Tupiza to Uyuni Salt Flat Tour

The past 4 days we went on a tour of southernen Boliva.  As part of the excursion we woud stay three nights in different "towns" (and I use this term extremely loosely as the places we stayed we far from my former definition of town...and in case you were wondering there were no McDonalds at any of the places we stayed).  As part of our caravan we had 10 5 people split between 2 4wd Toyota Land Cruisers plus 2 drivers and a cook.  The plan was to travel around the area exploring the lakes, mountains, volcanoes, flamingos, llamas and the last day see the salt flats.  This area is basically a giant desert with different regions that are drastically different in nature.  Each day we would have breakfast, lunch and dinner prepared by our cook, which was a sweet Bolivian woman who always smiled.  The meals were surprising very good, she made a mean vegetable soup that tasted great after being in the cold all day. 

Here is a brief recap of our trip day by day...

Day 1

We left Tupiza early Thursday morning and headed straight for the mountains of Bolivia.  The scenery was beautiful and the vastness of the mountains was very unexpected...they seem to be everywhere here.  The iew is much different than Patagonia though...there are fewer trees and there are much more interesting rock outcroppings. 

The weather was great this day which made for some good photos.  The first notable place we visited was Sillar which had these huge rock ridges that had been cut out by water over the years.

One of the ¨towns¨...

We also traversed Paseo del Diablo (Devil's Pass) at 4400m above sea level. Here the wind was howling and red sand blew over the top creating small dunes on the other side. 

We slept in a small "town" called San Antonio de Lipez at 4200m above sea level.  Let me be the first to tell you that your first night at altitude this high is no picnic.  Luckily neither of us experienced anything more than headaches and shortness of breathe, but we slept terribly that first night.  Just walking and talking at this altitude would cause shortness of breathe...and to think we were in shape!!  For those that are curious 4200m equates to about 13,800 feet...pretty high for a bunch of gringos. 

Day 2

We woke up really early this morning to get a good start.  Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate as we would have liked and it snowed most of the day...yeah who thought there was snow in South America, nevermind Bolivia, but apparently its pretty common for this area, especially at this altitude.  While the snow prevented us from seeing from of the mountain tops we still got some interesting pictures of the landscape, lakes and wildlife. 

Some pretty flamingos hanging out in the wonderful weather...

Hiding from the weather...

We hit an altitude of 4855m today which is over 16,000 feet...by far the highest elevation either of us had ever been...and yes this is the weather one day removed from me wearing shorts...

Day 3

We slept in a little more this morning, but were greeted again with snowy conditions.  We visted this crazy rock formation that had been carved into the shape of a tree with a skinny trunk and bushy top.  It was crazy just how big this rock was and how it was still standing given the relative size of the top to the bottom. 

A natural hotspring that we took a quick dip in before freezing our butts off running back to the truck

A pretty picture of the landscape during one of the few times the sun peaked throught the clouds...

The Geyser muck that stuck to our shoes...

It really smelled wonderful here (as you can see by our faces) ... We felt like we were about to meet with Yoda

We are holding up the rock tree. In all the pictures we saw, there wasn´t a barbwire fence nor SNOW! 

Our driver, Scott and Sean (a guy in our truck) climbing rocks

We stayed the night in a hotel that was made completely of salt, including the floor which was a loose granular salt much like sand.  The walls were big bricks of salt that were compacted and stacked on top of each other.  It was a pretty wild place.  For a second I even forgot we were in staying in a salt hotel, until I got this little cut on my finger and some salt got into it and it stung like crazy. 

Days 4

We had to wake up by 5am this morning to make sure we made it out to the salt flats before the sunrise.  We had great weather this morning so we were super excited to get up despite the early hour.  The drive on the salt flats was amazing in itself....its hard to describe, but hopefully the pictures show you what we witnessed.  The landscape is bright white and flat as a pancake with mountains surrounding in the distance. The sunrise was amazing, nothing like either of us had ever seen.  The pictures probably don´t do justice on the beauty of the sunrise! Standing in the salt flats seemed like you were in a different world, completely surrounded by super bright white salt that reflected brighter from the sun.  Because everything is so flat you can do these amazing "perspective pictures" (google salt flat fun pictures and it wll give you an idea of the poses). 

Truck and the flats...

Some early morning sunset exercises...

A close up of the salt flat...

A picture of the crew...

Standing on an ¨island¨ in the middle of the salt flats

Kerry finally found a wine bottle big enough to quench her thirst!

Blind justice...

Minature Scott...small enough to fit in your pocket...