SALAR DE UYUNI AND THE SOUTHWEST CIRCUIT

2. July 2011 - 3. July 2011

It's difficult to describe the Salar de Uyuni with words. It's an imense, white salt flat. You look in all directions and all you see is salt. Sometimes it looks like snow, sometimes there are interesting patterns and sometimes it looks like a lake.
We arrived in Uyuni in the afternoon after a scenic bus ride from Potosi. Immediately we booked a three day tour through the Salar de Uyuni and on to Chile leaving the next morning.
We started in Uyuni, with a guide and four other travelers in a jeep with all our bags on the roof. Our first stop on the tour was “El cemeterio del tren” (train cemetery). There were many old, very rusty trains and it was great for climbing on and around the trains and taking photos. I could have spend hours there, taking pictures and climbing around. But we went on to a little village at the edge of the Salar de Uyuni were people are producing salt and making salt souvenirs. After that it was (almost) only salt for the rest of the day. We drove over salt for hours and the landscape was amazing. We stopped at an island with many very old cactus before moving on. The view from from the island over the huge salt flat was amazing.
At night we stayed in a hotel where almost everything was made of salt – walls, beds, chairs, tables. Very interesting and quite cold.
The next day the tour went on through amazing landscapes. We saw many lagoons, volcanoes, mountains, llamas and vicunas.
When we got up very early the last morning (the plan was to see the sunrise) it was snowing and very windy. It wasn't possible to see a lot. We drove to some geysers (in my eyes they didn't deserve the name and were not comparable to the geysers I've seen before). We also had a good view of volcano Llicancabur and the green lagoon. The jeep driver was afraid that we wouldn't be able to go to Chile because of the weather but luckily we could convince him to go on and although there was snow, the border was open. The border is a tiny little shack wich houses the Bolivian offical - it's sometimes open, sometimes not. For that reason we got our Bolivian exit stamps three days before in Uyuni. The entry stamp to Chile we got later on when we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama.
Don't forget to check out the pictures...