of the salt flats, covered with cacti – is pure pleasure as we open the bikes right out. There are no roads, only faint tyre tracks from tourist vehicles that converge close to the island. Local drivers navigate using markers such as the Tunupa volcano and other peaks surrounding the flats. We do the same, picking a freestyle route that heads loosely in the direction of the dark mass of land far ahead, just an hour from the border with Chile. The land ahead glistens in the sun. Pulling up at the island, where tourist jeeps are parked, other visitors eye our bikes enviously. One of the fun knock-on effects of doing the Salar de Uyuni by motorbike is how undeniably cool it looks compared to the standard 4×4 tours. It’s not cheap, not least because of the costly wear and tear of the salt on the bikes, but it’s worth it, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“You feel alive on a motorbike,” Robin tells me over lunch. “But here you also get the experience of the vast openness. It’s spectacular riding, but pretty easy, too.”
A bleak and desolate place
There are no roads, few tracks and no other vehicles all afternoon as we head out into the open salar where other tourists don’t tend to go. The immense landscape is ours alone and we make full use of it, giving each other plenty of space as we lean and ride in big swooping lines across the great, wide-open desert.
There are times when Robin’s just a dark speck on the horizon, other times we loop around and cross each other’s tracks, like two lone skaters on what feels like the world’s biggest rink. We reach the slushy shore and reluctantly leave the flats, riding along the edge to the train cemetery just outside Uyuni – a famous attraction where rusted trains languish, useless, around 3km from town.
Distracted by the scenery, I don’t see a corner coming, hit a deep patch of sand and get thrown from the bike. I climb back on and keep riding, with pain in my left thumb (from the handlebars) and a bleeding right elbow. I nearly come off again when another deep ridge of sand on the uneven road makes it difficult to keep the front tyre straight. To top it off, a car screeches to a halt at a crossing in town, missing me only narrowly. We arrive, in one piece, at the train cemetery as the sun sets behind a silhouette of hulking rusted trains, abandoned engines and carriages covered in graffiti.
“This is a bleak and desolate place,” Robin says. “I think they’re a bit beyond restoration, don’t you?”
The train yard, Robin explains, was the birthplace of football in South America. British engineers came here in the 19th century to design and build Bolivia’s trains and rail network, bringing ‘the beautiful game’ with them which spread quickly across the land.
After dropping the bikes in town, I take a taxi to the hilltop Luna Salada Hotel. There are less expensive places to spend a night in Uyuni, but a stay in a salt hotel makes for a novel experience. The walls of the grandhotel are made entirely from blocks of creamy salt cut through with brown veins of mud. The interior feels light, airy and natural. Rooms are comfy, with gas fires and hot showers. Beds, strewn with thick blankets, are carved from salt. The floor in the bedroom is a kind of crushed salt gravel, which continues down the hallways too, where there are relaxation areas: the walls, arches, tables and chairs all also created from salt.
But it’s not until the following morning that I realise another of the hotel’s big selling points. Over breakfast, in a dining room made of salt, I sit close to a wall-length window that looks out from the high hillside and take in the scene. There’s a clear view of the jagged crater of Tunupa to the north, while right in front of the hotel is a grassy slope where llamas graze. Beyond it, the gleaming whiteness that stretches to and beyond the horizon – the desert of milk and tears.
