Largest Salt Plains in the World

November 30 - December 3, 2007

We left our beloved La Paz on a crammed bus heading south to Oruro. We changed here to a train where we spend seven hours watching very nice scenery roll past our first class window. Don´t think we´ve every travelled first class before!

We arrived in Uyuni at about 10.30pm, found a place to sleep and joined a three day salt plains tour first thing in the morning. Good recommendations for tour groups were hard to find for the salt plains, but we managed to find two companies who had reasonable reviews. There are many reports of drunk drivers, guides stealing food and taking short cuts. We could only hope that we would be lucky.

We had two 4WDs in our group. In ours we had two Finns, two Americans, a local driver and another local English speaking guide. The other car contained two South Africans, one Belgian, one Dane and one Dutchy.

The salt plains were magnificent. One of the ´things to do´ is construct perspective photos. Since it´s white as far as the eye can see, you can create some pretty cool shots. We needed some creative input from our guide who´d been there and done that many times before, to help us come up with these beauties. We were actually hoping for rain on the flats because this creates a mirror affect which makes the photos even more spectacular.

The locals use the salt to build houses and we were lucky enough to stay in a salt hotel on our first night. Everything was salt, the walls, the carpet, the bed bases, tables, chairs - not the toilet (it was porcelain!) The roof obviously couldn´t be made of salt because otherwise the whole building would dissolve when it rained. The salt bricks are cut directly out of the ground and are stuck together with a slurry of salt and water. Very interesting.

Our second day was spent driving our 4WD. We passed numerous lakes, one red lake with lots of red algae, one green lake with copper sulphate settling on the bottom, most with plenty of flamingos. We were introduced to wild vicuñas, like guanacos or alpacas and many domestic llamas. We also found some crazy rabbits with long traits. There were a few birds, but there wasn´t a lot to eat apart from rocks so the wildlife was understandably scarce.

At times we felt we could have been driving across the surface of the moon. There was one smoking volcano (albeit covered by clouds) many bubbling geysers and all sorts of crazy rock formations in a variety of colours. At one point we climed to just below 5000m, our highest point for our world tour, yay! We also stopped for a swim in some thermal hot springs and got covered in minute red-coloured bugs. They were called something that when translated in the local Quechuan language became ´skin eaters´!

Our guide decided to crack the shits on the second night. He got drunk and became racist and abusive, most of which we just ignored. Otherwise our group was a lot of fun.

The tour finished in a small tourist town called San Pedro de Atacama across the border in Chile. We only stayed long enough to organise a very expensive bus across the other border into Argentina. We paid US$85 each for a mini bus and two 4WDs to take us to the border. They overbooked and could barely fit the luggage on the backs of the 4WDs. Luckily, Davo still had some Tonny bailing twine in his pack to help tie them down. At the border we changed to two minibuses, one which broke down ten minutes from our final destination where we arrived only three hours late!

But we were happy because we were ´home´ in Argentina! It felt more like home anyway.