Hotel Playa Blanca Uyuni

... where you get to take in the scenery, visiting a couple of local villages. However you get up to 4300m which will be as low as we go for the tour until the Salar - the highest point is just over 5000m!! It really kicks off on day two. It is a 4am start and you get to explore an abandoned village first up. We were told that it was the location where the devil was tied up and therefore it was rich with minerals to mine. Unfortunately he escaped and went to Chile and the ...

I have just returned from one of the most varied and stark environments on earth. Me and my German traveling companion loaded into a 4x4 with a couple other Canadians and headed out on a tour of the ¨salt flats¨. Little did I know there would be so much more to the next 3 days than driving thru a salty desert. <br>After leaving about 2hrs late(bad even for Bolivia) we headed out to check out the salt processing area. Everything around us was salt, including the road we were driving on ...

... amazing! Every time we stopped, he was working on or cleaning something. Plus he has a great personality!<br><br>And I'm not joking about the drunk part - it's one of the common complaints from tourists - they felt unsafe because their driver had been drinking too much. I discovered drinking at work is not unusual in Bolivia, but some take it too far. Another group told us that they witnessed two girls in another ...

... about 80 years old (and looked every day of it). <br><br>Back into our Toyota Land Cruiser to Playa Blanca (White Beach) for the museum and gift shopping. I didn't see any signs of water, so not sure why it was called Playa anything =)<br><br>Then onto the salt flats...with the white salt surface - it was freakishly white and barren. Stopped at some salt mines - no need to go underground - they mine the salt off ...

What happens when you throw together 2 lawyers from Bogota, an uber trendy German from Berlin, a chain smoking French dude and two laid back chicks (Susie and I), for a 3 day adventure across the Bolivian Salt Flats? One pretty entertaining trip.<br><br>This was one trip that I was really looking forward to. It's not for the faint hearted, but I was told if you got a good driver ...

... at the side of the road for half an hour - it turned out the shuttle driver did not have the correct documentation... However, we eventually made it into Bolivia, after a long climb from 2000 to 4500 metres (at about 30mph). Upon meeting our guides (Figo, who drove our group, and Emilio who drove the second group) for the next 3 days, we felt reassured - the 4WDs looked like real, working cars, the drivers looked sober, and the breakfast they had laid out for us was ...

... into the Toyota Land Crusier (the preferred vehicle of the Taliban apparently) and spent the next three days travelling south across the flats towards Chile.<br><br>Salar de Unuyi has an awful lot of salt! In fact it has 4,085 square miles of the stuff and is the world's largest salt flat. The vastness of the place is quite mind blowing and is probably the most alien environment we have ever been experienced. It's located in south-west Bolivia near the crest of ...