A tour into Salar de Uyuni

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Arrived at our agency around 8:00 in the morning, luckily we were the only four on our tour. 1st stop, 5 minutes down the road was the Chilean border control, which took nearly 2 hours to clear and then a short drive to the Bolivian border control, a simple building in the middle of nowhere. Breakfast was served and we got chatting to an English couple who were coming off a tour with the same agency. They warned us that our guide only had 3 cds, which turned out to be no exaggeration! They also gave me a few Bolivian coins, enough for a couple of toilet stops, but in the end was a real saver!
The next 3 days we were to drive through some spectacular scenery, the guide calls Bolivia “simply superlative” and it is really hard to describe the landscapes we saw, massive, wild, stunning….. I hope the photos give some idea.
The first day we visited a couple of lakes, one green, the other white, and then on to some hot springs where we spent a delightful 30 minutes wallowing in bath hot water. Our next stop was to some geysers, fairly inactive at that time of the day apart from billowing pungent black smoke. We arrived at our hotel mid afternoon for lunch, simple food, but we were starved so we dove in. Spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and taking walks around the hotel. Evening came, and so did the cold, and we were all wearing many layers, outside the sky was clear, but full of stars.
Day 2 and we visited another series of lakes and saw flocks of flamingos, again set to a backdrop of stunning scenery. We stopped by the tree stone and some other fascinating rock formations. We stopped for lunch beside another amazing lake with loads of flamingos. Unfortunately it’s a popular stop point for many tour groups and it seems that most tourists do not seem to feel it necessary to take all their rubbish with them. So, as with many of these stop points, it was littered with ribbons of toilet paper and other junk, spoiling the natural beauty of the site. The afternoon we had to cover much ground, including some seriously rough driving, at one point we couldn’t see where the track was leading down to! We made a stop in a small village for a welcome beer break and made friends with a very cheeky little boy, who took a liking to us and to Roffeys Pringles.
Arrived at the edge of the salt flats and to our salt hotel, where everything was made with bricks of salt, actually the bathrooms fortunately were not made of salt, though the toilets did have cushioned toilet seats…..
Dinner was a comparative feast, plate of meat with fries and rice, served with a bottle of wine - heaven! We finished the evening watching the moon rise over the salt flats.
Next morning we drove out onto the salt flats, bizarre experience being in the middle of such a huge flat, dazzlingly white expanse. Spent ages digging out salt crystals from pools of freezing water, and taking lots of silly photos, no really Shakira was out there with us! Our guide Flavio explained the local legend of the salt flats, that one of the mountains was in the form of a woman, and the salt was the mixture of her milk and tears from losing her child. There was a fish involved too, but not quite sure how that fitted in to the story….. We made a final stop in a village at the edge of the salt flats, where the salt harvested is brought to be refined, also provides plenty of gift buying opportunity for the buses of tourists that pass through. Our last stop was in Uyuni at the train graveyard, effectively the junk yard where train hulks are left to rot. Our guide Flavio dropped us off at our hotel and time to say goodbye to him, he had been an excellent guide, always in a good mood and made an effort to understand our Spanish and answer all our questions.
Uyuni is hardly a rocking metropolis, but we found our selves a nice restaurant which served good pizzas and we finished the evening with a bottle of wine and live music.

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