July 4 – 7 – Southwest Circuit: Salar de Uyuni, San Pedro de Quemes, Ojo de Perdiz

Our 4x4 for the Salar Tour, originally uploaded by Andrew & Yvette's world travel.

After 12 very long hours on Bolivia’s laughably marketed “premier first class luxury bus company,” we finally made it to Uyuni where the daytime temperature had finally warmed to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. We met our guide Luis who was friendly but spoke not a lick of English.

Our 1st stop of the tour was at a salt factory in Colchani where 2000- 9000 kg of salt is packaged each day. The numbers are impressive considering the space this all happens in is the same size as our 1st floor apartment.

After this stop, we entered the blinding white beauty of the Salar de Uyuni salt dessert. The absolute whiteness of the place made this the most surreal 4wd tour we’ve ever taken. The Salar is definitely something different and definitely something to put on a destination list.
 
Some of our other stops on the Salar include Isla Incahuasi which is an island full of cactuses that are hundreds of years old. We also went to see the Coquesa Mummies which are 6 mummies inside a small, dark, rock cave. These mummies are on a very poorly marked trail and are not on a lot of tourist agendas so seeing them in their natural environment was freaky and claustrophobic. The cave also relies on natural sunlight so that made it a little scary as we arrived in the late afternoon when the sun was coming down on the horizon. Another similar stop was the Galaxy Cave and the Chullpas cemetery. The Galaxy Cave is a “petrified stromatolite reserve” ie, a cave with cool rock formations. The Chullpas cemetery was discovered by two farmers just a couple of years ago and contains the burial grounds of families that lived in the area hundreds of years ago. The bones have petrified into their surroundings and are just there for you to see. Like the Coquesa Mummies, these skeletons aren’t enclosed in a sterile glass box inside a museum so it’s a somewhat spooky experience seeing them in their original setting.

On our 3rd day, I got car crazy driving through the vast expanse of the dessert and spent about 2 hours annoying Andrew and Luis by singing along with the love songs on the tape (see flickr videos). This day was actually forgettable as all we saw were lakes and another volcano spewing smoke in the background. What was really amazing though was seeing an Andean fox in the wild. Neither of us had ever seen a fox in the wild and it was a nice treat to see one.

We experienced the bitter cold of winter on our 4th and last day of the tour. At -30C, the temperature was the coldest we’ve ever experienced. At 12 the weather was still in the negative so we decided to opt out of swimming in the Hot Geyser Springs of Polque. We did however get out of the car to take pictures of the herd of pink flamingos on Laguna Colorado. This was an unexpected sight as usually, flamingos migrate away during the winter season. Other sights of interest were Laguna Verde which was not very green because it was partly frozen, the Arbol de Piedro, which is a rock that looks like a tree, and Dessert Dali which is a dessert with huge rocks strewn about. From the distance, the view looks like a painting from Salvador Dali’s mind.

Following this tour, we got back to Uyuni where we had another 12 long and bumpy traveling hours ahead of us.