Salar de Uyuni - Bolivia

Two countries. 10 days. 9 flights. 0 room for delays or error.  Luckily, everything went off more or less smoothly and I was actually able to pull off my somewhat ambitious agenda.  I left Guatemala on Friday afternoon (May 31) and finally arrived in La Paz, Bolivia at 1:30AM on Saturday morning.  I grabbed a couple hours of sleep at the airport hostel and luckily didn’t wake up with a headache.  La Paz is the 2nd highest commercial airport in the world, sitting at 13,325ft. I then hopped on a domestic flight and landed in Uyuni at 6:50AM to a balmy 10F.  By 10:30 I was in a Land Cruiser with 4 other people headed out on a 3 day trip that would take us through the Salar de Uyuni and close to the border with Chile.  

Trip Map:

Amaszonas: Bolivan airline

The first stop on the trip (standard for all the Uyuni tours) is the old train cemetery, followed by a salt processing town.

Then finally, we arrived at the most famous stops on the trip, the actual salt flats, the largest in the world.  It is practically obligatory to take a series of goofy perspective photos on the salt flats.  Our guide even brought a prop with him…..hence the T Rex photos.  Some were a little better than others.  

Then it’s on to an island in the middle of the salt flats and finally off to the rustic, heatless salt hotel for the night.  To put it bluntly, the salt hotel was freezing and it was a welcome sight to see the sun coming up the following morning.

The theme of day two was lagunas and flamingos.  We stopped a couple times at different scenic views (volcanoes, railroad tracks, a rock tree, geothermal vents) and then visited a couple lakes before encountering quite a bit of snow on the final route to the hotel that night. 

Llama meat.  Ate some of that on the trip.

Despite all the warnings, the second night did not fell nearly as cold as the 1^st night.  This might have been due to (a) expecting the worst, (b) having more people sleeping in the same room that night hence more body heat, or (c) more whiskey.  Either way, as the sun was coming up the following day, we took a dip in the hot springs, watching our hair freeze from the steam rising up from the spring (yes it was that cold). Day 3 was a lot of driving, but we did get to see more flamingos, more lakes, some southwest-looking rock formations, and capture some very photogenic llamas.

The trip ended back in Uyuni, where I spent the night before flying back up to La Paz and then over to Cuzco, Peru.