Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

We and our newly introduced travelling companions, Sharyn and Peter from Canada, were taken by minibus from San Pedro de Atacama to the small border post on the other side of Volcano Licancabur, about an hour’s drive away. After completing the formalities we walked across the border into Bolivia. Waiting there for us in his Toyota Landcruiser was our driver/guide Nilfer. Nilfer is a Bolivian man from the town of Uyuni, about 600 km distant from where our road trip was about to begin, and where it would end. We helped Nilfer to load our things onto the top of the 4 wheel drive and then we set off. The track for the next 600 km was variously dirt, gravel, sand or salt. Nilfer spoke only Spanish, no English, but despite this we were able to communicate well enough with our understanding a word here and there. Lee’s few Spanish lessons that she took before we left home certainly helped a lot in this environment too.

For the first two days we were treated to some awesome wide open scenery and big blue skies. We passed, and often stopped to admire, mountains, volcanoes 20,000 feet above sea level, hot springs, lagoons, boiling geothermal mud pools and fumaroles oozing stinking sulphurous steam. At one place Lee, Sharyn and Peter lounged for awhile in an open air geothermal hot spring.  We explored rock canyons that were the weathered remnants of igneous volcanic flows of millennia ago, watched passing parades of vicuna and llama, admired flamingos foraging in still waters, and spotted other animals such as Andean foxes, condors and viscacha, a rabbit/marsupial-like rodent. We were surprised to see rough fields of red-topped quinoa growing at various places along the way; we didn’t know that quinoa thrived in an arid environment like this.

For the first night of the trip we stayed in a small roadside hostel, and on the second in a hotel/hostel constructed of blocks of salt. Even the floors, beds and furniture were salt.

Then on Day 3, before dawn, it was now salt under our wheels as we drove onto the vast Salar de Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt pan. This covers 12,000 square kilometres, with the salt nearly 400 feet deep! From the top of a small island marooned in this vast sea of compacted salt, we watched the sun rise and bathe the surroundings in a golden glow for a few minutes. Then it was time for breakfast from the rear of the 4 wheel drive, before some skimming at speed across the salt, with stops to admire the geometric pattern on the surface, extending as far as the eye could see. With the salt in many directions extending to the horizon, there was nothing to see but whiteness, and nothing to give perspective. This made it possible to create some wacky illusory images with the camera, and we spent a fun hour or so doing this.

In the early afternoon on Day 3 we came to the edge of the Salar, and from there Uyuni was just 20 minutes away on a sealed road. In Uyuni we said our goodbyes at the bus station to Sharyn and Peter who were continuing their travels immediately, to the city of Potosi to the east. But we were having a night in Uyuni, and were happy to see the slightly forbidding outskirts of this small dusty town give way to a cheery town centre where we checked into a hostel before ordering llama stew with quinoa for dinner at a nearby café. Salar de Uyuni certainly deserves its reputation as one of the world’s great road trips. And Nilfer proved to be just the man to take us on it.

Salar de Uyuni road trip slideshow:

San Pedro de Atacama, Atacama Desert, Chile

From Purmamarca heading north-west we gained a lot of height fast as the bus wound up through a long series of tight steep switchbacks. This brought us to an altitude of over 8,000 feet, the height at which altitude symptoms can begin to appear. Our 6.5 hour bus journey passed through spectacular countryside – steep mountains and sweeping desert plains bathed in varying pastels, and later big volcanoes. We came to the Argentina / Chile border and when all the officialdom had been completed we proceeded into the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Our destination was the funky dusty water-starved town of a few thousand hardy people, San Pedro de Atacama. If you want to know the full meaning of parched, come to San Pedro. Hot and dry in the daytime and seriously cold and dry in the night time. The one constant is dry. Swing a wet shirt around your head twice and it’s dry again. Hiking socks – three times.

All of the wall to wall shops and cafes are of adobe construction and the streets dirt. Even San Pedro’s old church has adobe walls, and its ceiling is of cactus plank. San Pedro throngs with travellers, mainly backpackers, from across the globe. They keep the many tour agents busy, enquiring about and booking tours into the desert. We went on a couple ourselves; first to the Valley of the Moon, and second, to the El Tatio Geyser Field about 100 km to the north. El Tatio is the world’s highest geyser field, at over 13,000 feet above sea level, and also the world’s third largest in area. To visit these we had to be up at 4am and to have abstained from alcohol and red meat to counteract the effects of altitude. It was seriously cold when we arrived; minus 5 C, and we looked forward to the sun peeping above the horizon. On our way back to San Pedro we passed through a valley with small herds of grazing vicuna, and visited a village where llama are farmed, and where we sampled llama shish kebabs. Very nice, and perfectly cooked. Llama and alpaca are the domesticated cousins of the wild, protected, vicuna and guanaco.

Like 90% of the other travellers in San Pedro, there was another reason for our being here, quite apart from seeing some of the sights of the Atacama Desert. An hour or so to the north east, on the other side of the Licancabur volcano (20,000 feet above sea level) that towers over San Pedro, is a remote border crossing into Bolivia. And across that border is yet more magnificent arid scenery, and further on, the vast stunning Salar de Uyuni in far south west Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat. This was to be our next destination. After making many enquiries we chose a 4-wheel drive operator to take us on a three day jaunt into Bolivia, leaving us there when it was all over. Five or six passengers are the norm; we had two travelling companions; a couple from Canada, Sharyn and Peter. And so on Friday 25 March, at 7.30am, we had checked out of our San Pedro hostel and were waiting outside to be picked up, each of us having abstained from red meat and alcohol and carrying what had been instructed. A gallon of water, a roll of toilet paper, and 400 Bolivianos.

Tilcara & Purmamarca, Argentina

A couple of hours by bus north of Salta the green agricultural lushness abruptly gives way, as the altitude rises, to barren rocky mountainsides dotted with cactus. Our destination was Tilcara in the far north of Argentina, a dusty funky small town with a slight ‘wild west’ feel about it. The mountains in these parts are known for their bright multi-coloured layers exposed by centuries of erosion and are popular with hikers and sightseers for this reason.

We spent two days in Tilcara, hiking into the surrounding countryside and wandering around town in the early evening when it had cooled off. Our longest hike was to ‘Devil’s Throat’. On the way out of town a large dog awoke as we walked past and it decided to join us; in fact it came with us all the way to the summit, several kilometres out of town. No doubt it’s done this many times before with other hikers; not a bad way for a likeable dog to amuse itself in Tilcara.

Then on Saturday morning we took a bus to the nearby village of Purmamarca, also well-known and popular with visitors for its own surrounding coloured mountains. In fact Purmamarca seemed to be entirely a tourist town, with no other industry or reason for being. We stayed a night and spent an afternoon hiking around its multi-hued hillsides too.

And that brought the final curtain down on our time in Argentina; a great country to visit. Over the past three months we’d come and gone several times across its borders but this time we wouldn’t be returning. The Atacama Desert of northern Chile beckoned.