Saturday 12 October - Tuesday 15 October

Uyuni Salt Flats, Bolivia

Another 'must do' on the Gringo Trail and probably the main reason to go to Bolivia. From La Paz down to Uyuni took us about 11 hrs overnight arriving at 6am. There is a lot of talk around about the road being really bad and while it's not the greatest it wasn't as rough as we'd expected. Maybe 5hrs of bumpy dirt road in the early hours of the morning, but nothing too hectic.

Tours from Uyuni all leave between 10am and 11am so we had time to catch some breakfast and check into getting our exit stamps done in Uyuni as we'd heard this was the last place you could get them done. Unfortunately it was Sunday and, while our tour operator, Quechua Connection told us that the immigration office would open for an hour at 10am, they never did open up. We'd just have to hope that we could do it after the tour at whatever kind of border post we'd get to. There are a lot of people who do this trip and take the connection to Chile so we'd figured we'd be just fine.
Our tour had three people pre-booked (us two and Odi - a lively german) so they had space to sign up another two people before we left at 11am. Its common for people to just turn up at Uyuni and scout out a tour leaving the same day, there are after all something like 80 operators in town. So Matthieu (French) and Steph (Swiss) joined our group and we were good to go.

Our guide, driver and chef, Jose Manuel, was first rate, responsible and friendly, always with a smile on his face and even though his english is non-existent, we got by with the bit of spanish we knew as a group. While an english guide would have been great its not really necessary on the salt flats tour, most of the tour involves just admiring the extreme landscapes and snapping them up with your camera. First stop was the train graveyard which contains the first locomotive to enter Bolivia and a train robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, then the tiny settlement of Colchani on the edge of the salt flats which is where most of the workers who mine the salt live. Then it was straight into the whiteness, an incredible part of our planet, and not just for the cool photos. Sitting at just over 3600masl, 10,852 flat square kilometres of salt is what is left of Uru Uru lake that evaporated thousands of years ago. Under the salt is brine which contains lithium, about 40% of the worlds reserves which the Bolivian government is extracting on a small scale.

The first day of the tour was driving on the salt flats stopping for photo's including the customary 'depth perception' photos (which didn't come out so well - the one important thing that Jose Manuel was not so good at). We stopped at Incahuasi which is an 'island' of fossilized coral in the middle of the Salar which is dominated by giant cacti which grow at one centimetre per year......some where 10 metres tall at least - pretty old. Jose Manuel prepared a llama steaks lunch which we ate in a salt museum next to the island of flags. We were still on the Salar at sunset hoping for clear skies, but it was not to be. A few too many clouds on the horizon that night ruined what would have been spectacular. That night we stayed in a very basic salt hostel, where everything was made out of salt including the building and all its furniture on the southern edge of the Salar and were back on the road at 6:30am.

The next day took us further south heading towards Laguna Colorado through the town of San Juan. We passed volcanoes, one steaming like it was ready to go, a few different coloured lagoons full of flamingoes, Arbol la Piedra which is a stone tree carved by the howling, sandy winds, with lunch at the beautiful white Laguna Hedionda which is great for bird nerds. We ended at the red Laguna Colorado at 4278masl where we checked into out basic adobe hostel. The red colour is caused by the algae that live in it. After dinner, a few drinks and a game of Phase 10, a card game Odi brought, we had to get some sleep to be up early for a 4:00am departure to catch sunrise over a geyser field.

In the morning the tour race was on again, and we were second to get going and second to get to the geyser field. With the earth literally boiling away just below your feet, you have to be pretty careful here. At 4850masl its absolutely freezing here, especially at sunrise, but worth it. Steaming gasses escaping from any hole in the ground, bubbling mud pools and a very strong sulphur smell. But the tour groups gather quickly so you can't and don't want to spend too long here. More amazing scenery as the sun rose in the Andes with fields of oddly formed vertical ice sheets, stark, arid, rocky, dusty, coloured mountains everywhere you looked. It's like you've been transported to another planet. We stopped for breakfast at some thermal pools next to Salar de Chalviri where you could have a dip in the hot water. With the bathrooms locked and nowhere to change into something more suitable for swimming we opted just to soak our feet trying not to be mooned by other less conservative tourists who seemed not to care who saw what and that it was about 5 degrees C outside.

We finished the tour, quite fittingly, at the immaculate Laguna Verde just on the Southern border with Chile. Its a picture perfect green lagoon at the base of Lincacabur Volcano, coloured green by the arsenic, lead, copper and other metals.

Jose Manuel dropped us at the Bolivian border and handed over our bus tickets which would take us to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. We said our goodbyes and off we went. No problems at the border as far as passports and stamps go. Happy days ahead in Chile and the end to an awesome action packed 11 days in Bolivia.