Salt Flats Tour

It has been argued by fellow travellers that this tour should be re-named as the Tour of South West Bolivia which I have to agree with, it’s so much more than just salt! We chose to do the route from Tupiza to Uyuni, four days and three nights. In a nutshell it was full of the following: time in a jeep, llamas, snow capped mountains, lakes, volcanoes, flamingos and (Jon you’ll be pleased to hear) Jungle Speed!

I want this Llama

The people we did the tour with made such a difference. In a boy heavy jeep I was joined by Chris, Kai (German), Marco (Italian) and Anup (Indian), we had a lot of fun. We also had another two jeeps with us with two great groups of people (two Argentinean, three Irish and three from London). I managed to insult Marco by teaching Anup how to cook Spaghetti Bolognese but otherwise we got on brilliantly! We had a great driver called David who let us take over the music in his car and only spoke Spanish so it was great practice. And our wonderful cook Gladys (we’re convinced that’s not her name, we think they called her that so it’s easier for tourists as the other cook had the same name!) The highlight of her cooking was llama balls, they were SO good.

My jeep crew

An important reflection: altitude is mental. Having never experienced altitude Chris and I were soon to find we could only walk half the pace, had constant headaches and were consistently out of breath! This particularly took its toll on Chris and the boys when they attempted to play football at 4200m, it was a short game!

Highlights for me were reaching 5000m where it snowed and we attempted to look at geysers, Laguna Colorada which was one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been and, of course, the salt flats.

5000m

Laguna Colorada

Tortoise rock

Unfortunately the salt flats were flooded so we could only safely go onto a bit of them but this didn’t really matter. And it’s incredible quite how much time you can spend taking those photos everyone takes!

Behind the magic

Smith