Uyuni, Bolivia - The Salt Flats

We took a night bus from La Paz to Uyuni (12 hours) to visit the world’s largest salt flats (4,700 sq miles).  The prehistoric lake dried up and left behind the blinding white salt.  An uneventful bus ride until 2am, the bus transferred from a paved road onto a dirt / rock path for the remaining five hours of the rockiest ride ever.  Somewhat like being inside a popcorn popper with overhead bins utterly dangerous from falling baggage, sleeping was impossible.

Arriving in the tiny frontier town we joined a three-day tour group that departed at 11am.  Our group of six (including one English girl, one Swedish girl, and a couple from Dominican Republic) piled into a 4x4 jeep along with Ishmael, our driver who spoke no English and had a tendency to speed.  (We can’t technically confirm this since the speedometer in the jeep was broken).  After driving all day over the breathtaking salt flats, we checked into our hotel... made entirely of salt!  Yes, the walls, the floor, the chairs were all salt blocks.  The hotel cook’s daughter was six-year old Guadalupe.  She cheated at cards like a shark while giving an innocent “aren’t I adorable” look... so cute. We drank Bolivian liquor (Singani) and played card games (of course ending badly with everyone licking the walls for amusement, yuck!)  We screamed with laughter, “if only we had tequila, salud!”

After two days of driving through the desert we ended up REALLY in the middle of nowhere, some no-man’s land between Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia... spotting flamingos, volcanoes, lagoons, geysers, and hot springs at 15,000 feet.  Clouds of dust billowed behind us choking our breathing.  Blistering sun beat down reflecting off the salt... there were no roads, only faint tracks in the gravel where previous vehicles may have crossed.

The coldest night experienced in Bolivia, we slept six people to a room with no heat.  The temperature was below zero, electricity only available via generator from 7-9pm.  We bundled into every piece of clothing we had and exhaled seeing our breath.  In our mummy sleeping bags with only eyes exposed, we shivered in the darkness fantasizing about space heaters, hot chocolate, and toilets not at the end of a frigid corridor.

Three days and three flat tires later we arrived back to Uyuni exhausted and dirty.  Who knew you could patch a flat tire with toilet paper and a manual bike pump?