After leaving Easter Island, James and I headed to the Atacama desert to take a more unconventional path into Bolivia. We caught a quick flight and bus to a town called San Pedro de Atacama. This is a pretty small little town that’s a hub for backpackers with not much more than cheap hotels and travel agencies. We booked ourselves on a three day trip to the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia that would take us thru some of the deserts, lakes, and volcanic areas of southern Bolivia.The trip didn’t start till the next day, so James and I took an evening trip out to an area called the Mountains of the Moon. This is a surreal desert area where the sandstone has been scoured by the wind over millions of years into just incredibly weird and beautiful shapes. There were gullies and caverns that had been dug out of the canyon floors that we spent several hours wandering around and exploring. At the end of the evening, we climbed a large sand dune and watched the sunset over the extinct volcano.

Early the next morning we joined up with three other folks and climbed into a decrepit old Land Rover with a driver who spoke next to no English. Luckily, one of our group was a beautiful Argentinian named Karina who was fantastic in providing a running translation of what the driver was saying.

We headed out thru more desert territory stopping at several different formations. One of my favorites looked exactly like pac-man from the 1980s video game days. Eventually we headed out of the desert towards a series of colored lakes. The “roads” out that way were awful, but there isn’t really any reason for folks to go out there unless they are tourists. The first lake we stopped at was called Lago Verde (Green Lake), and it was our first sight of the hundreds of flamingos we’d see over the next couple of days.

After the first lake we had another couple of hours of driving, gaining altitude all the while. Eventually we stopped at a geyser basin that had active steam vents, bubbling mud, and the constant smell of rotten eggs. The air was thin and cold (we were at about 15000 feet), and while there was a little hot stream we could have gone swimming in, no one really felt like braving the cold enough to get wet.

We stopped for the night at a ratty hotel where our driver fixed us a traditional Bolivian meal of spaghetti and tomato sauce. That evening we went hiking around Lago Colorado (Red Lake) where we got even more photos of flamingos, and then retired for a fairly sleepless night due to the altitude.

The next morning we headed out again towards what would be the highlight of the trip…the Salar de Uyuni. This is an area in southwestern Bolivia that was covered by a vast inland sea about 30,000 years ago. When the water evaporated, it left the salt flats in an area of about 12,000 square kilometers with salt deposits of up to 24 feet thick. The salt naturally dries into hexagonal plates about five feet across, and the flats extend out as far as the eye can see. We drove over them for hours, stopping occasionally to get out and take photos. Eventually we came to an island of land in the middle of the salt desert called Isla Pescado (Fish Island). We got out of the jeeps for lunch and went hiking around the island to its highest point where the views in every direction were stunning. The island is full of huge cactus and volcanic rocks and caves that are just a blast to wander around.

Eventually we headed to our destination of the evening, which was a hotel built completely out of salt blocks. Except for a few pieces of wood used for trim, everything in the building, including the furniture was made of salt. Even though I knew what it was made out of, I still had to lick the walls a couple of times to prove to myself that it was really pure salt.

The next day we headed towards the town of Uyuni, and as we approached the edge of the salt sea, we came across salt miners chipping blocks out of the surface and grinding the salt down into pieces that could be loaded into trucks for processing into ordinary table salt. Here we also came across places where underground water would seep up to the surface in brownish pools that the locals called the eyes of salt. If you stuck your arm in one of these pools, it would be covered with salt crystals as the water evaporated.