Uyuni – Day 1 | FroeWi on Tour

We were prepared for every possible happening. People on our way told us that it’s getting extremely cold in the salt flat area (down to minus 15 degrees). Buying a alpaca sweater, scarfs and socks as well as two extra sleeping bags and a down jacket seemed sufficient.

The most common way to get to Uyuni is by night bus which normally takes 12 hours and arrives early in the morning in Uyuni. This way the 3 days/ 2 nights tour can start the same day. In our case the bus took 16 hours and it wasn’t as comfortable as we were hoping. Psycho movies were shown until 1 am, just to start again at 6 in the morning. In between the bus stopped several times to let people out and in – our night was short.

Because of our delay of more than 2 hours we arrived at the tour agency in Uyuni 20 minutes after the tour should have started, but like most of the times in south America things go slow. The tour started with 1 hour delay and we were perfectly fine.

Our tour consisted of Alessandro and Francesco (two Italian guys) and Amy from China. Alessandro is a doctor specialized in viruses and bacteria’s, therefore he was very curious about everything we touched and reminded us of disinfecting our hands all the time (its because he is permanently working on projects in Africa for the last 20 years). Francesco is also a traveler and Bolivia is his last stop before going back home to Italy. Amy is working for Huawei and now Niels knows how his mobile (a Huawei) is pronounced correctly (something like Wawi 😉 After 2 hours we found out that our guide had been an English teacher for several years and offered us to do the tour in English (normally it costs a fortune to get an English speaking guide).

The tour started with the “Cementerio de Trenes”, which was followed by the worlds largest salt flat – Uyuni (12.106 sq km at 3.653m height). On the one hand it’s an enormous white areal of nothingness. On the other hand it offers the perfect setting for crazy surreal pictures. Before heading to our night stay in a salt hotel we stopped at the Isla Incahuasi, which is a hill in the middle of the salt flat covered with cactuses and offers spectacular views of the Salt Flat.

The night was pretty cold but with our two sleeping bags we were perfectly prepared. In the morning both of us were super rested – unlike the others of our group.

Day 2 see the next post 🙂

Abandoned trains made the famous train cemetery 3 km outside of Uyuni