Uyuni Salt Flats to the Border of Chile

We have packed so much into the last 5 days that I will try and sum it up the best I can without writing an entire novel. Alas, our final days in Bolivia...

Our only goal once we got to Uyuni was to find a way out to the salt flats. It is a small town that has little attractions and got quite boring for the one night we stayed. We were lucky to have had Cinemax in our hostel. Once we started shopping around for a guide, we quickly learned that there are over 70 companies that do tours to Salar de Uyuni and it was exhausting trying to figure out who to book for our three day tour. After the horror stories we heard of drunk drivers and vehicles getting stuck in the salt and mud, we wanted to make sure we had a reputable company. And since the only difference in tour companies is the quality of the transportation and food they serve, it was hard to decipher through the mess of businesses offering their services. We had a few conversations with people who had gone on the tour and finally settled with Andes Salt Expeditions. It turned out to be more than what we had expected. Plenty of food, reliable transportation, a great guide and friendly company. Thumbs up for these guys if you´re looking for a tour.

Getting packed up and ready to head out.

We hit the ¨halucinogenic¨ salt flats the first day, Salar de Uyuni, which is the largest in the world. It is basically a lake whose surface has dried up and left a solid salt foundation for as far as the eye can see. There is still a very large and very salty lake below the white surface, but hardly did we see any water. We took some great pictures in the middle of nowhere since depth perception through a camera is lost when you snap pictures (I will try and get some photos posted soon). We hiked up and over Fish Island that is covered by 10-foot-tall, thousand-year-old cacti, stuck our arms deep into the lake to find natural salt crystals forming under the surface and that night stayed in a hotel made completely from salt. Tables, chairs, the whole shebang...just salty. I guess its good they found a use for it all since Salar de Uyuni is still slowly expanding its 12,000km area and someday may even stretch to the town on Uyuni itself. I don´t understand how this all works, but all I can say is a salt drought in south America is not likely anytime soon.

Depth perception was nearly nonexistent allowing for photos like this one.

The following day we drove over the highest desert in the world, it´s peak reaching 7,000m, and saw shallow lagoons of every color. Wild flamingos walk acrossthe calm waters and if you are patient and quiet, you can get within arms lenght of them as they feed. Later on we took pictures under the famous ¨rock tree¨ that is over a million years old and saw vicuñas and chinchilla-looking rats watching us as we drove over the barren, dry hills. We spent a lot of time in the land cruiser, but saw some isolated landscapes that only looked like paintings done by a color-blind artist. The minerals are so rich in this region that they drastically change the color of the mountains, the rocks and even the water of the lagoons to red, pinks, whites and even greens. The largest, Laguna Colorada, had blood-red water that seemed to stretch on for days. It was the most bizarre lagoon I have ever seen. And believe me, that day we saw many lagoons.

Laguna Colorada and the blood-red tint of its shallow waters.

Our last two stops on the third day of our tour were the geysers and the natural hot springs. We woke up at 4:30am and headed out to see the earth spewing sulfurous gas and thick, grey-tinted bubbling water from its deeps depths below. The morning is the best time to see the activity since the sun is just rising and the air is calm and cold. The smell was horendous, and all the steam made it hard to see my own feet, which were completely frozen. But once I was able to thaw off in the natural hot springs and enjoy a cup of coffee with pancakes with strawberry yogurt, the morning air wasn´t as threatening and I certainly felt much better. We said our farewells to our group and our guide, Juan, who was most helpful and spoke great english, and headed toward the Chilean border and San Pedro de Atacama.

Bolivia is an absolutely amazing place. Since we didn´t plan to spend much time here, I went in with the least of expectations and now feel like this is a country I would visit again. And since my visa is good for the next 5 years, it may just happen. There are several places we had to skip over to make our schedule work. I just hope I can one day return and fill in some of those gaps.