Before be embarked on our trip to the Salar de Uyuni we tried to research the different tour companies as much as we could, one of the main things we learn was not to expect anything of your tour. Most companies don’t tell you the whole truth about the food or what you will or wont see, once you cross into Bolivia you are in the hands of their contracted driver. This was the approach we took to the tour, we weren’t expecting to have gourmet meals, hot showers or luxury accommodation, this way we weren’t setting ourselves up for disappointment. Based on our research and talking to a few people in San Pedro we decided to go with Cordillea traveller for the tour, they seemed to have the best feedback from other travellers.
Welcome to Bolivia
Loading up morning of day one
The first day began at 8am with a bus collecting us and our 15+ litres of water (travellers have to take their own water as this is not supplied by the tour companies) and taking us on a short drive to the Chilean border crossing. From here it was about an hour in the bus and about 2000m in altitude to the Bolivian border. San Pedro sits at approximately 2300m and the Bolivian border is at about 4300m, because of this sudden altitude change we’d started taking some drugs to help us acclimatize to the sudden change in altitude. Not really sure if they helped or not but for the cost of having to piss at every stop I think they were worth taking.
Laguna
At the border we were greeted by a fleet of 80 and 100 series Toyota Landcruisers, if you’re an Nissan Patrol fan Bolivia probably isn’t the place for you as they are few and far between. Our tour group consisted of Mathieu and Audrey from France, Mike an Olivia from the UK, Yulia, Natasha and ?? from Russia and John and Karen from Seth Efrica and Fan from the US We were directed to jump in a Cruiser with Mike, Olivia, Mathieu and Audrey. Audrey and I being the shortest we were given the back seat…three days later my legs were well in need of a good stretch. The others all piled into the second cruiser. Our driver didn’t speak a word of English so fortunately for us Olivia was originally from Mexico and spoke excellent Spanish, Mathieu could also speak pretty good Spanish so we were pretty sorted for translations for the next 3 days.
Stinky!
Hot mud
This probably fell off a Nissan
Our journey on day one took us to the highest point of the trip, a little over 4800m near some geysers spewing sulphur and other wonderful gasses into the air, I’m sure if you stood downwind of one of the vents for too long you’d be feeling a whole lot more than altitude sickenss. We also passed some lagunas and visited a high altitude hot spring.
High altitude hot springs
Our first night’s accommodation at Laguna Colorada was in pretty basic hostel, no hot water or electricity for anything other than lighting. I struggled to get to sleep due to the altitude but judging from the snoring in our room everyone else was coping pretty well.
Night one accomodation
Our group (minus the Russians)