My 5 month adventure!: Salt Flats Tour, Bolivia

The majority of the road between La Paz and Uyuni wasn’t paved so this made for a very bumpy ride and made it hard to sleep! I arrived in Uyuni around 6:30am and someone from the agency picked me up from the bus stop but then I had to wait around in the travel agency until 10:30am when the tour started – so boring!

The Salt Flats Tour was really good and we saw some amazing landscapes over the 3 days. On my tour was an Austrian couple, a mum and son from Spain, and a French guy my age (Remi). They were all really nice but if it wasn’t for Remi I think it would have been a bit boring. It cost about $50 more for an English tour guide and the whole tour only cost me about $100 so I didn’t bother. The tour is more about the scenery but the others on the tour did some translating for me. They could all speak Spanish so I was left out of many dinner conversations. I could understand little bits but my Spanish is definitely not good enough to be able to contribute. There was even a slight argument in Spanish at one point which was a bit awkward because I could understand what it was about but couldn’t contribute.

The first day we started at the train cemetery which is just lots of old trains that have just been left to rust. Most of the day was on the salt flats and all you could see was white for thousands of kms. We took the necessary salt flats photos which was lots of fun. We also went to Isla Incahuasi which was a random island in the middle of the salt flats which was covered in cactus. The first night we stayed in a hotel which was made out of salt. Even the tables and the base of the beds were made out of salt.

The second day we saw lots of lagunas (Spanish for lagoona) and the landscape became more of a desert. We had lunch at a laguna which was really beautiful with all the flamingos. The last stop was Laguna Colorado which was coloured bright orange because of the algae.

We got up at around 5am on the last day to make it to the geisers at an active volcanoe before sunrise. It was absolutely FREEZING and very very windy! The geisers were really cool and you could see the mud bubbling. The sun came up as we drove to the hot springs and it finally started to get a bit warmer. The hot springs were small but so nice and definitely worth braving the cold getting changed. It was amazing to see the snow capped mountains around us and for a bit of the day there was some snow on the side of the road. We also went to Laguna Verde which is very close to the border of Chile and Argentina and some of the mountains we could see were actually across the border. Unfortunately the laguna wasn’t green as the name suggests because there was too much water and ice. This was the furthest point of the tour and on the way back we stopped at some cool rock formations from volcanoes and in a small town called San Cristobal.

When we got back to Uyuni I had a couple of hours before my overnight bus to La Paz so I had dinner with Remi. The bus I got back was the tourist bus so it was a bit nicer but it was still pretty bumpy because of the road and at one point we all woke up because the bus was rocking from side to side. It felt like we were off roading but I couldn’t see anything because it was really dark. Once we were back on the paved road everyone relaxed a bit and we got some more sleep.

It was such a good tour and it was absolutely amazing being out in the middle of nowhere for 3 days surrounded by huge mountains and volcanoes!

I had one more day in La Paz before my flight back to LA to start the journey home. I finally made it to the Coca Museum and didn’t get robbed this time! The museum was really interesting and explained more about the legal and illegal uses of the Coca plant.

I had to get up at 5:30am the next day to head to the airport to make my way to LA. Unfortunately paying the cheapest price meant changing planes 3 times and spending the whole day traveling! I was trying to spend the last of my Peruvian and Bolivian money and 7 soles a few weeks ago got me a whole meal but in the airport it gave me the choice between chewing gum or 2 packets of mentos – so sad!