I left La paz on a local bus full of gringo tourists like me except for the rather large Bolivian lady in the seat next to me. The seats were small, she was large and her multi layered skirts and shawls took up even more room, not to mention her bulging shopping bags! I squeezed in next to her. We had a little chat, she was very sweet, and then she promptly fell asleep, on my shoulder. It was a night bus and the road became increasingly bad. We stopped in the desert at about 2 am for people to use the loo and stretch their legs and then continued down the bumpy road slowly into the breaking dawn. Through bleary eyes the next day broke spectacularly on the desert revealing blue sky and endless stretches of sand. Eventually we pulled up at a collection of concrete buildings, which turned out to be our final destination. My heart sank. It was a dump.
I hurried off the bus, to try to find a hostel. After checking into a rather run down motel I bumped into Greg, the motorcycling Canadian who had arrived the night before. We went for breakfast and he told me his adventures and mishaps during his ride down from La Paz. The Bolivians dont like selling petrol to foreigners and charge, legally, about three times as much as to locals.  So Greg, being on a budget brought as little as he thought he could get away with, and then run out in the desert. Next he had been driving through an area where there is quite alot of civil unrest and had been caught up in a road block and then struck by people with baseball bats as he tried to pass through it. I was glad that our bus journey had been trouble free.

 

Next I went in search of an agency to book my Salar de Uyuni tour. Its a 3 day tour in 4x4 vehicles of the salt desert and then the surrounding mountains and lagoons. I had heard from everyone who I had met who had done it that it was absolutley spectacular and not to be missed, but I was a little sceptacle that 3 days driving over 1000km was going to be my cup of tea. Still the tour would drop me off at the Bolivian and Chilean border and that was where I was headed. There are about 70 tour agencies in Uyuni, so it wasnt hard to find one and I was mostly concerned that the other 5 people in the car would be a good mix. I ended up in a group with 2 French, 2 Colombians and a young English girl.

The following morning we set off early and our first stop was a rusty old collection of trains. In the setting of the desert and the blue sky they looked like some sort of art installation you would see at Tate modern rather than just a grave yard for trains!

The Salar de Uyuni is the worlds largest salt flat, sittling at a high altitude of 3653m and blanketing an amazing 12,106 sq km. It was part of a prehistoric salt lake, Lago Minchin, which covered most of SW Bolivia. When it dried up it left this enourmous salt desert, the Salar de Uyuni. There are several islands that pepper this white desert. The isla del pescado at the heart of the salar is a hilly out post covered in Trichoreus cactus surrounded by a sea of hexaganol salt tiles.

The flat, white expanse of the salt desert is just broken up by the odd tracks left by the 4x4 vehicles zooming accross them and the odd conical piles of salt ready for harvest. The islands seem to float when viewed from a distance and the perspective in all this whiteness is very perculiar.

We stayed the night in a little hotel constructed from blocks of salt with mud and straw roofs and salt shingle on the floors. Our second day was spent driving through a surreal, treeless landscape punctuated by red and orange hills and snow capped volcanoes and heards of llamas and vicunas, near the Chilean border.  There were sparkling aquamarine lagoons with 3 varieties of flamingoes, caked white at the edges with all the minerals in the water.

In parts of the desert the wind had carved the rock into Daliesque sculputres.

One of the most beautiful lagoons was the Laguna colorada, a bright adobe red lake with black  and white shores.

Our second night was spent at a very basic and not very clean hostel, sleeping bag came out, as the sheets didnt look like they had been washed for quite a while. I awoke in the night to find a small cat had nestled on my chest and was contentedly purring while gently scratching at my neck. It refused to budge and I just hoped it didnt have fleas! Our final day was spent visiting geysers at dawn that blew powerful jets of smoke from the bubbeling muddy earth, then driving through still more spectacular landscape, where we were dropped at a small outpost which was the Bolivian and Chilean boarder.