The Salar de Uyuni: Bolivia redeems itself

The Salt Flats tour in Bolivia is yet another obligatory part of the gringo route round South America. Being the stubbornly independent tavellers that we are, we opted not to do it from Uyuni as is customary, but to head to Tupiza, where the tours were more expensive but reputedly better. Some of the horror stories reported online or in guidebooks about Salt Flat tours included hypothermia, food poisoning, drunken drivers and repeated mechanical breakdowns...so we embarked with some trepidation. Little did we know that while none of these things would happen to us, we were fated to spend four days in a jeep with travelling companions who made us wish our driver was drunk after all and would soon end the misery...

It all began when the French guy approached us on the street and asked us to go on the tour with him and his girlfriend. Surely a moral can be extrapolated from this, or at least a mildly xenophobic joke? In any case, the tour was actually really great anyway, so I will just say about this couple that there is inappropriate PDA, and then there is behaviour which makes you wish you were both deaf AND blind. But anyway, what could have ruined our entire trip just made us more proactive in seeking the company of people in a different jeep but on a tour with the same company.

Which meant we met Angus, a Scottish guy with a million great travelling stories, and four hilarious American girls travelling after six months studying Spanish in Buenos Aires. We spent all our time outside the jeep with them, even going so far as to eat our meals with them rather than the Rude Couple. The trip was also a mini Spanish course, as the driver of our jeep spoke no English. Luckily, by the end of the four days we became fairly proficient at translating anything to do with food, or minerals, as most of his comments seemed to relate to either or both topics.

On day 1 of the Salt Flats tour,  we climbed steadily to over 5000 feet along spectacularly windy mountain roads. The scenery was a mixture of increasingly barren desert and plains, with grazing llamas and vicunas, and dramatic crags eroded over time to jagged points. The wind was shockingly cold - Dave shivered in his shorts and I soon relinquished my straw hat in favour of a woolly one. The last stop of the day was a town so isolated that electricity had arrived just forty days prior. The town centre was deserted, with nary a stray dog or piece of tumbleweed, but a definite feel of the Wild West.

On the second day at sunrise, after the coldest night of my life, (the temperature was -20 degrees C) we visited the ruins of a town abandoned in the 18th century due to a mysterious illness. (Mysterious if you don´t understand much Spanish anyway.) We stopped at several lakes fringed with salt, with clouds of sulphur rising above. We also forded many streams which were completely iced over - a surreal sight in the blazing sun. Yet more surreal were the hot springs - a natural thermal bath with a constant termperature of 30 degrees C, in the midst of a freezing windswept landscape.

Bathing was heaven but my hair turned to icicles afterwards. Other highlights were the geysers, especially the one that hissed like a kettle on the boil, and the bright green, blue and red lagoons we visited. The last one, Laguna Colarada, is cold in the morning but warm at night. As a result, it is home to many flamingoes - seeing them here at sunset was one of my favourite experiences of the last six months.

Accommodation on the trip was extremely basic, but gradually improved, until on the last night we stayed in a salt hotel (walls, chairs etc made of salt blocks) and had our own room.

The evenings were spent sociably with Angus and the Americans, drinking herbal tea and playing endless games of cards. The food on the trip was actually some of the best we had in Bolivia - not that that´s saying a great deal! Portions were big and each meal generally had two different forms of carbohydrates. Dinner was two courses, always starting with an excellent vegetable soup. Notably, we had the Bolivian national dish one night, pique a lo macho - chips, chopped up hot dogs, onions, tomatoes, steak and eggs. Dave was not a fan but I managed to force down two or three helpings...

Day three of the trip encompassed five different lagoons, all with striking mountain backdrops to their frozen expanses, and many with their own flamingoes. We also visited some rocks in the middle of the desert (better than it sounds!) an active volcano, and the start of the salt flats. The final day began at sunrise, at the largest salt flat in the world. (Like a desert, but salt instead of sand, for 12000km.) It was a surreal and magical experience. The salt flat is hard to comprehend in the full light of day - it stretches on and on in patterns which look like waves from above. It looks like ice, but tastes like table salt! Underneath the upper crust of salt is water, and at points there are pools where holes have been made in the salt. In these pools, the salt forms beautiful multicoloured crystals, which seem somehow incongruous and miraculous in that vast expanse of white. So, not only did we not get hypothermia, but after more than two weeks we found something to love about Bolivia!