3rd - 5th September - Salar De Uyuni, Bolivia
After a mammoth overnight bus journey from La Paz - albeit in a high luxury Mercedes bus equipped with DVDs, dinner service and big comfy seats - we arrived in the drab town of Uyuni. It was so bloody freezing at 7 in the morning that the resident St Bernard was even wearing an Alpaca jumper!! - but the sky was the bluest blue bluey blue blueness we´d ever seen - not a cloud in sight!
After a hearty second breakfast (second to the luke warm tea on the bus!) we jumped into our private Landcruiser jeep to head into the famous Salar de Uyuni - the biggest salt flats in the world - about 12000 square kms! The norm is a three or four day tour but we were running short of time following our delayed flights from Rurre - and in the end it was pretty lush to have a whole jeep to ourselves!
Braulio and Lulu were our guide and cook for the trip - they were fantastic company and the food was fab - although we´re not too sure whether Polly´s diversion from her normally steel stomach mightn´t have something to do with the smelly eggs we had for breakfast!!
The first views of the Salar were truly amazing - although we´d seen pictures it really felt like being on another planet - bright white flatness for as far as the eye could see - and surrounded by huge volcanoes. Braulio was a great driver as we sped through the middle of the flats on no particular tracks - it was like driving through a massive snow field - I desperately wanted to get behind the wheel!!
We stopped at an 'island' where nothing grew except monster cacti - some up to 1200 years old, others bizarrely shaped like willies! It was wonderfully warm during the days and being at 3600m was great for the sun tans! Having said that, at night it could damn cold again - about minus 7 degrees! Tucked up in our sleeping bags in the hostel though we didn´t care! and of course a bottle of cheap Bolivian whisky helped too!
Pol also got a bit more witch doctor natural therapy action on her knee by dipping it into the icy cold sulphurous water mysteriously bubbling out of the ground - apparently people from all over South America come here for healing!
The next day we crawled out of bed at 5.30am and headed into the middle of the Salar for probably the best bit of the trip - watching the sun rise. Lulu then heroically cooked us a full brekky in the middle of the Salar at about minus degrees whilst we larked around with the longest shadows you´ve ever seen!
We climbed a huge volcanoe (extinct luckily!) for stupendopus views over the flats. This was also where we visited a sacred cave inhabited with old mummies of the original settlers - a spooky place, especially when we learnt that the mummies were between 1600 and 1800 years old!
Lulu once again pulled out the stops and served up chicken and chips in the middle of nowhere!! We scoffed lunch surrounded by flocks of pink flamingoes and then headed back to Uyuni.
Overall a fabulous trip - one of the most memorable and incredible landscapes we've ever seen.
After a hearty second breakfast (second to the luke warm tea on the bus!) we jumped into our private Landcruiser jeep to head into the famous Salar de Uyuni - the biggest salt flats in the world - about 12000 square kms! The norm is a three or four day tour but we were running short of time following our delayed flights from Rurre - and in the end it was pretty lush to have a whole jeep to ourselves!
Braulio and Lulu were our guide and cook for the trip - they were fantastic company and the food was fab - although we´re not too sure whether Polly´s diversion from her normally steel stomach mightn´t have something to do with the smelly eggs we had for breakfast!!
The first views of the Salar were truly amazing - although we´d seen pictures it really felt like being on another planet - bright white flatness for as far as the eye could see - and surrounded by huge volcanoes. Braulio was a great driver as we sped through the middle of the flats on no particular tracks - it was like driving through a massive snow field - I desperately wanted to get behind the wheel!!
We stopped at an 'island' where nothing grew except monster cacti - some up to 1200 years old, others bizarrely shaped like willies! It was wonderfully warm during the days and being at 3600m was great for the sun tans! Having said that, at night it could damn cold again - about minus 7 degrees! Tucked up in our sleeping bags in the hostel though we didn´t care! and of course a bottle of cheap Bolivian whisky helped too!
Pol also got a bit more witch doctor natural therapy action on her knee by dipping it into the icy cold sulphurous water mysteriously bubbling out of the ground - apparently people from all over South America come here for healing!
The next day we crawled out of bed at 5.30am and headed into the middle of the Salar for probably the best bit of the trip - watching the sun rise. Lulu then heroically cooked us a full brekky in the middle of the Salar at about minus degrees whilst we larked around with the longest shadows you´ve ever seen!
We climbed a huge volcanoe (extinct luckily!) for stupendopus views over the flats. This was also where we visited a sacred cave inhabited with old mummies of the original settlers - a spooky place, especially when we learnt that the mummies were between 1600 and 1800 years old!
Lulu once again pulled out the stops and served up chicken and chips in the middle of nowhere!! We scoffed lunch surrounded by flocks of pink flamingoes and then headed back to Uyuni.
Overall a fabulous trip - one of the most memorable and incredible landscapes we've ever seen.
posted by Polly and James at Thursday, September 08, 2005
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