Crossing From San Pedro, Chile to Uyuni, Bolivia

The Morning of the Departure:

I ended up booking my trip to Uyuni without anyone that I’d met in San Pedro or in other places during my travels. There were 17 people in our caravan none of whom I knew. I knew a few of the people in just about all of the other groups leaving on similar trips, just no one in mine. It may sound like this was unlucky—that it might make for a lonely trip—but I found that among other less-than-pleasant people, my incredibly talkative acquaintance, Kim, was traveling in one of the other groups. Rosemary is right, things really do seem to happen in 3’s for Italians, so maybe this will my last encounter with him. He happened upon me as I waited for my jeep in the logical place: on the street in front of the travel agency. Kim kept trying to convince me that a jeep clearly marked and parked by a different agency must be mine and that I should jump aboard the random vehicle trusting blind luck. Call me crazy, but I’ll take logic over uneducated impulse nine times out of ten. I spent the time until my jeep came trying to explain to Kim why that didn’t make sense and why he should stop urging me in that direction. My attempts were fruitless. He persisted until his own jeep came and relieved me of his adamant company. My jeep arrived shortly after. I boarded and waited for the rest of the group who were almost all running very late. Apparently, although Kim’s decoy jeep failed to fool me, the group of Danish girls that delayed our group had taken the bait. We had to wait for the drivers to balance out the incorrectly distributed masses before we could head on our way.

The Group:

Meeting the people on the trip was interesting, a random gathering of strangely compatible people. There were two British women, a German couple, three Dutch guys on their gap year, another Dutch girl who had a disaster involving a lost passport, an Australian couple, me, and the four Danish girls in my jeep. Our first stop was at the Chilean/Bolivian border. I was the only one treated badly (being American), they have a special procedure for Americans where they take your passport away and send you out of the building for half an hour… just so that you can return and be told that they process your information inside the border at immigration offices. I can’t imagine a better way to start a trip than dealing with a bunch of rude, curt, purposeless, and presumptive Bolivian militia. This, however, was just about the only time I was treated badly in Bolivia.

The Sights:

After the border, the stops can be summed up as a lot of small lakes with salt or mineral deposits that made them appear various colors: Laguna Blanca, Laguna Verde, Laguna Colorada and plenty of others. Although they were interesting and beautiful at first, 2 days of lake visits really did get a little boring. We witnessed flamingos and llamas in their natural habitats, but just like the lakes they got less and less remarkable as the trip continued. We changed scenery only on occasion, taking breaks to check out some irregular rock formations and other scenery that offered a bit of variety. We mixed things up by climbing rocks and finding other ways to exert ourselves when we had the opportunity to get out of the jeeps. Fortunately we were able to pass the less interesting time in good company.

The Salt Flats:

The third day highlighted the trip nicely. The night before, they drove us out to the flats so we could look at the stars and pointed out some traditional Bolivian constellations (I think they probably made them up and simply use them to dazzle tourists). Since there was virtually no light and only a thin layer of atmosphere between us and the sky, the Milky Way formed a perfectly thick and obvious line all the way across the sky, and the patchy light created by nearby galaxies illuminated large blotches in the star-speckled sky. After a great night’s sleep, we arose at 5:30 AM to watch the sun rise on the salt flats. The rest of the day was a long drive across salt, NaCl, and sodium chloride, with lots of stops on the pristine, glistening flat lands.

We did the usual salt flat activities: lifting jeeps, standing on soap boxes, and threw in a few originals as well. The perfectly flat, featureless ground creates a depth-less canvas where everything appears 2-dimensional. After some photo sessions and short visits to the nearby sites we headed to the town at the end of our journey.





We arrived in Uyuni, a small town where there was no choice but to constantly run into each other during our planning of other trips. Inevitably a few of us ended up heading the same direction. There is a lot to be said about the people I met, and what it means to be an American abroad… but I’ll save that for later. The short version is that I met a lot of people, had a lot of great times, and saw some incredible things. I can’t wait to travel in the near future when I’ll have more money at my disposal to do other trips of this sort.