Salar de Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat located in the South West of Bolivia. We took a three-day tour that took us through the Salt Flats, some incredible, endless landscapes and across the Bolivian border into San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.

We arrived in the town Uyuni on the edge of the salt flats at 4am on a bus from Sucre, a city in Bolivia. We planned to find a tour of Salar de Uyuni leaving that morning so didn’t book a hostel or anything to go to. Arriving, we were greeted in the street by a woman who told us about her café which was about the only thing open at that time. It was freezing cold outside so it was very inviting. She said that we could order something whenever we wanted so we passed out on the sofas for a bit first. We arose around 6am and ordered a cuppa as slowly more weary travellers came traipsing in.

We were in fact waiting for some friends to arrive on another bus from La Paz so we could book the tour together. They arrived around 7am just as some of the tour agencies were opening, altogether there were five of us. We approached a few tour companies and found a tour for one for bs/600 which is about £60 who we booked with. The tour guide didn’t speak any English but between us we had good enough Spanish for it not to matter, it would’ve cost around double to do the tour in English.

We were told to come back to the agency at 10am bringing some water with us for day ahead. We had some breakfast, bought some snacks, bottled water and headed over. We left Uyuni around 11am once he’d strapped all of our backpacks to the roof of the 4×4. We asked him how long until the first stop and were surprised when he said just three minutes! It was to what they call the ‘train graveyard’ just outside of town. We laughed when we got there as we were expecting to feel quite alone on this trip but the trains were absolutely crawling with people from other tour groups taking pictures. The car park was so full of 4x4s that we actually lost ours when trying to find him afterwards.

We stopped at a touristy market and drove for another 20 minutes or so eventually driving onto the salt flats. There were mountains in the distance and you could see the town disappearing behind us. The mountains looked as if they were floating over the salt flats and after a driving a little while more we stopped to have a good look and take a few photos. We were all well and truly impressed with the views of the salt flats so far. At midday we went to a Salt Hotel in the middle of the flats, clue is in the name, it was literally completely made out of salt. It was there we had lunch and with all the other tour groups, it was extremely busy and we had to wait for a table. More driving after lunch led to the landscape opening up even more and we got out the car a few times to take some funny photos and stretch our legs.

Fast forward to a couple more hours of driving, still on the flats, by now most of the cars had all but disappeared – I suspect they were day trips returning to Uyuni. It was at this point that we got our first sense of how vast the landscape is and how little there really was out there. We could see some other cars in the distance but there wasn’t even a quarter of the cars we’d initially been travelling with. After a while we stopped in one place where it had been raining a few days beforehand, water was sitting on the surface and was creating a perfect reflection with the sky above. The water wasn’t deep, maybe an inch at times, but the reflection really was stunning. You couldn’t see in the distance where the sky ended and the flats began. We took some more funny photos and tried to comprehend the scale of the place, none of us had ever been anywhere like it before.

We made a few more stops before driving to our hostel for the night, it was pretty good for a hostel completely in the middle of nowhere! It was totally made of salt, down to the bed frames and tables we ate our dinner on. We had an early wake up call at 6am the next day so were in bed early, I have to say it was one of the best night’s sleep I’d had in a really long time. I woke up to my alarm in the exact position that I fell asleep in, pulled on a change of clothes, had some coffee and then we were on our way to the first stop of the morning. We had to drive an hour or so before arriving at a viewpoint of a volcano. Our guide told us that the volcano is half in Bolivia and half in Chile. From here we made our way to a stunning lake where we saw our first Flamingos! The lake framed by the mountains and volcanoes in the distance was so so incredibly beautiful and the flamingos obviously amazing to see too. We went to another lake with even more Flamingos where we stopped and had a picnic which was the best picnic view I think we’d ever had.

We made some more stops this day to a ‘Rock tree’ in the middle of the desert which was also close to a place where Viscachas (a type of Chinchilla) live. We saw a Wild Fox, Llamas, Vicunas (type of Llama) and at times the landscape depicted something that you’d only imagine existed on Mars. The whole day delivered really spectacular scenery and was probably my favourite of them all.

That night we arrived at another hotel, this time it had carpet in the bedrooms and it actually seemed to be comprised of materials other than salt! We had dinner together and were in a dorm room with our whole tour group of six. The stars that night were really spectacular, we were in the desert in the middle of nowhere with next to no night pollution. There are some of the world’s best observatories located in this region because of this, so you can only imagine how many stars we could see. The moon was still up and I should have waited for it to set so that I could see the stars more clearly but we were so tired from the day that we went to bed straight after dinner.

The following day we had a wakeup call of 4am! It was freezing cold but the warm coffee and pancakes for breakfast made it slightly easier. We strapped our bags to the roof of the car for the last time and were on our way. We had to drive for a couple of hours before reaching our first destination but got there just as the sun was coming up. We were 5000m above sea level and surrounded by Geysers. They were surprisingly loud, warm – not hot, and had a stench of Sulphur. The outside temperature I’m sure was sub-zero so instead of having ten minutes or so wandering around looking at the Geysers as our guide had suggested, we were all back in the car within a few because we were just so cold! We went down the mountain a little and came to some natural hot springs on the shores of yet another lake. The view was breathtaking and the baths were a great comforting warmth after having been so cold all morning long.

We immersed ourselves for nearly an hour before we had to part ways with the rest of our group. Some people were heading back to Uyuni and the rest of us onto San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. We said our farewells and started to head to the border. We made a few stops on the way to take in the views of the volcanoes and the mountains in the distance before reaching the Bolivian migration office.

The Bolivian migration office is basically a hut in the middle of desert – there is no constructed road there and you could pretty much drive past if you wanted to. Our tour guide pointed out at one point that you could see mountains in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina all at once as we were close the borders of all three countries. The guide asked us all to give him our Passports, he entered migration and got our exit stamps for us, the migration office was that lax that we didn’t even need to go in person! Having got our exit stamps, we transferred to another vehicle that was to take us into Chile. As soon as we passed the sign reading ‘Bienvenidos a Chile’ (or ‘Welcome to Chile’) instantaneously a tarmac road began and you could tell we’d entered a richer country. We saw a properly constructed migration building which vehicles had to drive through, and we had to get out of the vehicles and queue with our backpacks to be searched. It took a little bit of time because there were a lot of us but then we were on our way through the first well paved roads we’d seen in days!

Into the valley below we drove and San Pedro appeared in the distance in the midst of the desert. When we arrived it was around 11 am under the heat of the sun. We happily set off to a hostel to put our things down, brush a few days’ worth of salt and desert off our clothes and have a well-deserved shower.