Journey to the Salt Flats

After my incredibly long hiatus, it would seem I’m back and using my blog as a means of procrastination, so let’s pick up where I left off back in August. Leaving Santiago, Jen and I had a 26 hour journey ahead of us to San Pedro de Atacama, which was just as fun as it sounds. Think one meal in 22 hours, no toilet paper, no water, broken seats… you get the picture. Probably the singular most uncomfortable journey I’ve ever been on. First world problems, I know. Anyway, after 22 hours we arrived in Calama, the “gateway to the Atacama Desert”. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Wrong. We had a three hour wait here before our next bus to San Pedro, and it was three hours longer than I would recommend spending in Calama, to be honest. There’s nothing to do while you wait, and to top it off, there had been a power cut so all the restaurants were closed. Great. To top that off, after waiting for our next bus, it turned out we’d waited all that time at the wrong bus station, and that actually Calama had FOUR bus terminals. Trust me when I tell you it doesn’t look like the kind of place to have one bus terminal, let alone four. Of course, this meant we’d missed our bus, but in our first stroke of luck of the journey, there was one more leaving half an hour later. We bought a ticket, boarded, and we were on our way to San Pedro.

Viscacha

By the time we finally arrived in San Pedro, it was pitch black. And obviously, given our excellent luck, a thunderstorm was raging and all the power had gone out in the town. Yay! What a perfect end to the day! After a ride in the world’s most fraudulent looking taxi, we arrived at our hostel, booked a tour for the following day, and went to sleep. The next morning we awoke in far better spirits and got ready to set off for Valle de la Luna. But of course, our bad luck didn’t end there! As we were hiking up the main sand dune in the valley, another thunderstorm started up. The whole valley was closed off, and we headed back to the hostel £30 out of pocket and covered in mud. Once back in San Pedro, naturally, the rain stopped. We ended up going to a desert party, which seemed like a good idea until we had to go straight out on our Salt Flats tour at 5 the following morning, having got back about half an hour before, and feeling ever so slightly fragile, and by fragile I mean it was the worst hangover of my life.

On the Salt Flats tour

My tragic state meant I actually slept for most of the first of the three days in the Salt Flats, which I still regret somewhat – people didn’t actually realise I was on the minibus until four hours into the journey because I was out cold. We went as high as 4320m above sea level that day, and I really don’t think that helped my fragility that day at all, despite the fact I hadn’t had any altitude sickness prior to this. From the little I did see, I know we saw some beautiful things – volcanoes, the Laguna Blanca, flamingos, the toxic Laguna Verde, and geysers, to name but a few, but honestly if it weren’t for the pictures I would struggle to recall them in much detail. We also went to some thermal baths, but the thought of undressing in the freezing cold and sitting in them literally made me physically sick so I decided to give that a miss and continue with my nap. That first day was followed by what was the coldest night of my life, but luckily by morning it was slightly (very slightly) warmer.

Flamingos

On the second day we got to see more flamingos, as well as vicunas (they kind of look like small llamas) and viscachas (chinchilla-esque animals). We went to a part of the desert that has natural rock formations and saw the Arbol de Piedra, which although fun to climb was honestly probably just thrown into the tour as a means of bulking out the second day a bit, as it’s primarily a day for driving to a hotel from which you can depart the following morning to the Salt Flats themselves. Day 3 started bright and early, as we were hoping to catch the sunrise over the Salar de Uyuni. The Salar de Uyuni is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We pulled up to the Hotel de Sal, and there’s just the most incredible view over the completely flat landscape. Your view is completely unobstructed for miles, and the layer of water on top made it almost glisten in the sun. We spent a couple of hours here taking various different perspective pictures as a group, before heading on to the train cemetery, which is exactly that – a dumping ground for disused trains – and then on to Uyuni, a transit town with bus connections across Bolivia.

On the Salt Flats

I guess I’ve procrastinated for long enough, so I’ll leave it here for now. Hopefully I’ll get round to writing the next one soon, but I guess we’ll see!

Un beso,
Lola