Cyclists ride across Bolivia's Uyuni Salt Flat in the dry season.GVY WENORNE/Supplied
Drawing up the window shade, the blistering white sunlight slaps me across the face. My eyes slowly adjust, blinking mole-like in the dark cocoon of the bedroom, and the mirrored surface of Bolivia’s flooded Uyuni Salt Flat materializes, reflecting blue sky and white clouds.
The 11,000-square-kilometre salt flat is the largest in the world. It’s so vast that it can be spotted from space. (Astronaut Neil Armstrong famously mistook the natural landmark for a massive glacier when he saw it from the moon.) I’m perched right on the edge, with nothing but cacti-studded Pescado Island to the left to break up the boundless white.
A humidifier puffs little vaporous breaths into my room at Explora Jirira Lodge to combat the bone-dry air and 3,700-metre elevation. Even though a dull headache throbs between my brows, I’m mostly used to the altitude at this point. My journey began a week ago in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert before crossing over into Bolivia and rumbling across the Altiplano, or Andean Plateau, overland, reaching elevations of up to 5,000 metres.
I am following a route that’s been used for centuries: the Qhapaq Ñan is a network of ancient Incan roads that winds across six countries and covers nearly 30,000 kilometres. The route is being considered for UNESCO status for its cultural and historical value, and tour company Explora runs trips called Travesía (the Spanish word for a long crossing) along 482 km of the trail, hoping to draw attention to South American cultural heritage that was being forgotten.
My husband and I started our trip in the sun-baked adobe town of San Pedro de Atacama, a region renowned among astronomers for its clear, starry night skies. To acclimatize ourselves to the high altitudes we’ll experience in Bolivia, we begin with shorter hikes through the Atacama Desert.
The Explora Jirira Lodge, located 3,700-metre elevation, is an ideal base for exploring the salt flats. The rooms overlooking include offer to make them more comfortable.
The lodge's interior is wrapped in warm local mani wood, neutral colours and large windows to highlight the nearby mountains.Roland Halbe/Supplied
In an area called the Mars Valley, we run down mountainous red sand dunes barefoot at sunset, the warm sand soft as silk, and later, we trek along the Puritama River, which carves through a canyon hemmed by swaying foxtail grass and five-metre-tall cardon cactuses.
On our third morning, we drive from the lodge with our guide, Nico Flores, to the El Tatio geothermal field, cratered with belching geysers. We travel up a mountainside in our Land Cruiser, pulling into a rocky outcropping where we’ll begin a 10-km hike.
“Take it slow,” Flores says. “Deep breaths.”
I’m a seasoned hiker, but my head still swims with the 4,400-metre altitude and my lungs grasp feebly at the thin air as I take in the sprawling bronze valley that we’ll be walking through.
Heading downhill, we pick our way around tufts of spiky golden paja brava, or Peruvian feathergrass, nestled among the rocks like porcupines. In the valley, the thermal Salado River sends tendrils of steam into the cold Altiplano air and froths with a foam like bubble bath, created by a high concentration of borax. The trail is crusted white with salt that crunches underfoot and bubbling geysers that are laced with bright orange cyanobacteria, one of the planet’s first life forms.
The Salvador Dali Desert is known locally as Pampa Jara and was used by Incan caravanners as a rest stop and trading post en route to the Chilean coast.Supplied
The extraterrestrial landscape only gets stranger as we cross the border into Bolivia, starting our four-night overland journey through the Andes’ Cordillera Occidental. Flores connects us with a new set of Bolivian guides who will be taking over. Our group piles into a 4x4 to head to our first stop: the Verde Lagoon.
The emerald saltwater lake gets its hue from a high concentration of toxic minerals, including arsenic and lead. Not much survives here with the exception of tardigrades, the tenacious microscopic creatures that resemble miniature bears and survive in extreme environments – even in outer space. There’s something eerie and unsettling about a landscape devoid of life, and I hurry back to the truck.
From there, the desert begins to fan out into an austere, windswept plain punctuated by ignimbrite rock formations that sprout mushroom-like in the sand. The surreal scene is aptly known as the Salvador Dali Desert. Its local name is Pampa Jara and it was used by Incan caravanners as a rest stop and trading post en route to the Chilean coast.
After a few more hours on the road, our next refuge, Explora’s Ramaditas Mountain Lodge, appears in the wilderness like a magic trick. Each of the Explora lodges we’ve stayed in were designed by Chilean architect Max Núñez to have the lightest impact possible on the fragile and remote environments. Steel rectangles suspended on stilts house just four guest rooms and a spacious common area and dining room.
Explora’s Travesia lodges are staffed entirely by locals, many of them small-scale farmers who provide the food on the menu, which was created by award-winning chef Mauricio López of Ancestral in La Paz. Interiors are wrapped in warm local mani wood, neutral colours and yawning windows, all of which serve to highlight the mountains and liquid silver Ramaditas Lagoon outside.
In the clear, bright morning, the mountain silence rings across the still water. It’s a view I’d gladly wake up to for a week, but begrudgingly, we leave Ramaditas and drive to the Pastos Grandes region, where an eight-kilometre trek begins by plodding through soggy, spongey Andean wetland.
We then pick our way uphill along a wind-pummelled trail, where plump, curly-tailed viscacha – rodents similar to chinchillas – sunbathe on rocks and scurry around llareta. The lime-coloured desert plant clings to the hillside like melting scooped sorbet, and in shocking contrast to its moss-like appearance, feels as hard as cement.
As we tick up towards 5,000 metres, I feel like I’m walking through waist-deep water, and I have to pop some ibuprofen to quell my headache. To our left, yardangs (rock whittled and fluted by wind) tower like a desert city.
A group of travellers watches the sunset over Bolivia's Ramaditas Lagoon.Supplied
I savour the shady reprieve of their shadow as we pause in front of ochre pictographs depicting a llama caravan. The paintings are thought to have been made by pre-Incan nomadic tribes who lived from the years 200 to 1100, and herded llamas along these paths. The trails later became part of the Qhapaq Ñan, as the Incan empire reached its zenith in the 15th century.
When we arrive at Chituca Mountain Lodge that evening, nothing has ever felt so luxurious as my hot rainfall shower with locally made rica-rica (an aromatic shrub) bath products, and dinner of roast chicken showered in candied peppers and chased by a smoky carménère.
On our final night of the trip, we drove out onto the flooded Uyuni Salt Flat plain, knifing through the still, shallow water that glitters with floating flecks of crystallized salt. We park in the middle and pull on rubber boots as a table is set up with sunset aperitifs. The fuchsia sky fades to tangerine, then indigo, and the moon rises. The water I walk through holds its perfect silver reflection.
Our week traversing the ancient Qhapaq Ñan has been full of otherworldly awe. Tonight, for a brief time, there’s no boundary between water and stars, mountains and sky, past and future. There’s only a crossing over between this moment and the next.
If you go
The Explora Travesía Atacama & Uyuni is a private tour with year-round departures from Atacama Lodge in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, or from Jirira Mountain Lodge in Jirira, Bolivia. Begin the journey in Chile to get used to the high altitude. The mountain lodges are equipped with oxygen, but the best way to combat altitude sickness is to stay hydrated and spend ample time acclimatizing.
Each group travels with a local driver and bilingual guide. The all-inclusive rate for a seven-night itinerary is $11,500 a person, with a two-person minimum. All ground transfers are included but not flights. LATAM Airlines flies daily from Santiago to Calama, Chile, and Boliviana de Aviacion flies daily from La Paz to Uyuni, Bolivia.
Special to The Globe and Mail
The writer was a guest of Explora, it did not review or approve the story.