Salar de Uyuni – surroundings we’ve never seen before

So, we finally made it to Uyuni. We had booked a one-day-tour with Red Planet. There are many agencies that organize tours to Salar de Uyuni. After reading the reviews, we booked ours with Red Planet because they seemed most reliable and consistent. We arrived to their office and could leave our bags there, change clothes, use the toilet, etc.

We were happy to notice that we received a private tour since no-one else had booked a one-day-tour for that day. :D We started by driving to a train cemetery. It had old, rusty trains that, according to our guide, had belonged to UK before and that USA used afterwards and then left there when they didn’t need them anymore. We climbed on the trains and took some pictures there.

After the trains, we drove to a salt factory. We learned that they produce 6000 kilos of salt every day in Uyuni. That’s a lot! There was a large plate under which one burned wood. The salt dried on the plate and after that, it went through a mill and became powder. Even the building was made of salt. :D

After the salt factory we had a long ride on the salt flat. We fell both asleep after the not-so-well-slept bus ride the previous night. We drove to a small village where we had lunch. Our guide told us that there lives only 8 people at the moment. Markus’ lunch was good – some grilled chicken and rice. Edda only got one egg covered with potato and rice. Hmmm, the amounts of food for vegetarians and non-vegetarians were quite different 😡 At the lunch spot we saw a beautiful semi-active volcano. It looked like a rainbow mountain! After lunch we went for a walk to see some lamas and flamingos.

The small 8-people-village 

Lamas eating and walking around

Family picture 😊

Our next stop was an ”island” (they call it an island because it’s in the middle of the salt flat) with A LOT of cactuses! We have never seen a place like it before. We got to walk around and take pictures. It was interesting and fun. The views were not bad either!

Some of the cactuses looked a bit crazy 😉

Then it was time to take some funny pictures with perspective. We were a bit disappointed that we didn’t take the pictures earlier, where the salt flat was whiter. After the cactus island we drove for a while and Edda asked the guide “are we going to take the photos in a specific place?”. The guide said “yes, because here it’s not good when the salt is so bumpy”. Then the driver said something (he was in a really grumpy mood and apparently wanted back home) and we stopped. It was a bit weird because the guide had just said that there it was not good to take photos. Anyhow, it was fun to take the photos, even if we could have hoped for a better photographer… The focus in the photos and positioning were not the best, but you get the idea :)

We also visited an old salt hotel, which now is empty and they call it a “museum”. We walked around and did not really understand how it was a museum, but it was interesting to see the building. The reason why it’s not a hotel anymore is that the government didn’t allow for it to be a hotel when there were no sufficient facilities for showers, toilets, etc.

We also paid a quick visit to the salt pyramids, which was a bit of a disappointment. In the pictures that we had seen before, the pyramids were perfectly shaped and beautiful – these were just piles of salt. 😒 The idea of the piles is to dry the salt. The piles were also interesting, because they looked and felt like snow in the spring when it have melted and frozen again.

Salt "pyramids"

We felt that the one-day-tour was sufficient enough for us (we had thought whether if we should take a three-day-tour instead). The guide was a bit all over the place and we’re not sure if all the information we got was true. Also, the driver seemed to control the time table even if the guide would have wanted to do something different. We don’t know how the other agencies are, but would not rank Red Planet as high as it’s been ranked e.g. on TripAdvisor, but we had a a good time anyway 😊