World’s Largest, Highest & Driest Deserts

This will be a feature full of superlatives – largest, highest and driest. But thankfully I wasn’t largely left ‘high & dry’ in this adventure in Latin America. The exotic Latin world starts from Mexico and ends at the tip of South America in Argentina and Chile. In between, on the western side of the South American continent you have a very special place that has Salar de Uyuni of Bolivia, the Altiplano Plateau and the Atacama Desert, which straddles both Bolivia and Chile. The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat or salt desert in the world (salar means salt flat in Spanish), the Altiplano is the highest desert while the Atacama is the driest non-polar desert on Earth.

The Salar is as big as 10,000 square kilometers and is very disorienting because it is so homogeneous all around. All you can see are the dried-out, blinding white hexagonal salt patches and the blue sky above. There is no other way to know your direction – no roads, no sign boards and no arrows pointing you onwards or home. That’s why a lot of the Bolivian drivers here take to the drink since this is a truly lawless and far removed part of the planet. If you drive through it day after day, it can be very tough on the senses, including the common sense. When we chose our driver, we were very careful to ask for a responsible person who would not drink and we did find a great chap in Jose (lot of the people here share this Spanish name).

So we had reached the town of Uyuni from La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia that sits at a height of 3,640 meters or almost 12,000 feet. This makes it the highest capital in the world and its airport, called El Alto, rests even higher at 4,062 meters and is the world’s highest airport (in comparison our Leh airport is 3,256 meters). Our Boeing 767 airplane went a lot faster and longer than normal on the runway to take off, as it needed sufficient air beneath its wings before it could lift off from the ground in this thin air altitude. Upon reaching Uyuni our gang of 6 (Sasha, Katharina, Mike, Rachel, Richa and me) along with Jose was on its way, not knowing what to expect in this remote corner of the world.

What followed is a week of being truly cut off from almost all humanity and almost all signs of humanity barring the odd salt home where we had warm food, warm shower and some shelter over us. These salt homes or huts were part of the surreal experience where the walls, the dining tables & chairs and the beds were made of salt. You could actually lick the salt from the table or sprinkle it over your food (and don’t ask about the food that was on the table, as I am sure I ate some llamas and alpacas too). In the salt flats themselves, we played a lot of visual tricks by placing an object or person in the foreground and the other person in the background, some distance away. This created the optical illusion of size and with no other marker to know the distance we created some very interesting snaps. In one photograph, ‘tiny’ Richa fit well inside my brown-green safari hat (a hat-trick, basically). To get her revenge, in another Richa held ‘tiny’ me in the palm of her giant extended hand.

We also went to a rusted train bone-yard, which itself was very strange and then reached a giant cactus ‘island’ in the middle of the salt pans called Incahuasi (house of the Incas). The ancient Incas actually used this as a place to hide from the Sun.

After a few days in the salt flats, our altitude was increasing and we were in the Altiplano Plateau which finds its way to the Atacama Desert. Now we were well above the tree-line and all signs of non-human life had also gone. It sounds weird that for 2 days we were at a height of more than 5,000 meters or 16,200+ feet, which is almost 60% of the height of Mt. Everest (8,849 meters or 29,030 feet). I would recommend altitude sickness pills and the key is to be calm, to breathe deeply and to not over-exert. The temperature at this altitude was quite low but not below zero since it was November i.e. summers in the Southern Hemisphere.

Here at these heights we saw llamas, alpacas, foxes and flamingos in salt filled lakes. We saw acid lagoons change colour from emerald green to turquoise blue and yes, these are just fancy colours which simply mean green to blue. However the fun was when the blue-green changed to red (or should I say scarlet). The red was because of the photosynthetic pigments in the algae that contain carotene. Best of all, we saw some of the highest altitude geysers in the world at 5,000 meters. It was like being on a different planet. And then finally we reached the place I was most interested in – the Mars like Siloli Desert (part of Atacama), which is the highest desert in the world and is home to the iconic ‘Arbol de Piedra’ or the ‘Stone Tree’, carved by the action of wind alone (naturally water doesn’t play a part in the growth of this tree).

I was told that to manage altitude sickness at this height you need to consume their popular Coca tea, which is made from the leaves of the Coca plant and the Bolivians consider it ‘medicinal’. It really is essential to keep the blood oxygen flowing at these altitudes and it’s available everywhere in Bolivia. So from the white of Salar de Uyuni to the ochre of the Altiplano and Atacama and every hue in between, I can safely say that this was a very colourful trip. You can have ‘any colour you like’, as the cult rock band Pink Floyd once played, many ‘full moons’ ago.

Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home.