Salar de Uyuni and the Lagoons

I think the pictures should speak for themselves...So unless you're incredibly bored at work (won't mention any names, Amelia!) then just scroll to the pictures! I really couldn't write this very well and it doesn't do it all justice!

Day 1 we left Uyuni in a group of 6 (all British) with our excellent guide, Obed. Our first stop was the train cemetry where there are a load of trains that were made in England are abandoned in the middle of the desert rusting. Next we headed straight to the Salt Plains to a small village where everyone works mining salt and all the houses are made of salt as well. There used to be a lot of big salt hotels in the middle of the Salt Flats but they have now been closed for environmental reasons. The salt is up to 120m deep in places and the plains stretch for 1200 sqkms. Pretty blinding stuff.
After our lunch of llama BBQ we went to Isla del pescado - a fish shaped island full of cactae. Its a really random place and it felt like we were in the middle of the sea because everywhere you looked it was just bright white for miles and miles. We then went out to take stupid pictures (see photos) playing around on the salt flats with the lack of perspective. It was boiling though and we all got a bit burnt so the evening was pretty funny sitting around with bright red faces.
We slept in a small salt hotel on the edge of the salt flats with two hours of electricity each day and we also had the local children sing to us and perform a dance even though they all looked pretty miserable and like they'd really prefer not to be there!

Day 2 we crossed the desert seeing volcanoes, lagoons and flamingos. The whole trip was timed perfectly so that we got to each place at the best time of day. We had lunch at the foot of two huge mountains by another lake with geese and llamas nearby.The highlights were the laguna colorada at 4300m which is a bright red colour due to the minerals in it and the laguna hedionda which had lots of flamingos feeding at the time that we arrived. We also stopped at a rock which is shaped as a tree and appears in a Dali painting (see photos). We slept in a small hotel with minimal electricity and no showers but our group kept warm with a couple of bottles of wine and some excellent winnie the pooh playing cards.

On Day 3 we got up at 4:30am to drive to the Sol de mañana and geisers. They are at their most extreme early in the morning while it is still cold. By this point we were at 5000m and were all a bit dizzy walking around with the bubbling mud and fumes from the geisers. The sun started to rise and we drove to some natural hot springs before a big pancake breakfast. We then spent the rest of the day seeing more amazing landscapes - volcanoes, laguna verde (green lake), an immense rock valley and the Salvador Dali desert which, as its name suggests, is pretty surreal!

Bolivia has so far proven itself to be a beautiful country with hugely diverse landscapes. Its weird to think that on top of all this it has the wetlands of the Pantanal in the East and the Amazon jungle in the North. A lot of the country is pretty inhospitable and i can imagine that life gets pretty tough in the salt flats and desert in the winter. Our nights there were -10 degrees and that is the end of summer for them! The people have also been really interesting and friendly. Our guide Obed never stopped working and made sure that he got us to places before the others if possible and he was really excellent and proud of his job. We actually broke down on the last day (those cars take quite a beating from the sand, salt and extreme temperatures!) and our radiator got a leak. We ended up getting back on the road after an hour after Obed and Tom improvised with some glue and melted rubber that we had in the back of the van. Made the trip moire exciting anyway! At one point he had us flagging down other cars to get all their water for the radiator (and I presume for us in case we were stranded in the desert overnight!)

The next stop will be the capital - La Paz! We will arrive there on Sunday 13th after an overnight train journey and short bus trip from Oruro. Seems so weird that we have already seen the salt plains - it was probably the part I was most excited about and always seemed really far away and we have now completed it!

Enjoy the pictures!

---

---

---