Salar de Uyuni – The Salt Flats and the Train Cemetery

I was originally going to write about a three-day group tour to Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats and the train cemetery, followed by the high-altitude landscapes all the way to the Chilean border. But when I started going through the photographs and the stories behind them, I realised that the post was going to become too long.

So I decided to split it into two.

I had booked the tour in Tupiza the day before and travelled to Uyuni early in the morning by trufi, a shared taxi. I arrived in time and met the other people joining the tour. There were five of us in total, plus our driver and guide/photographer. The average age was around 30, so I raised it considerably.

The Train Cemetery

We met in the dusty mining town of Uyuni, and our first stop was the Cementerio de Trenes de Uyuni, the Train Cemetery. It is a fascinating open-air museum with more than 100 abandoned, rusting steam locomotives and railway carriages from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The area is extremely photogenic and has become a popular Instagram attraction. Our guide and photographer also took some rather fun photographs of us here.

The craftsmanship in these locomotives is so detailed and exposed that they actually become quite beautiful.

The railway was a relatively new invention in the nineteenth century, and the colonial powers quickly saw the opportunity to use it to transport raw materials and minerals out of South America and eventually to Europe. But when the mining industry collapsed and economic difficulties hit in the mid-twentieth century, the whole railway venture came to an end. That’s why these old trains are slowly rusting away in the desert.

Salar de Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni is one of Bolivia’s most popular tourist destinations, and with good reason.

Uyuni is full of travel agencies offering day trips, two-, three- and four-day tours across the salt flats and onwards into the high-altitude landscapes.

I had read that you should be a little careful about which company you choose. Therefore, I picked one of the recommended companies, but it is still a little exciting to find out who you’ll be sharing a small vehicle with for three full days. I was very lucky.

Although everyone else was young, we quickly got along well. They were all well-travelled, and we had a good atmosphere from the beginning. We also had a young guide who took great pride in creating imaginative photographs.

I am not going to show all of them here, because that was not really the purpose of the trip, but it was certainly a fun part of the experience.

Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat and lies at an altitude of around 3,650 metres. During the rainy season, a thin layer of water covers the surface, creating the famous mirror effect. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see this because I was there in July.

But since you cannot really have both experiences on the same trip, you have to choose. For me, it was dry salt.

A huge prehistoric lake once covered the area and eventually dried up, leaving behind an enormous salt crust. It is incredibly hard, which means that vehicles can drive across the salt flats.

After the rainy season, the remaining water evaporates, and the dry salt forms the characteristic hexagonal patterns. Up close, they are fascinating. But perhaps the most remarkable thing is simply the sheer size of the place.

When everything around you is white, flat and seemingly endless, you suddenly realise just how small you are.

Isla Incahuasi

Something almost as strange as the enormous salt flats is that islands sit in the middle of them. Somewhere between 20 and 30 islands are scattered across the Salar, most of them the remains of extinct volcanoes.

The most famous is Isla Incahuasi. The island is home to thousands of enormous cacti. The ground itself is rather unusual, almost coral-like, and contains fossils.

There is a roughly 30-minute walking trail around the island, giving you a chance to see the cacti and the surrounding salt flats from above.

In the middle of the salt flats, there is also a tourist centre with a hotel, where almost everything has been built from blocks of salt. Nearby stands the famous Dakar Rally monument, also made from salt blocks. It commemorates the Dakar Rally, which had stages through Bolivia.

By now, we were approaching the end of the day’s journey, and we would spend the night on the edge of Salar de Uyuni. But this was only the beginning.

Over the next few days, we would experience a landscape that changed dramatically, with colourful lagoons, flamingos, strange rock formations and some of the most incredible scenery I have ever seen.

To be continued…