The Salar de Uyuni experience(oups, un oubli de la Bolivie)...Traduction à suivre!



Many people who come to Bolivia come just to go on the tour that is described here.  For four days Elise and I plus Sam and Kim (from Quebec) packed into a 4x4 jeep with our guide Sergio and our cook Santusa (both Bolivian) and saw some of the most incredible and diverse scenery somebody can experience.  It was absolutely gorgeous and we encourage everybody to head to this part of the world and do it.

The Salar de Uyuni is a massive salt flat, the largest one in the world, and is leftover from a gigantic inland sea that drained a long long long time ago.  Driving on the salt made me think of driving on ice - no bumps and pearl white.  The salt flat itself comprised only one day of the four.  We started in Tupiza and spent the next three days exploring Bolivia´s southwest before hitting the Salar itself.  This part of the world still has a wild west feel to it, only broken by the 70 or so jeeps a day that come through from Tupiza, Uyuni and Chile.  We recommend heading from Tupiza because it has the fewest tour companies and you get to see the scenery near the town itself.  Aside from lots of joking around, me brushing up on my french and us discovering a new game involving trading beans the trip was ultimately spent looking out the window of the jeep or taking pictures at the numerous spots we stopped.  The highlight for me was a 2 hour period on the second day where we saw a turquoise lake at 10,000ft with a volcano as the backdrop, hot springs, geysers and a red lake filled with flamingos.  Incredible.  Here is a selection of the some 42,543 photos we took during the four days. 

Ten minutes into the trip.

View while a flat was being fixed.

Chasing llamas.  Great fun...

...until they give you the stink-eye!

Elise in an abandoned village some 400 years old.  It was abandoned in the late 1980s because of tuberculosis.

One of the many volcanoes, dormant and active, that we saw on the trip.

COLD!  Water froze overnight.

First flamingo. 

At times it seemed like we were on a road to nowhere...

...until we came to places like this at Laguna Verde.

Sergio fixing something; Santusa looking at the camera.  She rarely went outside the car but made awesome food.

Typical of the second day.

At the geysers...  

...this was Mike´s favourite part of the trip.  Probably because he´s so full of hot air.  BLAHAHAHA! 

Two of the thousands of flamingos at Lago Colorado.

Elise loved the Valley de los Italianos

Us!

You can see the smoke coming off this active volcano.

Mike at sunrise on the flats.

A pre-incan skeleton found at a volcano next to the Salar.  According to our guide all of the stone fences in the area were built by pre-Incans because the Incans were ¨lazy¨.  Of course he´s making fun of his own ancestors!

Elise!  Don´t drive away - I need my shoe!

Like being on a giant sheet of ice...except its 30´C outside.

The tour ended in the city of Uyuni, which was an overpriced fairly boring place to be, but had this cool train cemetary.

This trip in itself is worth a visit to Bolivia.  I´ve never been to a more varied place than Bolivia, both the scenery and the people are so varied.  Just think that 5 days before this we were in the jungle!  We stayed in Uyuni for two more nights and didn´t know if we´d make it out to Potosi because of strikes in the neighbouring province that stopped all transportation for 24 hours.  However, we eventually were on our way.