Advertisement
Published: July 15th 2009
Edit Blog Post
I cant believe we’ve now been in Australia 6 weeks and still haven’t finished the blog from South America. I spent the first few weeks missing everything so much and wishing we were back there that I think I was holding on finishing the blog as something to still do from SA!!
Anyway, the last one saw us in the Amazon Basin which was actually my overall highlight of the trip! Bolivia just carried on delivering the goodness and can officially be crowned as our favourite country in South America!! (And for me my favourite country I’ve ever been - FACT!). So we didn’t have much time left at this point but we still had one of the ‘biggies’ to do and something everyone who’d done it raves about! The Bolivian Salt Plains (Salar De Uyuni). The strangest, most surreal and most magical landscape you’re likely to see! We began our trip from La Paz on a 13 hour overnight bus ride which consisted of 180km of unpaved road!! I kid you not this was a kidney shaker! Who needs a slendertone when you can do this bus journey!! Steve hadn’t been feeling well all day and managed to throw
up a good few times on the journey - this really isn’t good in such conditions (a little selfish if you ask me 😊).
On arriving in a small middle of nowhere town called Uyuni very early in the morning we checked in to our freezing hotel (this place was like a desert town, at altitude where everything was white and made of salt). We’d been lucky enough to meet an Aussie couple, Adrian and Jessie, at our hostel in La Paz so we already knew we wanted to arrange to do the tour with them and we three (Steve recovered in bed) headed off to find a good agency. You hear millions of stories about crap tours so it’s best to go on a recommendation. Even with doing this ours didn’t turn out to be that great at all!!
So after hanging around this strange little town for the day we headed off early the following morning in our 4x4 with a non English speaking driver and a quiet Korean couple on a 3 day tour of the salt flats and desert which would eventually end up in Chile!!
Day one was the highlight and the one
where you get all the cool and crazy photos that has made the salt flats famous - almost everyone we’d met on the trip had raved about this and we weren’t let down. It’s hard to describe the landscape but hopefully the pictures do it justice. That night we stayed in a salt hotel which is in fact a hotel made of salt blocks!! VERY cold and light’s out at 9pm when the generators conked out!
Day two was a lot of driving and a lot of lagoons of various colours! Green Lagoon, Red Lagoon, Blue lagoon - all determined by the landscape around them! We also saw lots of flamingos!! It was also where we reached our highest points (4700m!!) and where I realised that whilst I’d escaped the altitude sickness our Aussie friends were pretty sick. Jessie was ill all day whilst Adrian woke us at about 3am throwing up over the floor! We felt so awful for them. So many people we’d met who had just come back from the flats had complained about that notorious second night and how hard it was to sleep at that altitude - it really was - you’d wake up
with palpitations and weird tingles etc!!
Day three started at 5am when we headed to see geysers at sunrise. It was COOL! The volcanic steam pushing out of the earth on the -10 temperatures and with the sun rising in the background! It was something out of a science fiction film! It was too cold to stay out the car for long and so we drove on to the hot thermal springs. The springs were amazing - about 30degrees and with it being -10 outside many crazy people went for a dip. We were both far too aware that getting out the springs after this would probably result in my crying so decided to just dip our feet instead! We were coming to the end of our time in Bolivia and spent the rest of that morning driving towards to Chilean border through crazy desert landscape. We were dropped at the border which is literally a stone building in the middle of nowhere. A bus picked us up from 4200m and drive us down to Chile and the desert town of San Pedro De Atacama which was at 2500m and sunny at 25 degrees - bliss!!!!
We both
had an amazing time on the salt flats and it was again another highlight (there are too many now!).
I’d gone to Bolivia with high expectations and I wasn’t let down - in fact unlike Brazil, Bolivia had exceeded my expectations and I would have loved to spend more time there. If you could sum it up in a word I’d say ‘Cool!’. The people were crazy, the diversity of things to do and see and the atmosphere was totally different to anything/anywhere else!!
I hope you like to photos!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 7; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0493s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
joyce
non-member comment
Hello From Sunny England
Just to say I really enjoy reading your blogs. The shots at the salt lake are fantastic. Enjoy Oz. Joyce