Day 4-finally reaching the Salar de Uyuni!

Day 4

The last day of the tour was surprisingly one of the most unspectacular, probably due in part to the large amounts of tourists that you have to face at 7 am on the small Isla de Pescado for the sunrise.  This island is (unfortunately) where every tour company takes their group, so while you are all sleepy, groggy-eyed waiting for the sunrise, you have to weave through hordes of other tourists.  The Isla itself is pretty nice, a small hill in the middle of the giant, white salar dotted with huge cactus but unfortunately, the amount of tourists snaking their way up was not very fun.  You can hike around the isla for about an hour or so and then it is time to head back to eat some breakfast.

gorgeous sunrise colors on the Salar de Uyuni

The salar itself is quite stunning, however.  It really is huge!  Just an immense white expanse and the horizon stretches out so far into nothing that you can have much fun playing around with the perspective and make some really fun photos where people look small and other objects look big or vice versa.  We had some pretty creative and off the wall ideas but unfortunately they were a lot harder to implement then we imagined.  But it was so much fun trying them all out!

the props we had-before the photos

Here are some of our better attempts at trying to play with the perspective

my friend giving Godzilla the old one, two

our friend pretending to eat me

another ‘please don’t eat me!’

naturally the unicorn came to join the fun

the Uyuni standard photo-we had to!

Certainly the most ambitious and the most tedious to set up, was this one.  It involved a magnifying glass that started a fire on the salar (yes, we really started a fire on that pristine whiteness) and my friend and I were to run away in horror at the thought of being burned by the fire.

the guy holding the magnifying glass was the brainchild of this one!

our guide even got into the unicorn spirit!

We had our last lunch out on the Salar and also got a lesson from Silvia, our cook, who taught my friend how to wrap her dog like they wrap the babies here.  Then you tie it on your back, so you can walk with your ‘baby’ (or dog) hands free:

Laurent showing our friend how its done

Our last stop was just outside of Uyuni the town at a railroad graveyard.  It was kind of a strange stop, considering all the nature we had seen but it was kind of cool anyway.

All in all, the Jeep tour to the Salar is recommended.  The food quality overall and the hiking on the last day wasn’t so great. In addition, our guide & cook spoke a native, indigenous language so that made Spanish their second language and they weren’t too adept at speaking it, so that made communication rather difficult.  But these gripes are minor.  The landscapes we saw were positively breathtaking and the our 4 day Jeep tour to the Salar will remain one of our trip highlights.

Check out Day 1, our post on day 2, and the last post about day 3 to read the whole story!