Day 40 - 42: Across the Salt Flats of Salar de Uyuni

September 22 – 24, 2015

When you google Salar de Uyuni, you normally see photos of wacky compositions made possible by manipulating parallax errors on a sea of endless whiteness.

But the huge national park possesses much more than that. Impressive mountains, gorgeous desertscapes, majestically random sandstone formations, weird geysers and mudpools, and colourful high altitude lakes with thousands of beautiful FLAMINGOES!

Getting there We booked a 3d2n one way tour from San Pedro to Uyuni that cost us 180USD each with Cordillera Traveller. The only difference between this and the 4d3n is the last day that was reserved just for driving back to San Pedro de Atacama. Essentially, everyone is on the same tour and you split up based after that depending on where you were headed. We were picked up on a minibus early in the morning and arrived at the border checkpoint of Chile in less than 15 minutes. While queueing, we made friends with some Irish ladies who would eventually travel with us (follow us) to many more places. The Chile checkpoint was pretty much a breeze but we couldn't see the Bolivian border... Interestingly, the Bolivian border was 45 minutes away that had no gate nor fence nor anything to separate the countries! Not exactly the border we had in mind.

Lucky for us, we settled our Bolivian visa in Salta, Argentina and had minimal problems at the border. We were then gathered and given a briefing in which we were reminded that they hardly spoke English. In fact, according to the lead guide, they hardly spoke at all. We were then given some breakfast (our first taste of cold hard tasteless Bolivian bread, but they had Milo!), and introduced to our driver and 4 other travellers who would be our companions for the next few days. Sophia and Juanjo are siblings from Spain while Vanessa and Rachel are friends from Switzerland.

Day 1 45 minutes later we were at the entrance to the national park to pay for the entrance, and to use the toilet (ladies were warned that there was only nature, and well its a big open area with few hiding spots). Over the next few hours, we travelled up and down across crisscrossing trails to Laguna Blanco, Laguna Verde, the Dali desert (inspiration to some of Salvador Dali's paintings), Sol de Manana geysers and Fumaroles, and the highlight of the day: a thermal water pool! Everyone except us went in because we thought it was on the second day and hence left our swimsuits in our backpacks wrapped up in a bunch on top of the 4WD.

Laguna Blanco

The thermal pool we missed out. :(

Boiling mud pools

At one look, the trails left by the numerous trails left by 4WDs before us seemed like confusing routes to different destinations. The truth was that they all headed the same way in the wide expanse of land. It was really just up to the driver which trail he preferred. He occasionally had a race with the other drivers.

The high altiplano coupled with the rather bumpy ride en route provided some of our travel companions with a rather unpleasant altitude sickness. Fortunately we had a few stops along the way and we were only in the vehicle for less than 5 hours in total. We eventually arrived at our hostel with no shower facilities where we shared a cold room with our new companions. One should also note that there were barely any blankets and only 3 toilet cubicles for all 28-30 people.

Dinner was surprisingly satisfying and everyone sat together for the first time. Soon it was all laughter and jokes around the international table. Although we were recommended to bring or even rent sleeping bags, some of us decided that there wasn't a need and survived the night wrapped in all our cold wear. Day 2 The day was spent visiting Laguna Colorado which nests approximately 30000 flamingoes from 3 different species; Liloli desert with randomly shaped wind eroded rocks; other coloured lagoons with even more of those cute dancing flamingoes; and the Chiguana salt flat.

It's our first time seeing so many flamingoes! We just couldn't resisit doing these weird poses.

If you have yet to see wild flamingoes, this is probably the best place to see them all in their natural habitat. Their sheer numbers in the gorgeous coloured lakes against a background of stupendous mountains are really an awesome natgeo ment to behold. It's fun even just watching them move around in packs and gracefully Tangoing away when people got close, then taking flight with their massive pink wings that were well hidden when stationary.

Random rock formations from wind erosion

When we arrived at the salt hotel after some shopping at San Juan, we were the first to the hot showers. As you might expect, we showered fast and tried to ration the limited hot water but it still didn't last long enough for the last few in the queue. Lucky us!

As night fell, we took some starry night shots, had dinner with everyone again, and then shared some wine (we also contributed our Argentinian Malbec) and good laughs. Then things turned sour when the drivers refused to wake up earlier for the sunrise at the salt flats: the highlight of our tour. They came up with some stupid rule that everyone had to agree, although it is supposedly settled within the passengers of each vehicle. They even tried to play us against each other. After some heated discussions where all 24 travellers (even the old chinese lady that had altitude sickness) stood unanimous on waking up earlier and skipping lunch, the drivers reluctantly agreed. We were fortunate to have a sizeable group of Spanish speakers who rallied for us.

Day 3 We were off at 4am, but we missed the actual sunrise moment. Till today, we are not sure why our driver kept on driving despite knowing that we were about to miss our moment. All the other cars had found their own spot in that vast stretch of emptiness. There were no roads, no trails, no paths, so you could simply stop anywhere you liked. Yet he chose to stop only when the sun already peeked out, even though we asked him to stop a couple of times before that.

Still, we witnessed the glorious sunrise although we couldn't really capture it perfectly on a timelapse video. We kept warm by running around and doing some cardio workouts whilst taking photos whenever we could. Driver stayed in the vehicle, as he always did.

We moved on and drove to Incahuasi island, one of the few volcanic islands that inhabited this once upon a time sea. When Vik found out that it used to be a coral island, it blew his mind. He realised he was witnessing a work of extreme nature!

Incahuasi Island

What used to be under the sea and inhabited by beautiful marine life thousands of years ago is now inhabited by giant cactuses almost 12m tall! This clearly tells us how long it has been since the sea dried up. As we continued to climb the island (It wasn't THAT tall but its still no mean feat at that altitude), Vik found his way through some caves and could imagine what a beautiful dive site this would have been. Of course, one must not forget how beautiful it still is, with miles of dried whiteness stretching toward the horizon. It's all nature's work, and it really humbled us, because we could clearly see how the unnatural looking landscape before us was naturally formed. Naturally unnatural.

Understandably, Vik was the last to descend from the hill and had a quick breakfast. We saw a few people playing football on the salt flat but it didn't last long; the ball was punctured easily by the rough salt crystal surface. When we were done, we finally moved on to find a nice spot far away enough from everything else to do the obvious: crazy photos! We brought as many props as we could but it took a long time to position people in order to take good shots. We never really got the hang of it; we only managed to capture the ones with us on top of our props. The driver grew impatient with us (presumably because we got him out so early in the morning) and we ended up all rather unhappy with the "photoshoot".

Last stop on our trip was the train cemetery just outside of Uyuni. There isn't much of a story to this actually but Vik enjoyed it as he was able to monkey around and take his action movie shots.

We then had lunch in Uyuni (we didn't know it was included), and tearfully bade farewell to our new friends, before heading off to buy our overnight bus tickets and explore the dusty town.

We had to withdraw extra Bolivianos and were appalled by the withdrawal limit despite trying different atms (500BOB = 75USD), which barely gave us enough to buy our bus tickets and have dinner. Uyuni is small and we had too much time on our hands so we got bored soon after. The only positive is that we had really good spicy pizza at Minuteman Revolutionary pizza (you have to walk into Tonito hotel to reach there). Time passed slowly before we finally got onto the rather smelly and filled bus that had nothing as promised (WiFi, heating, food). We were just looking forward to reach La Paz! Tips:

Get your Bolivian visa beforehand. We did in in Salta for free and with ease!
If you can, start from Tupiza instead of San Pedro. It's cheaper and you can still get the sunrise at the salt flats compared to starting from Uyuni.
Swimsuit on the first day! The thermal pool is worth it
You will also need about 50 Bolivianos (money), 5l of water, power bank to charge your cameras and phones.
Spanish here is important, try to identify and make friends with Spanish speakers early so as to be in a group with them.
Be prepared for altitude sickness: do not start a tour without acclimatising first.
Try to encourage everyone to go for the sunrise option. It's very well worth it. Don't let the drivers' selfishness screw your plans over.
Maximum withdrawal in Uyuni is 500 BOB which is like 100SGD. So please bring more spare cash if you plan to proceed from here.