EC-Rider Travels

I was allowed a bit of a lie in this morning and Noel and Timothée picked me up at 10. We headed off across the salt flats on our 100k journey to the Tunupa Volcano. There appear to be many legends as to how it got its name, but Noel’s is that it is named after an Aymara Princess whose baby died and the milk from her breast created the salt-flats….!

First we stopped at an area where they are carving bricks from the salt for building. This is all contained within certain areas and mostly done by hand – however there were no hands working today! The salt is in such abundance that it only costs a few Bolivianas to get a licence to take it. We continued on a long and very bumpy drive across the flats to the volcano which sits above a small village called Coqueza. Apparently very much bigger than it used to be, not that we saw a single person. It appeared to be just a mass of abandoned, dilapidated buildings with few with a roof or windows. Tunupa is one of the main attractions of the Salt Flats and someone is trying to build a hotel, but again, not today!

Between the village and the Flats is some rough grass-land which is home to hundreds of llamas and in front of them is an area full of flamingos. So beautiful and just the most perfect picnic spot. The boys set up the most delicious lunch, cooking chicken brochettes, chorizo and weeny potatoes – one of their five hundred local varieties. All so good. Lunching with llamas, another very special ‘first’.

We then drove up towards the volcano to see some Aymara mummies which had been buried in a volcanic eruption 1,600 years ago. Never my best, but rather amazing they are still in tact …. and their hair is still growing….

Tunupa on the other hand is quite stunning and if I had researched more I would have loved to have done the treck to the first level. It is 5,321m high and its crater is like a rainbow with red, yellow and green, I have never seen anything quite like it. It last erupted about 10 million years ago.

The short walk to the mummies was incredibly beautiful with the most amazing wild flowers and some more pasacana cactus, though here the flowers are pink rather than white as there were on Incahuasi Island.

We then headed back across the salt for about an hour and a half, seeing not a single soul. Back at the Luna Salada for my last night of this amazing adventure 😔.