Bolivian Salt Flats

We signed up for a 3day salt flats tour in Uyuni and had a tour group consisting of me, Alexa, an American girl called Hailey, who we had met on the bus there, a French-Canadian couple and a Japonese guy. We had us 6 in the back of a jeep and our driver and his wife, our cook, in the front. It was quite a squeeze! First day we didn´t start until 11am. Firstly we went to the "train graveyard" and spent 10mins climbing over random bits of engine etc...Us with Hailey:

After that we drove to the edge of the salt flats to see some piles of salt, and to be subjected to stalls of salt llamas and other bits and pieces. Afterwards we drove onto the salt flats which are right next to Uyuni and they were wet so the sky was mirrored which was so stunning:

There were little piles of salt everywhere which were being mined:

It just appears to go on and on, it´s like nothing I´ve seen before:

From there we went to the salt hotel which was highly ugly and a bit of a waste of time. We then drove for over an hour to the cactus island in the middle of the salt flats. It was really cool because you could see for miles and miles and the salt was dry so we were able to get some perspective photos:

Friends from the bus from La Paz:

Some of our perspective photos:

We then went to the salt hotel which was just off the salt flats where we stayed that evening:

Sunset from the hotel:

The next morning our first activity was to go and see the semi-active volcano nearby but unfortunately it was cloudy. The countryside was beautiful though:

We were at high altitude for all of the tour, at some points we got up to 4700m, so the views of the surrounding mountains were stunning, many were snow capped! The next part was to see four lagoons with flamingoes on them. We stopped and had lunch at the first where it unfortunately rained (see below) and we then stopped at a second which had much pinker flamingoes. I have never seen flamingoes up close so it was very exciting!

View of one of the lagoons we didn´t stop at:

After the four lagoons we went to see the "stone tree" which was in a desert. It was quite bizzare, the sun was burning but it was freezing cold because we were so high:

The last stop of the day was the "lago rojo," a lake turned red due to the algae, minerals and the wind. It was quite stunning and had a huge coloney of flamingoes as well:

That night we stayed in a not so nice hotel/shack but they made up for it by giving us wine with dinner so we had a very funny evening playing cards with some of the other groups. The next morning we had left the hotel by 5am and went to see some geizers which were smelly and beautiful and unexpected because I hadn´t understood we were seeing them, oh and it was FREEZING!

From there we went to a hot spring and by the time we´d emerged it had warmed up enough for us to sit outside eating breakfast:

We then rearranged groups and said goodbye to those going to Chile, we were right on the border between Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. We then drove an hour to see "lago verde" which was beautiful:

The rest of the day was spent driving the six hours back to Uyuni with the occasional natural toilet stop including a nice group of big rocks(!):

We stayed the night in Uyuni and jumped on a 6am bus to Tapiza the next morning. It was a bit of a nightmare journey. We had to get out and walk twice, once across a river, then we arrived in Atocha where they declared the bus could go no further. So, we had to get all our stuff and walk across a river then push our way on to a bus the otherside which they had double booked. We then had another 4hours squahed on that bus before we finally arrived in Tupiza!