Traveloholics at a geyser field in Bolivia on our journey up to the world’s biggest salt flats
After a couple days hiking around San Pedro de Atacama our big adventure for the region is a five-day journey with car and guide up into the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia. The map here shows our route, starting from San Pedro at the bottom in Chile, going north into Bolivia, and then west to Iquique. It’ll take us a couple days to get up to the salt flats themselves, but in the meanwhile we’ll spend our days in some of the most remote regions I’ve ever been in; no wifi, no Internet, no electricity, and, for the most part, no people. The company we’re doing it with, though, does provide food and shelter so we’re not completely destitute.
Immigration at the Bolivian border. Does that just scream “Isolated!”?
Unfortunately the day was a lot more about covering ground in the car than hiking. We stopped at a Bolivian geyser field where it would have been easy – and deadly – to fall in, and had a great lunch – a salmon salad, lettuce salad, good wine – our guide whipped up when we stopped at a flamingo-settled lagoon in the middle of nowhere.
This was our lunch break on Day One. The lagoon below has just thousands of Pink Flamingoes – real ones, not plastic. A pretty fabulous place to stop for lunch.
Flamingoes. Lots and lots of flamingoes.
The middle of nowhere. This certainly feels as isolated a place as you can imagine. Just miles and miles of high plains, mountains, and flamingoes. Lots of flamingoes. And here we’re going to be with no Internet for days while the Wisconsin primary plays out. We won’t know anything until days after the results are in!
We were curious what the sleeping arrangements would be. There are no settlements of any size at all up here and certainly no hotels. The company we organized the tour with said they use “shipping containers” for sleeping and eating, and sure enough when we pulled in toward the evening there they were: old shipping containers retrofitted as little cabins. Cots with great sleeping bags for the cold nights. Separate kitchen and bathroom shipping containers, all out in what is just the middle of nothing. Pretty cool, really.
After a long day in the car getting here, I hiked up above our “lodge” for a view of the area. Those are our shipping-containers-turned-accomodations. I loved being out there in the middle of just really nothing. If you look at the map below, this is the first star north of San Pedro.
Without Internet or even electricity there was no opportunity to load pictures or write this blog, so I’m doing it all now that we’re back in civilization. I’ll add more on our subsequent days over the next day or two, but there are a lot of pictures to load so it’ll take a while. For now, though, here are the rest of our pictures from Day One.
Here’s our route from San Pedro down near the bottom, over to the Eduardo Avaroa National Reserve in Bolivia and then north for three stops (two nights in the northernmost spot in Bolivia when we’re actually in the salt flats) then over into Chile before ending in Iquique
An early stop at a Bolivian geyser field was a welcome break from bouncing along on crazy unpaved roads
The bubbling mass of goo that would make a real mess of things if you fell in
Another view of our lunch stop
Flamingoes
Thousands of flamingoes
They get their color from eating untold numbers of little shrimp in the lagoon. Our guide explained that they spend pretty much the entire day, from morning to night, eating thousands and thousands of tiny pink shrimp. Strange way to live.
There are no trees at this altitude so this tree-shaped rock is a real destination
And then there are the strange signs. This seems to say … what? No birds? All those flamingoes out there seem to be ignoring the sign.
This was my favorite, though. I understand, they don’t want you pissing in the lake and fouling the natural environment. The two pictures at the top make that pretty clear.