With many travellers starting from the windswept town of Uyuni and taking a 3/4 day jeep tour to the Salar and beyond, we quickly realised being a "Gringo" here involuntarily invited seemingly half the town to descend upon us in a desperate sales-pitching frenzy. In believing previous stories from other travellers about agencies lying to get cash, breaking promises and bundling clients into dodgy unmaintained jeeps prone to mid-desert breakdowns, we gave ourselves a day to research which of the 56 tour agencies were half-reputable.
Although Uyuni was totally overrun by swarms of young Israelis fresh out from the army, Nic and I were grouped up with some local Bolivians from the city of La Paz and a 3 hard talking New Yorkers, which made an interesting mix for the 3 day trip.
The visit to the desolate, sunshine searing salt-lake itself was amazing, complete with man-made salt pyramids piled for export, shallow lakes of water literally on the surface, heat induced, horizon spanning mirages and the thrill of speeding across the endless plain in search for ANY life.
Bizarrely there 'was' life residing on a small island close to the salt-flat centre, of which 1000 year old cacti had somehow managed to thrive, obviously with the help of no surrounding predators.
The following 2 days saw us visiting the high-altitude deserts of the far southern Altiplano near the border of Chile, which included thermally active areas of boiling mud with geysers, surreal wind blasted rock formations millions of years old, colourful half frozen mineral-stained lakes coated in arsenic, surprising sights of rare flamingos unique to South America and desolate areas that literally could pass as a Mars landscape on Earth.
The geysers themselves were at an altitude of 4800 meters, requiring a few to pop pain-killers to ease their growing headaches, but fortunately our Spanish speaking driver descended the jeep a little before setting up for the night in 'extremely' basic, cold, concrete lodgings (luckily we had all brought extra layers to survive the nights).
The high altitudes made nights staggeringly cold and most of us had lingering headaches for the whole 3 days! Despite this, as you can see by the remaining photos, it was an amazing experience visiting such uniquely bizarre landscapes.
