The Salar de Uyuni

On Tuesday we headed off on our Salar adventure. We first had 3 hours in a bus to Oruro, before boarding the train for the 6 & a half hour trip to Uyuni. The train was very comfortable, & we had a great sunset on the way. We got into Uyuni at around 10:30pm & went straight to our hotel for a good nights sleep.

The next morning we set off on our 3-day jeep adventure. Along with Will & myself there was a Belgian couple who had just finished med school, a couple of kiwi chicks who had thrown in their jobs to travel South America for a few months, plus a husband & wife driver/cook team. Our Toyota Land cruiser wasn't too bad to travel in, & was certainly in a better state of repair than a lot of the jeeps we saw! To say this was a budget trip however, would be a huge understatement... It only cost 85USD each for the 3 days, including all transport, meals & accommodation, & we did get what we paid for... The food especially was very ordinary, usually rice or quinoa, tomato & cucumber, plus some sort of meat. We did get nice (if very salty) vege soup at dinner though.

Our first stop was the Salar de Uyuni itself. It's the worlds largest salt flat & covers 12 000 square km. It used to be a prehistoric lake that covered most of southwest Bolivia. It was very freaky, just blinding whiteness as far as the eye could see.Next stop was Isla de los Pescadores, aka Cactus island. This was a very surreal stand of giant cacti in the middle of the salt flat. We had a good walk around the island while the cook prepared our lunch.After lunch we visited the salt hotel (no water or electricity, just a llama dung burning stove & every single thing, including the building, furniture, beds etc made from salt). Then it was several more hours of driving to our accommodation in a tiny village called San Juan. The lodging was very basic, & there was only electricity for a few hours in the evening. We did however find the only pub in town & enjoyed a couple of drinks before dinner. After dinner it was a couple of hours of Texas hold 'em poker (playing for grains of rice we managed to steal from the kitchen!) till the electricity ran out & it was time for bed.

The next day was spent driving through some unbelievable scenery. We had deserts, volcanoes, blue lagoons, red lagoons, flamingos... Pictures really do tell a thousand words, so here goes...The red lagoon (Laguna Colorada) below was where our accommodation for the second night was. We were at 4300m, & it was freezing! Our smiles in the photo below belie the fact that we're actually freezing our butts off!!! It was absolutely stunning though.
Our lodging that night was described in our itinerary as primitive (the previous night had been basic). We pretty much had a concrete room with 6 beds in it. This was the night that nobody was looking forward to, as the temperature was known to drop below -20 degrees at night.
It wasn't actually too bad... In the communal area outside our room we had a wood-burning stove to huddle around. We had also found a shop buying cheap Bolivian red wine, & in a moment of kiwi ingenuity, realised we also had left-over mandarins from lunch, sugar, plus Cinnamon & clove tea... In other words, all the ingredients you need to make mulled wine! We managed to get across to the cook what we wanted (I think I forgot to mention that our driver & cook only spoke Spanish!) & they delivered the goods... It was brilliant, we were the envy of the other groups staying there as we drank our hot wine & played some more poker until the lights once more went out on us at 9:30pm.

The next morning we were on the road at 5:30am, & it was FREEZING!!!!!! We drove through some very strange geothermal terrain, & made it to some natural hot springs by breakfast time. Will went in for a dip, but I wasn't brave enough... It was warm enough actually in the water, but I couldn't face getting out & getting dressed in the cold. Naturally there were no changing rooms or anything as civilised as that...This was a long day of driving. After breakfast we continued on to Laguna Verde, then dropped the kiwi girls off at the Chilean border, before the long trek back to Uyuni.We got into Uyuni at 5pm after hours of dusty bumpy roads. We had a fantastic pizza dinner (a lovely change from rice!), before our 8pm 12 hour overnight bus back to La Paz. Tired & smelly we arrived back at our fabulous hostel & promptly collapsed in bed for several hours of kip.

This is pretty much the end of our trip. We have a couple of days chilling in La Paz, spending our remaining Bolivianos at the markets, before flying back to the UK early Tuesday morning.