The Bolivia road map showed a “hard surfaced” road from Uyuni Bolivia to the border crossing into Chile at Ollague. Of course we were not naïve enough to think that meant blacktop! The distance of 208 kms should not take us more than about 5 or 6 hours. That should give us plenty of time to check out the Train Graveyard before leaving town.
On the outskirts of the town is the train graveyard. There are many old steam locomotives that appear to have chugged into the desert and expired. 
When Bolivia lost yet another war, this time to Chile, and lost its connection to the sea, as a compensation the Chileans agreed to build a railway down to the coast. British engineers built the line and imported British locomotives. The line has since gone into decline, with many of the old locomotives ending up at Uyuni just rotting away.
Wasting more time than we had desired seeking a route to the trains, we finally got up close and personal. An awe inspiring sight to be sure, but now we had to make time. It was after 10:00 AM.
The road (when we finally found it) was a good hard packed gravel road and other than the dust it seemed like we would make good time. Unfortunately we came upon a desvio (detour) for some road construction. Unlike detours in North America, this one was little more than a track through the desert.
In some places the sand, actually more like dust the consistency of flour was 8 to 12 inches deep. That is no exaggeration. We duck-walked the bikes with a few spills along the detour and finally made it back to the road about 10 kms later. That killed another hour of time.
Several kms further down the road and we were riding on the salar… the salt flats. Still pretty good going until we came upon an area that had been rained upon earlier that day or that week. We couldn’t tell other than the salt/dirt mixture was wet. Oh sure there was a thin “skin” on the surface but underneath the mud was the consistency of grease.
Our many spills were killing time, not to mention destroying yesterday’s bike wash. We had covered less than 100 kms and the sun was setting. Picking up the bikes over and over with the extremely thin air at 12,000 feet had us completely drained of energy.
It was time to admit that we were not going to make the border and our best choice was to try and find shelter for the night. The salt flats get very dark and very cold. We did not intend on “camping” on our adventure so we were ill prepared to do so but one must do what one has to.
We made our way to a small rock outcropping and set up “camp” by encircling the wagons… I mean the two bikes. We laid down between them with a bike cover for a ground sheet and Corinne’s fleece throw for a blanket. It was getting cold, very dark and it started to drizzle. This was going to be a long cold night!
