Our next adventure was a 3 day jeep journey from Chile to Bolivia. 7 of us plus the driver squashed into 1 jeep and travelled over very rocky desert tracks. The scenery was just phenomenal! Three full days of nothing but desert, volcanoes, lakes and wildlife - not a building in sight! We visited many mountain lagunas filled with thousands of flamingoes. The lakes were so calm and the reflections of mountains, sky and flamingoes could be seen on all of them. We spent some time at a natural thermal pool which was beside a flat salt lake which contained more flamingoes. The water was around 30 degrees and the scenery was filled with beautiful pastal colours - desert and mountains with a few fluffy clouds dotted around on the blue canvas sky. This was the perfect place to get away from it all.
My favourite lake was Laguna Colarada which is a dark red/brown with large areas of salt deposits in the Laguna. The white salt patches have a greeny/blue edge. The Laguna is full of swirls of blues, sandy colours and red/brown colours, it contains around 5 million flamingoes and at the edge there were several Llamas. The surrounding paths are all made from loose salt rocks - all very natural.
Our hostel for that evening was very basic, but it was in the middle of nowhere - nothing but miles of desert! Several people in our group, including Tracey, had pretty bad headaches due to the high altitude of 4300 metres and didnīt sleep very well.
The next day we surfaced at 6.30am and bounced along in the jeep to Arbol de Piedra (The Stone Tree) where we saw large layers of rock which formed the shape of a tree. It was standing solitary in front of a mass of large clusters of rocks. It was perfectly calm there with no wind at all, surrounded by more desert and mountains. Back in the jeep we drove to 3 different lagunas - Lagunas Honda, Hedionda and Canara - all stunning and extremely calm with perfect reflections of the surrounding landscape. Each Laguna was filled with flamingoes. Pretty much a day of lagunas, desert and thousands of flamingoes!!
That evening we spent the night in a very basic "hotel" - this was no hotel! It was just someones house with a few dingy extra rooms attached, not the luxury hotel we had been promised! But we made the most of it with a few warm beers from the local store.
4am rise the following morning as we headed to Uyuni salt flat where we watched the sky slowly turning orange until the sun burst up from behind the salt lake, lighting the whole area bright white, stretching as far as the eye can see. From there we drove to Isla de los Pescadones (Fisherman Island) which is a small island in the middle of the salt lake filled with thousands of Cacti, all shapes and sizes - very impressive. The cacti looked great with the early morning sun shining behind them in the cloudless blue sky.
We then continued our journey to visit a hotel/museum made from salt, then the salt mines and finally a train cemetary - which was very weird!! We ended our trip in Uyuni where we all went out for a few Bolivian beers while we waited for our overnight bus to La Paz. A fantastic 3 day experience in the Bolivian desert!
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