Final days in Bolivia – salt flats time.....

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I'm seriously behind on my blogging due to a frantic few days of travelling in mostly remote areas with limited access to the tinterweb so I'll try and keep this post brief so that I can catchup. After returning to La Paz I flew into Uyuni the following morning to see the Salar de Uyuni Salt flats before heading South for Chile. The approach to the airport is well worth the cost of flying alone I think, the scenery here is amazing – a strange lunar desert mix of whites, reds, blues, greens and other colours. Its very surreal. The tour I booked involved a 1.5 day drive around the local area in a 4x4 before a very long and bumpy ride along dirt roads for the transfer to the Bolivia-Chile border.



The Uyuni tour started with a trip to the Train Cemetary – an eiry corner of the town where various locomotives from the town's mining era are rusting away. This was followed by a trip to Salar de Uyuni (the famous Salt flats). I think every traveller to South America comes here, and every traveller takes pretty much the same photos – the sky melting into the land, the various jumping and funny perspective photos. Everyone's seen these so you think you know what to expect. Nothing prepares you for the sight when you arrive however, this place really is unlike anywhere you've been before (unless you're an alien maybe). Its so bright, the huge sand and salt grains crunch under foot and the scale of the place is just astounding. Even with tourists flocking to the lake in their hundreds (possibly thousands?) you still feel small compared to the scale of the dried out lake. The colours here are extraordinary and difficult to capture on a camera (if you have my skill level anyway). I tried my best anyway by playing about with a CPL lens I got with my camera which changes the 'blueness' and contrast of skies. Of course no trip here would be complete without the compulsory stupid photos as well and so myself and a couple of cool guys from Columbia and Argentina set about taking it in turns to get some ridiculous photos. I say ridiculous in the group photos it looks like they befriended a snowman with chocolate arms....



That evening we drove via jeep to Villa Mar, a quiet frontier town that would be our resting point for the night before driving the final leg to the Bolivian border. Due to tiredness none of the passengers were particularly talkative en route, when we arrived though and had dinner together we got chatting. They were all university students on their summer holidays and although they spoke a little english they insisted on speaking Spanish for the whole evening which was great practice – they were very patient even when we decided to play a game of cards, the rules of which I had to try and grasp in Spanish. Generally on this continent they really appreciate it and much more patient with foreigners trying to speak the local language than in Europe I think. This has been really useful and has helped my Spanish immensely, I've now had a few trips and evenings where I've found myself speaking Spanish for several hours without any serious faux pas!



The next morning for the final leg started at 4am to Chile with us driving through a changing desert landscape. The light sands giving way to a more reddy landscape punctuated by geysers, thermal lakes with flamingos and snow capped mountains. Stopping for breakfast at one of these I was introduced to a Chilean delicacy for the first time, 'Dulce y leche' I think it was called. Basically reduced milk caramalised with sugar which is usually eaten on bread at breakfast – kind of nice but insanely sweet.



Arriving at the Chile-Bolivian border we swapped the 4x4 for a bus ride to San Pedro de Attacama, a desert town in the Northern Attacama famous for stargazing and treking. Meeting another Brit from Brighton at the border we agreed it would be a wasted opportunity not to do a stargazing trip so we signed up to drive out of town after sunset with a group of tourists to be educated about the stars. The Attacama has something like 360 cloudless days a year I think and its easy to see why its renowned within the world of astronomy. The sky here is so clear. Peering through a telescope looking at the various planets, constellations and stars we were also able to see the craters on the moon to quite a level of detail and witness two shooting stars. Bizarrely the on trip I also bumped into a couple from London who live just two streets away from me, so perhaps the universe isn't that big after all....!

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