Bikepacking Salar de Uyuni and the Vicuñas Route | Pat’Alaska. ep. 8

We are officially seven months into our journey now. Can you believe it? After spending a lot of time exploring the backcountry of Chile and Argentina, we have now landed in our third country of the trip. Bolivia. And oh boy, we've had quite a start here. Tough day. After finishing the crazy Lagunas route, all we wanted was lots of food and lots of sleep. And we found all of the above in the town of Uyuni. Hello and welcome to Uyuni, Bolivia. We arrived at sunset, covered in sand and desert dust. But it wasn't long before we found ourselves a small hotel, ready to take two dirty cyclists in. Uyuni is the base for exploring the famous salt flats. But most travelers don't stay here very long. After a few days of lounging in town, we started seeing Uyuni in a different light. We enjoyed going shopping at the indoor market, trying out different kinds of food and drinks. Chatting with vendors, soldiers and mine workers. All helped us discover new perspectives of life on the Altiplano. Once upon a time, railroads connected this remote region of Bolivia to the Atacama desert in Chile, carrying minerals and passengers. Now, all that's left of this fascinating piece of history are the abandoned train tracks and Uyuni's train cemetery. Like this. The trains might be long gone, but the minerals are still here, buried underneath the famous Salar de Uyuni. It's a cyclist's dream coming true, crossing the biggest salt flat in the world. All right, babes, you ready to go? Let's do it. Get some food and then cross the Salar, eh? So, we eagerly packed our bikes and put on our sunglasses to tackle the overwhelming whiteness of the salt flats. Yeah, we made it, baby. I think we need to get around the water, so we'll have to... Why don't we go to the right? The salt flats are a pretty dry place for most of the year, as the clouds can't really get past the Andes mountains. They receive just a few inches of rain every year, mostly between January and April. That's when the salt flats are covered in shallow pools and they have an incredible mirror effect. Did you spot yours? But when you're traveling on a bike, that's less than ideal. So, most bike travelers choose to cross the Salar during the dry season. Oh, Quito. On our first night on the Salar, we meet fellow bikepacker Zachary, an absolute gem of a human and a ray of sunshine. Born in Morocco and currently living in Brazil, he's been all over the world. He told us about his love for traveling by bicycle and his motivation to get out there. We shared food and bonded over our love for into the wild. Together, we made our way to the island of Incahuasi, in the middle of the Salar. The incredibly friendly people living on the island allowed us to sleep in the local folklore museum. As nights on the Salar are really cold. Truly, it's a special place with special people. After breakfast, Zachary made his way back to Brazil. And we continued riding on the Salar. And yes, we made the photo all bike tourists make. Don't judge us. How deep is that? We don't want to ride through it. No? It's salt water. Ah. Salt water is very bad for metal things. Ah, okay. Yeah, we should go around. Okay. We made it off the Salar de Uyuni and spent the night in a salt hotel. How appropriate. Welcome to a room made of salt blocks. It's entirely salt. Flamingos. When this room is done, it's going to have salt all over the floor as well. But it's beautiful. It gave it like quite the look. It was nice. This room's unfinished, so they gave us a big discount. It's like a third the price. We're paying 50 bobs each to stay here. So, beautiful. The following morning, we continued our way on the Salar. For the very last time. Wow. Okay, this is cool. This is super cool. And that night, we arrived in the town of Lika, where we stuck up on food and water before crossing our second salt flat, Salar de Coipasa. We've been skirting around it for a little over a day now, but we're finally crossing the Coipasa Salar. It's filled with water over there, so we had to ride some really sandy, dusty tracks. Sand. But behind me here is the Chilean border. We're gonna ride around this little mountain here and cross into Chile for the, I don't know, I think maybe the fourth time. But we'll only be in it for about a week, riding the Ruta de las Vacunas. So yeah, it'll ought to be fun. Look forward to it. We're in the desert. Ah, the desert. Well, in a way, it is a desert. We are partly underwater, so we're staying very close to the shore. It is kind of a desert. But we're doing everything we can to stay on dry land, on dry salt. Rivers of salt. We just passed a military base and one jeep this morning, and that's it. We're utterly and completely alone here. We did not see a single other car or traveler for the entire day. And at the end of the day, it became clear why. We've hit a bunch of water now, so we're riding through salt water. Definitely not the best for our bikes. Well, there's not much we can do. We can see the border right there. 18 kilometers, so we just gotta hope it doesn't get too much deeper. We're about 15 kilometers from town there, from the border. Actually, we've technically crossed the border. The border's in the middle of the salt flat here, but the town and the actual legal crossing is there. But now we've just hit this super loose, wet, almost unrideable, crusty salt. It's four o'clock. We've got two hours of sunlight left and maybe like 15 kilometers, so hopefully we can make it. What? Yeah, just be careful it doesn't get worse, because then you'll be stuck in the middle of it. I've been there before. The crossing of the solitary Salar de Coypasa is at the same time the beginning of a new bikepacking route for us. We're riding the Vicuñas route, a Bikepacking.com route made by Cass Gilbert, which takes us from one wilderness area in Bolivia to another in Chile. We are in trouble. Minutes after wading through the water on the Salar, our bikes and us finally found refuge on the rocks of the mainland. Salty water is horrible for bikes. We really wanted to get to town to be able to wash it off. And a couple of hours later, we made it to the Bolivian border town of Písica. What are you doing right now? Cleaning the bikes after traversing the Salar de Coypasa, which was very wet. Here in Bolivia, a whole plate of chicken with soup costs around two, three dollars. It's cheaper than a pack of cookies. The economy in these towns is completely focused on serving travelers food, selling goods, exchanging money. But this town is a bit of a smuggler's paradise. When we're in big cities like this, we take a few extra precautions. One is carrying two wallets. I have a leather wallet that I use as a decoy wallet. And in here, I keep enough cash to get me through for a few days and some fake cards. And then for my real wallet, I want to thank today's sponsor, Ekster. This is the Ekster Wallet Pro, and it's the slimmest, smartest wallet on the market. It holds 7 to 12 cards that are accessible at the push of a button. Quick, easy access. It's made of premium leather, which goes really well with my hat and my journal. And they have the slimmest Find My tracker on the market. No matter what happens, if I lose this, if anything happens, I can track it right through the Find My app on my iPhone. And if I leave my wallet on my bike or anything else, they have a feature that will alert me straight to the phone. It even has a ringer built in so I can press a button, and it'll make a loud noise so I can find it if it's in a room or in a couch cushion. So if you're looking to upgrade your wallet, use the link in the description and code RyanKodakBrown to save 10% on your total order. Special thanks to Ekster for sponsoring this video and helping make these edits and these videos happen. The border crossing into Chile was definitely the most interesting one so far. Previously, we've only crossed small remote borders in the mountains with very few people waiting in line. But this time, we just got through with our bikes. Between hundreds of people after waiting for three hours. And the jefe of the aduana told me we were lucky. Because it might take, usually it takes way longer. People are reporting 5 to 10, 12 hours of waiting time. But it was already quite stressful enough. But apparently we were lucky. So we got everything. We lost the honey, but we can live with it. Eventually, we passed the border safely. And we're back into Chile for the fourth time. Ready to start the Vicuñas route. And that same night, we camped at a very special place. Trying to find a warm spot. Yeah, it's not hot, but it's definitely warm. Who's a bunny rabbit? I'm a bunny rabbit. We found vegetables, which is rare around here. So I'm super happy. Yeah, there's not a lot of veggies on the Altiplano here. It's day two of the Vicuñas route. And we stayed somewhere magnificent. And I feel cleaner now than I've felt in a very, very long time, actually. Today, we're going to climb 1,000 meters up to 4,900 ish. But then we will be rewarded with a downhill. A downhill to another hot spring too. There's three hot springs on this route. So yes, here we go with day two of the Vicuñas route. Let's get it. Passing by a few villages and old-timey churches, we're given a rather unique sneak a peek into everyday life in these mountains. The main industry here is evidently llama and alpaca farming. But this bikepacking route is named after their small cousin, the Vicuña. Unlike the domesticated alpaca and llama, the Vicuña is the only camelid still roaming wild. And their soft wool is considered one of the most expensive and high-end fabrics in the entire world. Unfortunately, this led to Vicuñas almost being hunt down to extinction. Which is why today they're protected by law. We follow the river upstream and see the final traces of winter lingering in the landscape. Ryan and I are finally getting close to spring. But the nighttime temperatures don't feel like spring yet. Every night we have to push our tent pole aside to sleep next to each other and use each other's body heat to stay warm. I'm fully covered in ice. You too. I'm ready for Costa Rica. Let's get. The Vicuñas route offers a few alternatives as well. Sometimes the choice whether to turn left or right is a tough one. There's a turnoff in the road here and we have two options to decide between. We can go straight on and cut 20 some kilometers off our route or we can go left up and around these mountains here. They say that the straight shortcut is a smuggler's route. So they advise to take the long way around. Yeah we're running low on food. It would shave off 300 meters of uphill and like 30 some kilometers. So it wouldn't make a big difference. It's nine kilometers so let's just hope we don't see anybody. So somewhere in the middle of the route we were presented the option between a 400 meter climb spread out over 40 kilometers on our left or a one hour climb of 10 kilometers on our right. But the only downside? The shortcut on our right was actually a smuggler's route between Bolivia and Chile. Testimonies on iOverlander claim to have seen strange activities here at night. We made it down the mountain. No smugglers. And now we have a very special treat in store for us. Right on the edge of the beautiful Solar here. We arrive at the third salt flat of the route. Salar de Sorir. And it is there that we saw our second hot springs of the vicunious route. And a very natural one too. The fumes nearly make us pass out as we waded through the ankle-deep mud. The temperature was quite hot, around 40 degrees celsius. And we definitely had trouble getting out without fainting. Lounging in hot springs above 4000 meters is no joke. We circled the Salar de Sorir, home to lots of wildlife. Amongst which a famous puma that roams the plains. But the Salar itself is actually mostly used for mining purposes. Something we would see increasingly on the last stretch of this route. A procession of trucks passes by on the final days of the vicunious route. But the views remain stellar. We get some cheap food at a trucker's restaurant and chat with the locals. Their day starts real early and navigating these huge trucks in this challenging landscape is not an easy thing to do. Most of the truckers have been so courteous to us cyclists on the road. And we get many thumbs up. Some truckers even gave us some bread and snacks. Thank you very much, sir. What's your name? Renato. Ryan, nice to meet you. Thank you so much. So kind of him. Ah, that's incredible. Despite the kindness of the people here and the beauty of the landscape, I'm having a really hard time. Been a really hard day. A lot of wind, a lot of trucks with a whole lot of dust coming off them. Now we get to rip down a thousand meters of pavement. Here we go. Is it feeling homesick, hungry, tiredness or cold or all of the above? I'm not sure, but I know that I'm having a hard time keeping my head up during the difficult days. Fortunately, there's music. And Ryan's company, of course. It's our last kilometers of the Ruta de las Vicuñas. And it's giving us a very challenging sendoff. We got strong headwinds and a lot of trucks that are blowing a ton of dust. There goes another truck. It's like, I don't know, maybe 20 trucks an hour. But we got 30 km to go and our route is over. And then we have a very special treat that I think we're both really looking forward to. It's time. We celebrate the end of the route in Putre at a sobering 3000 meters. It's just a thousand meters lower of where we were. But what a difference this altitude makes. Breathing becomes a lot easier and we sleep through the entire night without a problem. We look back on our time in the Altiplano with gratitude. It's the end of a chapter and the end of our time in Bolivia and in Chile. Now our sights are set on Peru. Vamos! Yeah, very dirty. I love my riding ones.