Day 181: Try Standing in My Shoe

La Paz – Uyuni – La Paz, Bolivia

So the whole point of coming to Bolivia was to visit Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world, and take sick perspective photos.

In order to get there, Nat, Ben and I boarded the 7pm bus the day before in La Paz and didn’t get to the Uyuni town until 9am the next morning. The bus that we took was comfortable though. There are two options for buses that go to Uyuni: the cheaper local bus with no amenities and the more expensive touristic bus. We went for the touristic bus for a couple of reasons: safety and comfort. Apparently, a bunch of people that took the local bus woke up with either their bags missing or things missing from the bags. Also, there isn’t any air-conditioning in the bus so it can get really really cold and uncomfortable in the local bus. We had none of these problems.

Upon reaching Uyuni, we headed to our travel agency to find out about our day tour to the salt flats. By 10:30am, we hopped on a van again to travel to a few destinations for the tour. The first one was a train cemetery. It was once a railway hub for Bolivia’s mines but is now totally abandoned in the middle of nowhere. It was such a good site to take awesome awesome shots but I don’t know why I didn’t have any decent photos at all there. My mind must not have worked properly due to the tiredness from the long bus ride.

Second stop was just some small local market selling the same souvenirs you’d see elsewhere.

The last destination was finally the salt flats. Now, I have a mixed feeling about this place. While it’s an impressive view, somehow I wasn’t as thrilled with the whole experience as I had expected to be. The perspective photos turned out to be sooooooo much harder to pull off. So many trials and errors that we kinda gave up not having taking the perfect ones. The blinding sun reflected by the white salt flat didn’t help either. It was difficult to see the preview of the photos we had taken. Thinking back about it, I wish we had tried harder.

The tour brought us back to Uyuni town a little bit after 4pm. Desolate and dusty, there wasn’t much to see in the town itself. We grabbed ourselves some juices and pizza and waited out the 3 hours before we caught our bus back to La Paz.

Imagine 30 hours+ bus rides in less than 2 days time! It was brutal but it had to be done or it’s pointless to visit Bolivia. Wait, I take that back. The Death Road biking turned out to be my Bolivian highlight instead.