The salar de Uyuni is the largest and highest salt plain in the world. We took a three day jeep tour with 3 friends for a high altitude rollercoaster ride of flamingos, lakes and vast expanses of absolutely nothing.

Please note that all images are courtesy (and copyright) of Kevin Tucker whose permission I did not seek. (erk - thanks Kevin)

There are many companies offering jeep tours around and through the famous salar de Uyuni and therefore we managed to bag a trip to include our own tour guide, 3 days of tourist sights, all our food and accomodation for 4 days and 3 nights all for $65. Tee hee!

Our guide was called Dionysus (D). He was well informed about the scenery and had a woman in every 'port' (although he swore that he was married to his jeep!).

The crew

We visited many mountain lakes of all different colours - red, green, turquoise, all of which had varying numbers of bright pink flamingos wading around in them.

I believe they are experts at hopscotch...

The deserts were expansive and dry with only a few rocks to break up the scenery, and as soon as D told us that this was the scenery that inspired Dali, the elephants on stilts and dripping clocks just appeared out of nowhere. We had a dip in the thermal baths where I burnt my bottom:

Close your legs Jon

There were geisers and mudpools, Pecuñas (llama things) and active volcanos, it was an amazing trip.

The first night we stayed in a hotel which was 4700m higher than sea level. It was Lisy's birthday and it was the first time any of us had been that high (apart from at student parties :) and we all felt dizzy and disorientated. We had tried chewing coca leaves as the locals did but I thought it was disgusting having a bunch of leaves soaking up the spittle in your cheek for hours on end. So we resorted to coca leaf mate, wine and beer. Soon it didn't matter that we couldn't breathe or see straight, it just felt like a normal saturday night. The next morning we got up at the early hour of 6:30am as required and sleepily ate our way through our breakfast, wondering why there were few other people about - including our driver. It wasn't until that night that we realised that Chile is an hour behind Bolivia and we had in fact risen at 5:30am and eaten the neighbours breakfast because ours hadn't been put out yet. Doh!

The second night we stayed in the salt hotel. It is indeed, as it's name suggests, a hotel made entirely of salt. The walls, the beds, the tables, the chairs the floors, the people (no, not the people). At dinner, which was the staple Bolivian fare of chicken, chips and rice, we actually had to make the embarrasing request for table salt having baulked at the idea of using the floor dust or scraping a bit off the walls. Yes, we were laughed at, but we're getting used to it.

The local children came to entertain us as an after dinner treat with traditional costumes, drums and pan pipes. The little men played the music in a group while the little ladies walked bouncily up and down swinging their arms in rhythm and we all applauded heartily. Then they started again - same tune, same dance - after which we also applauded. by the time they had done this 6 or 7 times they suddenly broke into double time and we were all so excited by the change that there were a few cheers and whoops as the drummer banged the life out of his drum. They were all very cute and it was very entertaining.

The next day we got up at the ACTUAL time of 4:30am in order to see the sun rise over the salt plain. D drove the jeep of across the dim salt plain and I still don't know how he knew where to drive because it is so vast and empty it looked as if we weren't even moving. We raced against the arriving light and got to the "sunrise" island just in time. There was still a small matter of climbing to the top of the cacti ridden mound though, and in our hurry we forgot about the altitude. At 3660m high, walking fast up a hill is like running at full pelt up stairs and we were soon trying to cough up our burning lungs while still making progress to the top. The pain was worth it and we were treated to the most beautiful colours imaginable.

After breakfast we walked around the island to enjoy the salt plain experience which can only be done properly by a series of silly photographs which abuse the perspective distortion of miles of flat white salt...

Kevin (aka Mr. strong)

We walked the line