Vagabond Tales: Salar De Uyuni, The Weirdest Place On Earth

by Kyle Ellison on

Right now, as you read this, there are pink flamingos and wild llamas running amok on the shores of a red lake in Bolivia. In a land far, far away, people are watching the sunrise amidst steaming geysers while dodging puddles of boiling mud. There are hot springs where you can bathe nude at 15,000 ft, hotels made entirely of salt, and rocks that look exactly like trees.

No, this isn’t peyote week in the Vagabond Tales office. I’m speaking of a real place, a place where I’ve been. It’s a place I’m officially labeling as the weirdest place on Earth. In addition to all of the other oddities this is also the world’s largest salt desert, and, as you might expect, this is a terrible place for your car to break down.

At 4,633 square miles Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni is a vast sea of salt larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Traffic is minimal and the roads are always shifting. If you get lost out here or lose your way you don’t simply call AAA or check your GPS. These don’t exist here in the southwestern hinterlands of Bolivia. If you get lost in the Salar de Uyuni, you start hoping that you aren’t going to die.

%Gallery-153780%Having booked a three-day crossing of the Salar with an adventure company out of the town of Uyuni it only took one hour before Juan Carlos, our driver, had donned a pair of faded blue coveralls to replace a flat tire on our trusty white land cruiser.

“Diez minutos” he reassured us with with a slightly embarrassed mumble. “No te preocupes“.

Don’t worry.

Standing just over 5′ 5” and sporting a thin black mustache, Juan Carlos, like so many other men in the Bolivian town of Uyuni, has a job which involves shuttling travelers across this mountainous netherworld.

Even before the flat tire incident our troupe of six travelers had already made a pit stop at a place known only as the “Train Cemetery”. Located only minutes from the outskirts of Uyuni-a windy, dusty, 12,000 ft. outpost where lips chap and heads ache-many of the locomotives which once dominated the Bolivian rail lines now appear as metal phalluses left to rust in the salty mountain air.

Now, with our lone spare tire firmly affixed to a rusty axle we saddled up the mechanical horse and headed straight for the great white unknown.

After bouncing around the back of the Land Cruiser for a couple of hours Juan Carlos eventually brought us to Isla Incahuasi, a cactus-covered dollop of an island floating all alone in the endless sea of salt. Literally, as far as you can see in every direction is a white horizon of nothingness. Here, strangely enough, it’s possible to amble among cacti which have thrived for over 1,000 years in one of the most inhospitable terrains on the planet.

Already awash in an alternate reality, Isla Incahuasi is also a place to tinker with the unique elements of perspective. Utilizing the endless horizon and deft usage of a digital camera it’s suddenly possible to take pictures where you appear to actually surf on a water bottle, sit in the palm of your girlfriend’s hand, or take a casual stroll down the handle of a guitar. The only thing missing is a smoking caterpillar and a smiling Cheshire cat.

As if the day hadn’t been strange enough already, that evening I somehow found myself licking the walls of my hotel room. In an empty basin where building materials are hard to come by, even the buildings are made from blocks of salt. So too are the beds, the windowsills, and the tables and chairs. Unfurling my sleeping bag onto a year’s worth of sodium I silently questioned if this place could get any stranger.

Never could I imagine, however, how strange it was about to get.

Not three hours after waking on a bed made of salt did I find myself chasing flamingos around a lake resembling an oversized peppermint. Fittingly known as “Laguna Colorada” (Colored Lake), the lake has a certain type of sediment which turns the water a blood shade of red. Blended with white islands made of borax deposits, the red and white color wheel almost seems to spin in the thin, 16,500 ft. air. Higher than any mountain peak in the 48 states, the altitude doesn’t seem to bother the flamingos, pink curiosities of nature who still sleep on one leg in spite of the 40 mph winds whipping across the plain.

Wanting nothing more than a restful sleep after a day spent navigating an environment straight out of a Dr. Seuss book, we instead were roused at 4am as part of a plan to watch the frigid sunrise. Though I have seen enough sunrises in my travels to warrant sleeping in through a 4am wakeup, never before had I been presented with the opportunity to watch the sunrise from the steaming caldera of an active volcano.

This is so strange I am going to repeat it.

The opportunity to watch the sunrise from the steaming caldera of an active volcano.

I’m not making this up. This is a place where you can literally jump through steaming geysers of sulfur which springs straight from the Earth. Don’t believe me? Look for the part where I momentarily appear to be on fire.

For as much fun as this might seem, when you are navigating the geysers of an active caldera there are nevertheless dangers intrinsic to such an activity. What dangers might exist inside of an active caldera you ask? What about accidentally stepping in a puddle of boiling mud?

Relaxing in a thermal hot spring after having escaped the confines of the active caldera I got to chatting with an Australian traveler who had also spent the last three days in the salt flats.

“You ever been anywhere like this before?” I casually inquired, the thin mountain air still having an effect on the ability to speak in long sentences.

“Never mate. This place is mental. It’s like I’ve gone to another planet and am afraid to return.”

Well said mate. Well said.

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Vagabond Tales: Are Plastic Bottles Becoming A Natural Resource?

by Kyle Ellison on

The island of Mabul, Malaysia, is not big. In fact, it’s tiny. You can walk around it in 45 minutes.

A popular destination for scuba divers, visitors to this remote island off the coast of Borneo frequently pass the time by diving the offshore reefs or lounging beneath a coconut palm – pretty taxing stuff really.

While digging into a good book from the confines of a hammock is all well and good, few visitors, I noticed, actually take the time to get out and explore the island. In the hour or so it took me to meander the circumference of the tropical sand spit, I encountered a grand total of zero other tourists.

Zero.

This is not to say the beaches were empty – far from it. All along the shoreline local fishermen mended their nets and rolled canoes on logs in an effort to extract them from the turquoise waters. As the fishermen went about their daily tasks, others sat shirtless and cross-legged on the sand, methodically hacking into coconuts with machetes that had seen their fair share of husks.

All of this activity is to be expected on an island with only two natural resources, those of course being fish and coconuts.Interspersed among the workers, however, was something that set in motion a line of thinking, which has haunted me for the past three years. There, on the trash-strewn shores of Mabul, hordes of young school-aged children ran dutifully around the island sifting through the plastic-lined shoreline and stuffing the bottles they found into tattered burlap bags.

No, this wasn’t Malaysia’s version of a nationwide beach cleanup.

Rather, these children had been sent out to collect the plastic bottles so they could be used around the home.

Ever wondered how you grow a vegetable garden on an island made of nothing but sand? Cut a plastic bottle lengthwise, fill it with imported soil or dirt, plant some seeds in it, and hang it on your balcony. Voila. Vegetable garden.

How about creating a fishing net? Instead of using expensive styrofoam floats which need to be imported, why not just use the buoyant plastic bottles, which are imported by the drifting ocean currents?

Watching these groups of 5-year-old children gather bags of plastic bottles from the shore, I realized that in some twisted stretch of irony, for these children who don’t know otherwise, these plastic bottles are essentially a natural resource much the same as coconuts.

Need to mend a net? Need to plant a garden? Need to carry fresh water? Go down to the shore and gather some bottles.

As someone who is staunchly anti-plastics and an advocate for their removal from global commerce, this was an eye-opening variable I had never considered.

What if plastics and marine debris are (for a select number of impoverished coastal communities around the globe) actually providing a resource and considered to be good?

Environmentally conflicted I tabled the thought and buried it down deep. This past November, however, I spotted an outdoor lamp on the island of Boracay in the Philippines with a lampshade made from an empty two-liter coke bottle (pictured above) and the counter-intuitive thought resurfaced.

Not more than two weeks later, while exploring the backside of Koh Tonsay (Rabbit Island) off the coast of Cambodia, I happened upon this fishing net which had been strung together on the shore. Here, again, were the plastic bottles in abundance used as floats for holding up the net. In a flashback to Mabul, here, in a village numbering no more than 25 people, were two young boys wandering the shoreline and collecting plastic bottles.

So after all of these sightings am I still an advocate for the elimination of plastics? Yes. Are plastics one of the largest elements of marine debris threatening our oceans and marine species? Yes. Are plastics petroleum based and do they contribute to the world’s addiction to fossil fuels? Yes.

Nevertheless, as we here in the West fret about marine debris and oceanic garbage patches the size of Texas, I think about a mother in Mabul growing tomatoes out of a coke bottle; I conjure up a fisherman in Cambodia feeding his family with gear made from a flotilla of empty Evians.

I wonder if, by some chance, we as a civilization are able to clean up our oceans and ditch the addiction to plastics. Will a generation of islanders in forgotten corners of the Pacific tell their children stories of a day when plastics were abundant and easy to come by?

I sure hope not, but the point has been raised nevertheless.

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Vagabond Tales: Why Is There A Monkey In My Sleeping Bag?

by Kyle Ellison on

There are few moments more startling than waking up to a jungle primate seeking refuge in the warm recesses of your crotch. Consider the fact you’re sleeping in an abandoned, open-air, concrete nightclub in the middle of a Peruvian cloud forest, and the entire ordeal takes on a new aura of peculiarity.

This, however, was exactly how I started my morning in the rural village of Santa Teresa in the 6,000-foot highlands of southern Peru. One of the stopping points along Peru’s Salkantay Trek – the budget friendly and more adventurous alternative to the famous Inca Trail – is Santa Teresa, a remote little village that modernity seems to have forgotten.

Level of development aside, the real draw of Santa Teresa is undoubtedly the muscle-soothing hot spring, which percolates on the outskirts of town. From the confines of a massive thermal swimming pool set on the banks of a raging river, local women wade waist deep in the tepid waters and sell baskets of cold beer while attempting to simultaneously bathe. A surefire way to dehydrate yourself and welcome a morning hangover, the entire scene takes place alongside torrid waters hell-bent on draining into the Amazon Basin as part of a muddy, eventful journey to the Atlantic.

Completely unregulated and awash with the stench of freedom, in a word, it’s utterly perfect.

A welcome respite for the weary, Santa Teresa is the first real town Salkantay trekkers will encounter after having crossed over the 15,200-foot Salkantay Pass the day before.

In the actual town there are a handful of small restaurants, children playing in the town’s only square and shop owners willing to place a cot in their kitchen and firmly call it a hotel. Oh, and there’s also a communal concrete slab for slaughtering livestock, a daily affair which doesn’t seem to turn that many heads except for, perhaps, mine.

Camped out with an adventure tour company in what can best be described as a friend of a friend’s backyard, the last thing I expected to see from the window of my tent flap was a hapless cow on its way to being slaughtered.

Nevertheless, a militia of young boys wielding saws and machetes systematically took to slaughtering the bovine directly in front of our cheerless campsite. With the same level of excitement of someone brushing their teeth before bed, the young troop of butchers dismantled the cow in such a routine fashion their nonchalance spoke volumes towards the realities of rural Peruvian life.

Succumbing to a growing sense of nausea birthed from the morbid entertainment, I swapped the damp board shorts of the hot springs for a dry t-shirt and my trusty thermal underwear. Blissfully ensconced in the comfort of a two-person tent and pulling the edges of my North Face sleeping bag to just beneath my armpits, I settled in for what I deemed to be a much needed slumber.

The strengthening pitter-patter of precipitation, however, ensured that this would be far from a restful night. With drops morphing into rivulets atop the overstretched nylon dome above, it wasn’t long before the skies would open completely and turn what was once a modest campsite into a soggy and swampy mess. With the rain actually forming streams beneath the bottom of the tent, my soporific sanctuary was transformed into a dripping den of misery.

With the downpour causing my wife and I problems enough, the introduction of a violent bout of flatulence really wasn’t helping matters.

Mistaking my nausea as a product of watching the cow slaughter, it was beginning to become apparent the mystery meat from dinner was having an adverse effect on the welcoming atmosphere of our tent. As my sleeping bag finally relinquished its attempt at keeping my body dry, so too did my ability to keep us from perishing in a cloud of high-altitude methane.

Frustrated, cold and weary from days of trekking, I contemplated the few options remaining and finally decided to do the chivalrous thing and preemptively remove myself from the tent. It simply had to be done.

With zero places to turn, however, and the prospect of sleeping beneath the stars vanquished long ago, I grabbed my half-soaked sleeping bag and sprinted for an abandoned concrete building, which once housed the town’s only discotheque.

Slinking into the soggy bag and cringing at the state of my current affairs, I was eventually able to fashion a remedial pillow out of a plastic bag and a dirty towel found languishing in the corner of the shelter. Frigid, bloated and with nowhere else to turn, my vacant stare rested on a dangling disco ball awash in a sea of dripping, wet wires. This, I reckoned, was my Peruvian chateau.

Finally, amidst a fitful bout of thrashing and copious amounts of internal dialogue, I eventually drifted off into an impressively deep sleep. Falling ever deeper into the realm of mental exhaustion, amidst a gastrointestinal meltdown and a torrential tropical downpour, I somehow welcomed a restful and purposeful slumber.

Waking to clearing skies, the first rays of lights were beginning to penetrate the high clouds and twist their way through the verdant valleys above. With the introduction of sunlight, I could tell that the concrete shelter I had chosen had all the charm of sleeping in a construction site.

Feeling an itch against my inner thigh and still searching for an exit from my early morning daze, with much difficulty and little coordination I fumbled with the ability to unzip my still damp bag. Just as the first teeth of the zipper began to chatter, however, in an explosion, which can be described only as mammalian fury, a rambunctious young monkey exploded from the dark nether regions of my sleeping bag.

Nearly climbing over my face in his hasty exit, he too was simply seeking emergency shelter from the sky-opening downpour and brisk evening air. As I would later find out after recounting the story to my guide, the monkey was actually a pet of the property owner and not some wild primate.

Nevertheless, there are few things more startling, scary or downright confusing than waking to a face full of monkey – an unwelcome visitor from the depths of your loins just trying to stay out of the rain.

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Vagabond Tales: Standing inside the Devil’s Throat

by Kyle Ellison on

Eleanor Roosevelt and I have one thing in common: We both have stood inside of the Devil’s Throat.

Yes, those words came out right, and no, I haven’t been drinking.

Far less cult-like than it originally sounds, La Garganta del Diablo (The Devil’s Throat) comprises the most dramatic section of Iguazu Falls, a humbling series of waterfalls spanning the border of Argentina and Brazil.

Recently voted as one of the new Seven Wonders of the Natural World, Iguazu Falls was actually able to render me speechless. Not in that clichéd “I’m a travel writer so I should say ‘speechless,'” type of way but in the sense that I went into a zone, tuned out the world, and literally refrained from speaking for a solid one to two minutes.

As I mentioned here on Gadling while hiking in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest, I believe that waterfalls, in their innate ability to entrance us humans, are akin to being “nature’s televisions.” If this reasoning holds true, then Iguazu Falls is nature’s IMAX theater.

Mrs. Roosevelt, however, was not rendered speechless by Iguazu Falls. Stoically staving off the instinct to mentally glaze over, she instead uttered a one-liner, which has been the foundation for Iguazu marketing campaigns for decades:

“Poor Niagara!”

That’s it. Poor Niagara. And really, what else needs to be said?

Iguazu Falls is so powerful in its intensity and so overwhelming in its scope that it arguably trumps any other waterfall complex on the planet. Comprised of 275 separate and distinct walls of water, which average 210 feet in height, at one point you can stand within the Iguazu Falls amphitheater and be surround by 260 degrees of waterfalls.

Sure, there are jet boat trips to the base of the waterfalls, swimming in roped off, calmer sections and photo opportunities at every conceivable overlook, but nothing in Iguazu Falls compares with walking out onto the metal gangplank and standing in the heart of the Devil’s Throat.

When planning a visit to Iguazu Falls, nearly everyone you meet will tell you to visit the Devil’s Throat last — logistically sound advice since visiting in the morning hours will leave you staring into the sun, however, the main reasoning for doing so follows the train of thought of saving the best for last.

An explosive crescendo, if you will, and what a crescendo it is.

Even the process of getting to the Devil’s Throat is an exotic adventure. First off, you have to get on the Ecological Jungle Train, which winds its way through dense forest teeming with crocodiles, panthers and fiery-billed toucans. Will you see any of these from your perch on the train? No. But the fact that they’re out there is exciting enough for me.

After departing the jungle train the next move is to walk out onto a metal gangplank, which slinks its way over the rushing, upper Iguazu River. It is one of those grated metal walkways where you can see right through the bottom; the proximity of the river to the bottom of your feet gives a sensation of literally walking over water.

Finally, at the terminus of the walkway, after crossing the expansive stretch of river, a viewing platform precariously peers into the depths of the Devil’s Throat.

A U-shaped chasm in the Earth, 492 feet long and 262 feet high, the water of the Iguazu River rushes with such ferocity into the “throat” that it’s impossible to see the bottom through the cloud of mist and foam. Staring down into the shifting white abyss, it becomes apparent that this is where water droplets come to die.

Peering out over the crowded platform, I am casually approached by a traveler from Peru visiting the falls with his family.

“You can tocame un fóto?” he inquires, nervously blending languages in his timid request.

“Por supuesto,” I agree as he hands me his oversized Nikon.

Backing up against the railing and motioning for his family to join him, I notice tears, like the falling waters beneath, begin to stream down the contours of his young daughter’s face.

This is because standing with your back to the Devil’s Throat isn’t fun. In fact, it’s terrifying. Even my wife in a wave of anxiety was only able to sneak a fleeting peek over the cliffhanging ledge.

To be fair, the construction of the platform is modern and sound, and I have zero doubts about its structural integrity. Nevertheless, there’s something about toeing the edge of a gaping cleft in the planet, which is aflame with the fury of nature that raises certain emotions in even the hardiest of travelers.

From the edge of the throat you cannot only watch rainbows emerge from the mists, but also feel the upward rush of wind in your hair. Cast your thoughts deep within the turbid foam as useless voices in your head are silenced by the sound of incessant thunder. Lazily watching a stick floating at the cusp of the river, you wonder if it has any idea of what’s in store. As many of us do while standing atop a waterfall of grandeur, you momentarily imagine what it would be like to be that stick.

Placidly floating, peacefully drifting and then, suddenly, this…

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Vagabond Tales: Tunneling beneath the ‘scariest place on Earth’

by Kyle Ellison on

This may come as a shocker, but traveling to North Korea as a tourist isn’t exactly easy. In a country that tops the paranoia charts when it comes to dealing with “outsiders,” the tourist administration in Pyongyang isn’t real cool with throngs of camera-toting tourists soiling the ultra-pure North Korean populace with their strange and fetid ideals. Better to simply keep them out.

Sure, there are still ways of traveling to North Korea as a tourist, but lets just say it’s not the type of trip where you get to put your two cents in on the itinerary. Or, for that matter, what you can pack, whom you can speak to or what you can photograph.

So have I actually been to North Korea? Technically, no, I haven’t.

Wait. Did you just say that you technically haven’t been to North Korea? That doesn’t make any sense.

Although it may be difficult to actually travel inside of North Korea, there are various opportunities for you to actually travel beneath it.

C’mon. How do you travel beneath a country? You’ve had one too many shots of soju again haven’t you?

When the Korean War came to a politically awkward stalemate in 1953, troops on both sides were required to pull back 2,200 yards from the initial Military Demarcation Line, thereby creating a 2.5 mile wide stretch of no man’s land known today as the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).

This, however, did not stop the wily North Koreans from still trying to find a way to win the war and stage an all-out ground attack on the South Korean capital of Seoul. If they couldn’t send soldiers across the DMZ any longer, then by golly they were going to go under it.

And go under it they did. And now, strangely enough, so can you.The first “incursion tunnel” was discovered by South Korean soldiers in 1974 after witnessing heat vapor rising inexplicably from the frozen Earth just south of the DMZ. A second tunnel was discovered in 1975, a third in 1978 and a fourth in 1990. Though these are the only four to have been found, it’s rumored that there are upwards of 20 tunnels, which undermine the fragile border of the politically tenuous nations.

At first the North Koreans denied the existence of the tunnels and labeled the discovery as South Korean propaganda. When intrepid teams of South Korean and American soldiers explored the first tunnel (which was booby trapped), the North Koreans denied any knowledge of the tunnels and claimed they had been dug instead by South Korea.

After markings on the tunnel walls confirmed that the tunnel had been constructed from north to south, Pyongyang came up with its best excuse to date and adamantly claimed that the tunnels were simply for coal excavation, even though there isn’t any coal in the granite rock beneath the DMZ. Firmly clinging to their alibi, North Korea proceeded to paint the rocks inside the tunnels black, because, as everyone knows, when you paint rocks black it totally fools everyone into thinking that it’s a coal mine.

Now, over 30 years after its initial discovery, it’s possible to book a tour down inside of the third tunnel and actually walk beneath the North Korean side of the DMZ.

This, as you might expect, can be a little scary. Tensions run so high at the DMZ that former U.S. President Bill Clinton once labeled it as “the scariest place on Earth.”

Even though the war has been confusingly “on hold” for the past 58 years, the situation at the DMZ really hasn’t been all that rosy. There have been numerous instances of North Koreans being shot and killed for wandering into South Korean territory as well as an odd event in which a Soviet Union defector ran across the two-and-a-half mile-long DMZ, an incursion which eventually culminated in the deaths by crossfire of three North Korean and one South Korean soldier.

Then, of course, there was the issue of the overgrown poplar tree in 1976 where a joint team of U.S. and South Korean soldiers were hacked to death with axes by North Korean soldiers while attempting to trim tree branches within the Joint Security Area, a shared space where peaceful meetings are meant to take place.

Oh, and three days before I arrived the two sides were back at it again exchanging volleys of heavy gunfire. Perfect.

So what’s the natural thing to do when standing amidst tens of thousands of soldiers ready to go to battle at a moment’s notice? Strap on a helmet, climb aboard a motorized tram cart, and descend 1,100 feet below ground, of course.

Clicking the plastic pieces of the helmet together and nestling in for the slow descent, I reflected on the odd sensation of riding on a contraption better suited for a theme-park into a place originally dug for the express purpose of killing people. Over six feet high and six feet wide, the tunnel was capable of transporting up to 30,000 troops per hour.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I continued to think to myself. “I’m about to walk through a tunnel which leads to North Korea.”

Excitedly, I turned to the Japanese tourist seated next to me, the dark green helmet swallowing her tightly pulled black hair.

“Nervous?” I inquired.

“Hai. Yes. Nervous.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I confided. “Me too.”

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[Tunnel image by Flickr user, WanderingSolesPhotography]