I was really unsure whether to visit the enormous 10,500 sq. km. salt flats given many of the promotional pictures looked primed for Instagram and I wasn’t really sure what there was to do there. However, everyone both first-hand and online raved about it being a unique and unmissable place. I’m not a staged photo person and I have had a lot of outdoor experiences… However, I’ll still say the staged photos were actually super fun playing with perspective, the salt landscape strange, the use of salt bricks for construction very novel and the SW Bolivian landscape of high altitude volcanic desert very wierd and interesting. In summary, it was worth the visit.
(This is day one of our three day Uyuni tour)
Getting to Uyuni
We booked our tour in person through Homeland Tours in La Paz, took a nine (turned 10.5) hrs overnight “lie flat” bus ($35 USD each way) down to Uyuni where we were (I guess) subcontracted out to Tomorrow Land Tours. The tour cost $200 USD pp for a Spanish speaking “guide” in a six person SUV. Our guide was more of a driver who kinda had the attitude of a guy going through the motions on his day job. He did a fine job but these drivers were not the most engaging and didn’t even introduce themselves. 🙃
This first day would consist of traveling point to point across 8 stops with a short walk and/or speech at each one. Up to 25 SUVs could also be along for the ride, stopping at each point but it typically didn’t feel crowded.
Stop 1: Abandoned Train Yard
The first stop is the abandoned steam engine train yard which is representative of the history of the region as a Silver and other mineral mining area. Uyuni being the main hub between here and the oceanic exportation through Chile across the salt flat. It’s now known that Boliva holds something like 15-20% of the world’s Lithium with the largest reserve being under the Uyuni Salt Flat. Aside from the history, this stop involved climbing around on the trains and taking pictures with them.
Stop 2: Colchani Salt Cultivation
Next we stopped in Colchani for an instructional demonstration of how the salt is cultivated. They explained how they use heat to dry out the humid salt while processing. Also, our first look at the salt-bricks that can be extracted from the first few meters of salt flat before it becomes more of a gem-like, crystalline structure. These bricks have an alternating coloration of dark and light layers which have to do with lighter wet seasons and darker dry seasons when dust blows onto the flat. At least, that’s what I thought I heard… 😅 We got some table salt from Uyuni and we had maybe too much time to stroll around various souvenir / craft shops.
Stop 3: Water on the Uyuni
Finally driving out into these salt flats at 12,000 ft, it definitely struck me as an interesting landscape than other salt flats I’ve seen. It was composed 100% of solid white salt with an interlaced hexagonal pattern on the surface. We were taken to an area of the flat where water bubbled up through a hole in the bedrock.
Stop 4: Salt Sculpture Park
It was the salt-structures that kinda convinced me that Salar de Uyuni could be a novel experience worth checking out. First we had lunch in a building where all the furniture (seats, table) and walls were constructed of salt bricks with salt mortar. It was pretty unique and interesting.
After lunch, we explored a sculpture park where everything was also constructed and sculpted from these salt bricks. I had a surprisingly fun time taking staged photos on the llamas, walking the maze, admiring the various art.
Stop 5: Playa Blanca, the original Salt Hotel
On the way to our next stop, I was having major Burning Man vibes. The experience felt very similar to biking out on The Playa between art installations via the flat dusty lake bed of Burning Man, but instead we were taking SUVs between different points of interest on a flat salt plain.
Here we toured Playa Blanca, the first hotel constructed on the Uyuni Salt Flat in the 1990s, but was shut down after a few years due to santitation issues and ecological concerns. It is now a mueseum / bar of sorts. I actually thought the hotel was called Dakar due to the monument here with that name but actually Dakar was memorializing a famous off-road rally that used to take place here.
Stop 6: Perspective Photos
A lot of promotional photos of Uyuni show these photos of toy-looking dinosaurs looming over small people. I didn’t really understand what was going on… was there some weird dinosaur sculpture park out there?
Well… apparently with only 10-20 ft between camera and subject, you can create these surprising perspective photos where the foreground looks huge and the people super small when taking a photo directly off the ground. This is possible (I guess) because the salt flat offers little background reference points, is a consistent color and is actually so self-levelingly flat. In fact, there is no more than 1m difference across its 10,000+ sq. km. So it’s used by space agencies for satalite altimeter calibration.
Everyone got into it, even the older Bolivian couple, so it was actually pretty fun. The photographic output actually pretty interesting without it feeling like Instagram-cliche.
Stop 7: Sunset and the Mirror Effect
Our next stop was at an area of the flat that had standing water. I think this was to help us see some of the famous “mirror effect” that can turn the entire salt flat into a mirror of the sky after a rain event. This stop was never really explained other than we needed to put on our rubber boots, haha. We kinda saw the mirror in some of the water, but the water was not very still given the constant wind. The sunset was pretty though, with a little snack table and a bottle of wine provided.
Stop 8: Night photography
Driving slowly while watching instagram videos on his phone, our driver waited until it was dark enough to take some long-exposure nighttime photos. It was pretty funny seeing this straightforward guy swing a lit-up plastic toy sword in circles around people as it chimed with lightsaber style sounds for some of the photos. Engaged or not, he was committed to deliver the experience promised for the tour and all the pictures turned out really good. 😄
Sleeping at a Salt Hotel
To my surprise, we finished by driving back to Colchani for our “Salt Hotel” (Hotel Salt Paradise) which was sandwiched between two concrete structures. The hotel was actually pretty nice and not as bare bones as I thought it would be. Probably because only the walls and the bed platforms were made of salt. I guess I understand that having a floor and bathroom made of salt is kinda problematic with hygiene, spills, etc. The salt art was pretty cool on the walls, but I had kind expected to stay out on the salt flat in something like the Blanca hotel experience.
Onward to SW Bolivia on Day 2
I had kinda expected to get deeper into the salt flat (we stayed very close to the edge) or visit one of the “islands” of land rising out of the salt flat either this day or one of the following but that was not on the schedule. To my great surprise, we actually only spent this day in the Uyuni Salt Flat and would explore much of SW Bolivia for the rest of the tour. Which I do not regret because I feel like I got to explore a whole region of high-desert Bolivia, consistently around 15,000 ft.
So to the question, “Is it worth it to go to Uyuni? Is it too touristy? Too Instagramy?”… I’d say, it’s worth the trip since its very unique and while there is a lot of car-time, these tours can be quite fun and definitely introduce you to very different and unique ecosystems.
