Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
It took us a good few days in San Pedro de Atecama to research and choose a tour operator for the Salar de Uyuni 4x4 tour. The reason being that we had heard from other travellers and had read on TripAdvisor.com that in recent years there have been a number of fatal accidents on the Salar due to drunk driving tour guides. One particularly bad incident in 2008 involving a head on collision between two 4x4s resulted in 13 deaths! After a lot of internet research, and reading traveller reviews in the San Pedro tourist office we chose Cordillera Traveller which seemed to be the safest (albeit most expensive) of the tour companies operating out of San Pedro. As it turned out, our choice of tour operators was a good one as our trip went off smoothly and incident-free. Our driver, Felix, was seemingly sober for the entire trip and the car itself seemed safe: a looked after 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser with working seatbelts for everyone.
On the first day of the tour we ascended to 4800m (15,800ft) to cross into Bolivia. As we turned off the Chilean highway our minibus driver pointed out just how symbolically relevant the roads we were driving on were: The path to Argentina which we had come from a few days prior was a paved and luxurious highway, whilst the path to Bolivia which we were turning onto now was a rough, unsealed, 2-track road.
When we arrived at the Bolivian immigration office, or should I say, the shack in the middle of nowhere where a guy chews bags of coca leafs all day, we underwent our immigration formalities and set off on the tour. As the only American in our group I was the only one required to purchase a visa ($135 USD) to enter Bolivia. Because the border entrances don't handle visas, Felix had to keep my passport and be accountable for me whilst I was in the country until I could get my visa in Uyuni. We continued driving the rest of the day visiting a ton of lagoons and volcanos and some geysers that put the Tatio Geysers to shame. Our first night's sleep was in a refuge at 4400m (14,500ft) next to the best lagoon of the day: Laguna Colorada. Laguna Colorada is a massive, dark re, algael lagoon that is home to hundreds upon hundreds of bright pink flamingoes. An interesting thing about these flamingos: they sleep standing up with one leg in the water and are literally frozen in place overnight until the morning sun defrosts their ice-handcuff and they're freed for the day. It's a strange thing to see in the morning -all those flamingos stuck in the same spot they went to bed - and I'd imagine it would make hunting them a very boring sport indeed.
Our second day on the tour was mostly spent driving alongthe high Bolivian plateau with a one hour lunch stop overlooking a couple of volcanos, and another hour stopover in the small pueblo called San Juan so Felix could go number twos. The highlight of the second day was not the drive itself, nor Felix's numbers twos, but was in fact the 'hotel' we stayed in at the edge of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. What made this hotel unique was that it was constructed almost entirely out of salt. They somehow manufacture salt into bricks and mortar them together with some combination of salt, water and glue. It's a very clever way of using local resources and insulates the
hotel very well. The finishing touches were a salt dinner table, a salt bed frame and a 2-inch layer of loose salt on the floors of the entire building. It was definitely one of the strangest places I've ever slept.
The third day of the tour was the most visually spectacular as we did a pre-dawn hike above the hotel to watch the sunrise, visited the incredible Salar de Uyuni (world's largest salt flat) and stopped at Fisherman's Island in the middle of the Salar which contains tons of 900+ year old catcuses. Because it was the dry season, there was no standing water on the flats, therefore all you could see for miles and miles was bright white salt. It makes for a cool effect in photographs because there is little to no perspective in a photo and so if someone is standing 10m behind you it looks as though they've shrunk.
We finished the tour in the transit town of Uyuni where I got my Bolivian visa, and we had a couple drinks with our new friends from Australia David
and Merryn at the Extreme Fun Pub (who can resist with a name like this - see photo). We then jumped on our 7-hour bus to Potosi.