Safari! – The Tales of Two Travelling Turtles

Safari!

Visiting the Uyuni salt flats and Eduardo Avaora Reserve

The Uyuni salt flats are the largest on earth, and very clearly visible from space. You get the idea from the satellite map below. (As the skies in this area are nearly always cloudless and the flats’ altitude is known, astronauts use them to determine their exact distance above the centre of the earth by pinging radio signals off their large, flat surface.) The sheer scale of the flat nothingness is breathtaking.

4WD Road/offroad Stop Overnight

Our route from San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni

There are many tour operators in Uyuni who offer 4WD day trips to visit the flats, but it’s not just the salt flats that are well worth visiting. This whole area of southwestern Bolivia is teaming with stunning features – extraordinarily coloured lagoons, pastures hidden in remote valleys, and even a Wild West-style railway line that was built in the 1880’s to bring tin, silver and other minerals to the coast. (It’s still in use for freight.) Some of the area is a nature reserve – the Reserva de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaora. It’s all on a plateau which is very high up, the altitudes ranging from 3,600 to 4,900 meters, so spending a few days acclimatising at a slightly lower altitude, to avoid altitude sickness, is a good idea.

For this leg of the journey, I have been travelling with my good friend Carsten. He is one of the world’s true polymaths: mathematician, artist, author, and a fabulous photographer. You can see his wonderful pictures of our journey on his flickr profile here, and more about him in general here. We acclimatised in San Pedro de Atacama (alt 2,450m) in Chile, before taking the safari as a one way journey to Uyuni. It’s a great place to spend a few days (see The driest place on earth), and it’s a better option, I think, than taking a round trip from Uyuni where the last day is spent driving back to base.

The local tour operators offer a multitude of different possibilities, but the standard safari tour is a 3 day/2 night tour, and that has felt about right. Typically, they cram a lot of people into the Toyota Landcruisers – up to 7 in a car built for five – so you might like to do what Carsten and I have done, which is to splash out and hire a car, driver and guide just for you. There are lots of warnings in the guidebook about dodgy operators using clapped out jeeps that break down (we did see one of them) and teeth-chatteringly cold nights. In late April (equivalent to late October for those of us from the northern hemisphere) the temperatures are well below freezing at night, but as the sun comes up, they rise to 10 degrees or so during the day not counting windchill. Our first hotel was indeed very cold outside the duvet, but the second – built of bricks of rock salt – was fine.

We used Cordillera Travel, and have had an extremely positive experience. Great driver, good Toyota Landcruiser, and our guide, Eleazar, has been excellent company. Not only is he very knowledgeable about the area, but he is very considered and insightful when talking about life in Bolivia generally. He was brought up in La Paz in a family of dentists – both his father and his brother are dentists. However Eleazar decided that this was not the path for him, and he went into guiding tourists (I imagine to the despair of his parents!), no doubt helped by his excellent English. Splashing out on a “private” tour for the two of us has definitely been worthwhile. Not only have the hours spent on the road been very comfortable, but we have been able to spend just as long as we wanted at each stop. Eleazar also timed things to avoid other tours at the sightseeing stops where possible (as there are quite a few people doing the safaris and stopping at the same places, even at this time of year).

So, I can really recommend making the effort to get to this remote and very special part of the world and taking a safari. You can get a flavour of what it’s like from the day 1, day 2 and day 3 picture tales, and the map at the top of the page traces the exact route and places we have stopped at.

by Chris