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"text": "Madai Laime’s mother bags the iodised table salt for a local factory, cauterising the polythene packets closed over flames from an LPG cylinder that she can’t afford in her own home. The Laimes make $2 (14 Bolivianos, or about S102) for every 1,000 bags they pack.",
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"text": "A salt miner walks his bicycle past a building made of bloques de sal (blocks of salt) and adobe, and with a grass roof, in Colchani. For all its centrality in the Bolivian salt economy, Colchani is a stunningly arid town peopled overwhelmingly by the poor.",
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"text": "The home of the Laime family is, mildly put, a modest one: it is built of (the usually greyish) halite bricks that have been bleached white by relentless sunlight unfiltered by pollution; nor is it covered by the thick adobe that insulates most houses in Colchani from the often bitter cold. Their roof of paja brava grass has become tatty under the assault of wind, weather and an extremely elastic temperature differential.",
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"text": "Eighteen-year-old Madai Laime, a Quechua Native American indigene in Colchani, makes a meagre living filling one-kilo bags of salt, before and after school hours. She spends her time listening to heartbreak songs by the Santiago-based Chilean pop group Kudai—she particularly likes ‘Ya Nada Queda’ (‘There is Nothing Already’).",
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"text": "Adela Choquetiglla plaits the hair of her daughter, Maribel Chambi, at their home in Colchani. Adela’s husband, Nirmo, has changed ambitions from wanting to be a musician to buying a trailer to haul the salt he harvests, and sell it outside Colchani for a tenfold increase in his monthly earnings.",
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"text": "Nico Chambi, one of Nirmo’s brothers, plays bass in Colchani. It’s a tough act—to do, and certainly to follow—because the bass is missing a string and Nico can’t seem to fine-tune it. Nonetheless, music is music, and the Andean Quechuas are great believers in the power of collective decibel.",
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"text": "A sunrise on the Salar de Uyuni might not have the flaming drama of a sunset, but the vast calm is therapeutic. Here, a shallow lake formed by unvapourised rainwater provides a perfect reflection of the craggy hills and volcanoes that punctuate the periphery of the vast salar and rise into the high Andean peaks along the Chilean frontier.",
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} LEGEND HAS IT THAT a long time ago, the mountains in the Andes could walk and act like humans. One of them, Tunupa, was a female who lived with her husband and three children. When one of her children died, her husband left her, taking another of their children with him. Tunupa cried so much that her tears mixed with her breastmilk. The valley below her was flooded with the tear-soaked milk, and formed the blinding-white salt flat of the Salar de Uyuni.
At 10,582 sq km, the Salar de Uyuni (meaning ‘Islands of Salt’) is the world’s largest perennial salt flat . The salt crust sits atop a vast lake of highly saline brine that contains 50-70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves. The salar’s salt reserves estimate is 10 billion tonnes; the annual extraction averages a puny 25,000 tonnes.
Colchani, the tourist gateway to the spectacular flats, still looks the part of a frontier ‘town’ located on the edge of the salar. But despite Colchani’s location, it’s Uyuni that makes money from the tourists; Colchani’s bread-and-butter, so to speak, comes from its Coöperativa Rosario, which farms the salt. Using pickaxes and shovels, workers literally scour the salar for halite (salt crystals), which they pile up in pyramids and leave to dry in the sun. It is then shovelled into trucks and taken to Colchani, where it is further ‘cooked’ in ovens and infused with iodine. It is ground to powder—table salt—and children as young as six are drafted to stuff it into one-kilo sacks that are then trucked down to Bolivia and Brazil.
Trucking is inefficient and costly, but there is no alternative. Colchani once had a fully functioning railway station; what’s left of it is a memory. A single train from Uyuni now steams straight through Colchani as if this gateway to the salar doesn’t exist.
In truth, very little exists in Colchani other than the nearby Hotel Palacio de Sal, the ‘Salt Palace Hotel’ and the Hotel Luna Salada (Salty Moon) in Uyuni. The Salty Moon’s claim to pedigree is that it once hosted Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma. Morales demanded that the hotel give a 50 percent discount to Bolivians, which served little purpose—even at half rates, few Bolivians, among the poorest of Latin Americans, can afford to stay at the expensive star hotels in the salar.
Madai Laime, 18, has been bagging salt since she was six; she has to shoehorn work into study periods, filling one-kilo salt sacks and then stuffing 50 of them into a larger bag. Her take-home is incommensurate with her labour: bagging 2,500 kg of salt brings her $5 (35 Bolivianos, or about R255), which works out to two cents (less than R2) for 10 bags.
Nirmo Chambi, 31, a resident salt-miner-philosopher who has been trawling the salar since he was 10, is one of four brothers who started a band named Nubes del amor (Clouds of Love) in 1991 with tin cans for instruments. Nirmo, like his brothers, has other ambitions now: he wants to save up to buy his own trailer in order to haul the salt he personally harvests and sell it outside Colchani. He believes he can increase his monthly earnings from $143 to $1,500.
On those rare, windless days from November to March, when a few centimetres of water covers the salar, the flattest area on Earth turns into a perfect mirror. The salar has a surreal, postapocalyptic beauty.
Many of Colchani’s residents have never set foot in the flats. It’s a subsistence economy—they couldn’t care less about the thousands of tourists.
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