After hearing horror stories about the tours across the bolivian salt flats, from the drivers being drunk for the whole trip to car crashes on the salar, we were pretty cautious what company we went with. Since it’s much more expensive to book trips in advance we decided to book in San Pedro de Atacama. We luckily walked in to a random tour agency mixed in among many. World white travel! After leaving and doing a bit of research we couldn’t find any bad reviews so decided to book the three day trip from San Pedro to Uyuni in Bolivia.
We were picked up from our hostel bright and early and piled in to a bus with 12 other people. After an hour and a half wait in the cold to get stamped out of Chile, we headed to the Bolivian border. Immigration was literally a lone standing shack in the middle of the desert, but it provided one of the fastest border crossings so far. We had a quick breakfast while our bags got strapped to the roof of a 4wd. The group was split in two and we were both very happy our jeep ended up with a young friendly group. A couple from America and 2 girls from the UK. We were also very lucky we ended up with our amazing guide, Miguel!
The trip is three days long, most of the time spent in a jeep. The first two days we past a few lakes, saw flamingos, climbed rocks in the middle of the desert, walked up a sand hill when our car couldn’t make it up with us in it and spent time in the hot springs in the middle of the desert.
We spent the first night in a basic shared accommodation, luckily they supplied us with extra sleeping bags because the nights get really cold. The second night we spent in the salt hotel, A hotel made of salt. It wasn’t as spectacular as we had imagined but it had private rooms, luke warm showers and the ground was covered in salt! A little impractical when there was salt getting into everything.
It wasn’t until the third day that we arrived on the salar. The biggest salt flats in the world. Everywhere you looked was just Kilometers of white ground. We pulled over in the middle of the salar and spent the next few hours taking the token salt flat photos.
After a bite of lunch in the middle of the salar we headed to Uyuni, the end point of our tour, we visited the cemetery of trains, basically a yard of abandoned trains, it’s was a bit bazar!
After finding a hostel for the night we settled In and grabbed a beer from the square and relaxed in the sun, most people caught buses that night which would have been a better idea. There isn’t much to see in Uyuni.
We had planned on going to Potosi the following day and then on to Sucre, unfortunately there were huge strikes in Potosi blocking the roads from Uyuni to Potosi and Sucre so instead we made our way the following night on a bus to La Paz.
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