It has been a wild three days crossing the antiplano (the Andean plateau) between San Pedro de Atacama in Chile and Uyuni in Bolivia. We’ve spent most of the time around 4000m above sea level, getting short of breath whenever we walk up a gentle slope and sometimes even just from talking.
We booked a tour which saw us grouped with four others and a driver/guide for the three days. Our guide, Herman, was a gentle Bolivian who spoke in very slow (and sometimes a bit broken) Spanish. Our companions were a brother and sister from Chile who didn’t speak English and Vy and Titlau, Danes who didn’t speak Spanish and who picked up the rules of 500 super quickly. As such, it was a mix of languages in the car, with Dan patiently keeping everyone on the same page.
We stopped at so many different sights on the tour that I won’t attempt to name them all. We saw numerous lakes, hundreds of flamingoes, heaps of llamas, alpacas and their more lithe, shorter-haired cousins, vicuñas, as well as an emu and a couple of alpine bunnies.
The landscape was, as you may imagine, pretty breath-taking (in part because oxygen was harder to come by). After the border crossing to Bolivia early on the first days, there were no roads – just a spiderweb of different dusty 4WD tracks. Volcanoes often lined the horizon, and the near landscape flitted between dry, lifeless dirt, tufty grasses, and the occasional field of boulders (it was easy to imagine the volcano eruption that caused them to land there).
For us (I’ve consulted Dan so it’s not just yours truly off on a frolic), the stops that were the highlights were:
- Thermal springs – we took a dip in these steamy springs on the first day
- Laguna Colorada – this incredible lake appears as a deep peachy-red at the right angle
- Piedra de Árbol – I could have spent so much longer crawling on these intricate rock formations. Dan’s recreated a photo that was taken of him when he was last there in 2006
- Salar de Uyuni – Bolivia’s 11,000km squared salt flat was made when the Andes split the Pacific Sea and the patch in Bolivia dried up. The salt is up to 10m deep and on top is a pure unadulterated white. We saw dawn from a coral island covered in cacti, took all the usual touristy photos that play with the lack of depth perception in the white landscape, and were also blessed to see a section covered in a few centimetres of (super salty!) water, which made for the most outstanding reflections
The other less expected highlight of the tour was the food – we were treated to super delicious, fresh, vege-filled meals. I counted ten vege and two fruits served for lunch yesterday!
I could go on and on, and share dozens more photos, but I’ll exercise restraint. While the tour was amazing fun, we’re tired from the constant moving and the pre-dawn start. It will be nice to set up in Sucre in a few days for an extended stay and hopefully some Spanish classes (for me).
VRPS
[En route to Potosí with half the Bolivian army, getting occasionally squished by people in the aisle of the bus who have different cultural ideas about personal space]
The Two Swords 