Salar de Uyuni

After arriving in Uyuni at 8 in the morning, the bus Terminal was already busy with travel agents selling tours for the salt flats of Uyuni.
I had already met Li from Taiwan on the bus and so the two of us decided to go along with one of the girls, who put us on a 3 day tour leaving the same morning.
It turned out that I was very lucky with my group of travelers: a very good national/international mix of a Bolivian mother traveling with her two teenage daughters, a Portuguese photographer, a Japanese guy named Kan who made the tour on his motorbike (he actually started his journey in Alaska and is now on his way to Patagonia…. quite crazy), Li and myself.
The Salar de Uyuni is the biggest and highest salt lake in the world; further south you can see some impressive volcanoes, multi colored lagoons with hundreds of flamingos, nice rock formations and hot geysers and natural thermal baths.
The first night we spent in a very nice hostal entirely built of salt, even the mattresses of our beds were put on blocks of salt!
The second day (December 24) we visited several nice lagoons and we spent the night at the shores of Laguna Colorada at 4’300 meters above sea level. After sunset it got quite cold and a strong wind was blowing all night long.
Together with some other groups we celebrated Christmas Eve with a lot of wine, beer and tequila. As we had an early start at 4:30 the next morning, for some of us the night was quite short!
Rui, usually very keen to take loads of pictures (he is a photographer after all) could not really be convinced to see the beauty of the geysers at 6:00 in the morning and preferred to rather get some sleep in the car….
Mid morning we arrived at the Chilean border and here it was already time to say good bye to Li and Kan, who continued their trip to San Pedro de Atacama. The rest of us returned to Uyuni, where we arrived at 7:00 in the evening after a long and tiring drive.
The same night at 10:00 I boarded the night train to Villazon, the border town between Bolivia and Argentina.

The Salar de Uyuni was another big highlight of my trip and probably because we spent Christmas there, it is a really memorable one too.