Salar de Uyuni tour - part I

When in Boliviav visiting the Salar de Uyuni is a must. We took a tour for 3 days and 2 nights, starting from Uyuni and bringing us over the border to Chile in the end. We knew already that the tour involves a lot of sitting in the car as the Salar and the whole area of Bolivia towards the border of Chile is vast and mostly empty, but considering Alinas current issues we were actually looking forward to be driven around for hours, looking at the beautiful Bolivian landscapes. Our expectations were not disappointed in regards to beautiful views!
The first day started with a visit to the nost touristy place we‘ve may had so far: The salt refinery (where they supposedly still harvest and process the Salt coming from the Uyuni Salt fkats by hand, including adding Iodine to it) and the train cemetery. Interesting fact on the buildings in and around the Salt flat: Whole buildings are made of blocks of salt (which looks super cool) because it is so abundant! And as for the train cemetery: Never have we seen such a crowd of fame-hungry instagrammers trying desperately to get an instagram-worthy shot with only themselves on the picture - a real challenge given the crowd 😂 We admit that the train cemetery was super cool and that all the old, rusty, half-rotten and sometimes artfully ‚vandalised‘ trains (which used to bring the salt to Chile in earlier days) are superb photo motives, but oh my god, so many stupid people 😂 So we did some climbing on the waggons, got some pictures ourselves but got out of there as quickly as possible!
After some time in the car we already arrived at the actual highlight of the tour: the middle of the Uyuni Salt Flats. It is exactly how it is shown in all the pictures: very white 😉 (we did not have the mirror effect as - fortunately - it did not rain). But joking aside, it truly is a very unique landscape and nothing we‘ve ever seen before, so we were very happy!! We (or Gilles) also managed to have at least a bit of fun during these very obligatory but rather stupid Uyuni-Salt-Flat photoshootings 😂 After a visit to the famous Incahuasi Island (translated as ‚house of the Incas’) with its many cactuses (according to the guide around 400‘000, but that‘s bullsh*t 🙄), we continued our drive theough the salt flats, enjoying the vast area of salt around us until we stopped for the sunset - And oh, what a sunset we were able to witness on the Salt Flats 😍 (including a super cute apero from our guide with wine and chips 🍷) - spectacular!!
After sunset and another long drive we arrived at the very interesting Salt Hotel (the name was the program: the walls of the rooms and even the floors!! were all salt 😲) rather late. We all looked forward to dinner and the whole group was half amused, half shook when it arrived - see picture of the luke warm gourmet „casserole“ we got (for once Alina was happy to eat only crackers as a meal) 😂. Despite the food we had a good night of sleep and were ready to see more of Bolivias outback the next day!Read more