Into Chile

An overnight bus from La Paz later and I´d arrived in Uyuni and straight away booked a tour leaving a few hours later to take me over the Salar de Uyuni salt flats accross 4x4 territory into Chile, where I would transfer at the Bolivian border to San Pedro De Atacama in north Eastern Chile.

The whole town of Uyuni only seem to exisit to sell Salar De Uyuni tours to tourists, and there are a lot of horror stories about various companies and peoples experiences on the internet, and the companies that were most recommended in my guide book had the worst reviews on trip advisor. It was also more expensive to book from La Paz, so I decided just to turn up and campare tours in Uyuni itself. In reality it dosn´t really matter which company you use, as they all seem to run exactly to same tour, with the same menu, staying at similiar places, using the same type of vehicles (mostly Toyota Landcrusiers). One shouldn´t need to pay more than 750 Bovilianos.

In the event my tour was great, I went with Lapiz Tours who were helpful in the office and the driver was great. He did keep opening the door and looking at the front tyres as if they were about to fall off or something, which they didn´t, apart from that the tour exceeded my expectations. Excluding the driver there were 6 of us, a family of 4 from Belgium, a Scottish chap and myself. The tour start of driving over the bright white salt flats West of Uyuni, if you Google map the bottom west of Bolivia, you´ll see them as a big white blob. The first night we stayed in a hostel made of salt, on the edge of the salt flats, lunch was great and invloved some very nice meat, the Dutch didn´t eat any so myself and Michael finished the whole lot of between us. Dinner was a nice soup and a baked chicken dish, yum.

The next day we were up early to make the majority of the distance down to the Chilian border. The roads were sandy gravel tracks accross the mountains, and a lot of it hard going. We stopped at lagoon full of flamingos, cactus oasises, lagoons red with algea and green lagoons, the second night was spent at 4300 meters and aparently reached -10, we finished the tour visiting some amazing geysers with bubbling mud being chucked about and atmospheric mists lit up with the early morning sun, and then a much needed bath at the long awaited hot springs before transfering onto another bus for the short trip into San Pedro De Atacama, a little desert oasis, and a completely different feel from the last few countries and my last country of this trip.

Notes:

• It really dosn't matter what tour company you take for Salar De Uyuni, most of the reviews on the net as usually from people with bad experiences or expecting too much which makes it hard to make a decision. Just arrive at Uyuni and ask around when you get there. We had 6 people not including the driver in our car and it was fine, if people have very long legs they probably won't want to sit in the very back seats though.