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Sarah and I had been looking forward to making this trip for quite a while. We had heard about the Bolivian Salt Flats and seen photographs long before we left Florida. Every week we also met other travelers who had been there and had wonderful reports on the tour. The tour of the Salt Flats can be done in a few different ways either starting or finishing in the Bolivian town of Uyuni. We were making our way from Chile so started in the beautiful desert town of san Pedro de Atacama.
Before you can see anything you have to book a tour. This can be a bit of a dilemma for travelers since every of the many tour companies have conflicting reviews both online and in the local tourist office comment book. Among my favorite reviews are the one with the company that had to cancel last minute because its drivers were drunk and the one where the tourists were supposedly kidnapped by local farmers for a time! At the end of the day, they say, you have to hope for the best and go with your gut. We booked through a company called Atacama Mistica, and they were
excellent. From the beginning we liked them –we had to push our start date back one day because Sarah was a bit ill and instead of being difficult, like we heard some companies have been, the agent told us we could start just whenever we wanted. The guide was excellent and he cooked some great food for us too. Although he didn’t speak English it gave us the perfect excuse to practice our Spanish. Food and accommodation was also perfect, and our group was top notch too.
The tour itself was for three days and two nights, taking us from San Pedro in Chile to Uyuni in Bolivia. You can see some photos of the amazing landscapes below. Over the three days we saw the three lagoons – White, Green and Red; aptly named. We both loved seeing the many different rock formations and especially the Dali Rock Tree. The Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida is my favorite art Museum and I love Dali’s surrealist paintings so it was incredible to actually see and touch many of the forms that inspired some of his work. We also visited the geyser field
Salt Flats
Salar de
Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat at over 10,000 square kilometers. It is located in southwest Bolivia, near the Andes, and is elevated over 3,500 meters (11,500 ft) above sea level. The landscape is incredible as you can see from some of the photos. About 30,000 or so years ago, the area was part of a giant prehistoric lake which dried and left behind two modern lakes, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Salar de Uyuni. So now the Salar de Uyuni is covered by a few meters of salt crust. The crust serves as a source of salt and this is collected daily by companies in the area mainly for industrial sale.
It was incredible to be there and to get so many amazing photos. While we were at Salar de Uyuni there was a layer of water on the ground which turned the area into the biggest mirror in the world. At times it was hard to know where the horizon was. We also stopped at the Salt Hotel, but it wasn’t as you might imagine. I was picturing from a Disney movie and instead it might have been a budget motel.
Coca Leaves
Helped with altitude Funny Photos
You can probably tell that we had a lot of fun taking photos at the Salt Flats. Here you get a chance to play with perception and have some fun.
Train Cemetary
Another attraction was the antique train cemetery. Uyuni used to serve in the past as a distribution hub for trains that would carry minerals enroute to Pacific Ocean ports. The rail lines were built by British engineers arriving near the end of the 19th century and were used until the 1940s when the mining industry collapsed, partly because of mineral depletion. Many trains were abandoned, producing the train cemetery that you can see in the photos also..
Coca Leaves
I’m all about natural remedies. Coming from Ireland where a hot whiskey is good for what ails you, I wasn’t going to look for pharmaceuticals to help with adjusting to the altitude. Enter Hojas de Coca or Coca Leaves. I chewed them from San Pedro to Potosi (the highest town on the world) and had no altitude sickness. I also ran around with uncontrollable energy during that time but it’s probably a coincidence (Joking!)
Well, we hope you enjoy the latest tale from
our travels. Next we went from Uyuni to Potosi, a famos mining town.
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lauren
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perspectives
I LOVE the pictures of contrasting big and small. You guys are hilarious.