Tips 👏
- It’s a touristic city with only hotels and average restaurants, nothing much to do.
- Arrive at least one day before the tour to acclimatate to the altitude of 3600m.
- Hotels usually offer to keep your luggages while you’re in the expedition.
🏠 Accommodation
We stayed at Hotel Jerian. Good location, very clean, functional with breakfast.
🚲 Getting there
Bus from Sucre of 7 hours.
⏱ Duration
We arrived two nights before to acclimatate, two nights for the tour and one night before leaving to La Paz and that was good.
Uyuni Pueblo 🚶
It’s an old mine city, reconverted for tourism nowadays, quite desertic too when we were there. There’s nothing much to do here besides visiting tour agencies and getting acclimated to the altitude. We took the opportunity to relax, write this blog post, and negotiate prices with our agency, Andes Salt Expeditions.
We selected this agency based on the reviews on Trip Advisor. Since we’re travel-trolley, we wanted to avoid being 7 people in the one tiny car, so we asked them to pay extra to be only four. After some negotiations, we ended up with 4900Bs for a private tour (only us, 2450Bs/person) or 5400Bs if we were four (1350Bs/person), excluding entry tickets. We tried to convince a couple of tourist to come with us without success, so we accepted the price and paid the deposit to leave the next day.
There’s plenty of agency for way cheaper than that, but all of them with horrible reviews. Do you homework but it seems the best ones are Andes Salt Expeditions, Red Planet and Quechua 4W.
Salt Expedition 🌋
The next day we’ve headed to the office to pay the full amount at 8AM, and started our private journey at 10AM. Because we were only us, we had way more leg space, we could stop anytime making our own schedule and access our luggages way easily in the trunk. Four people in the jeep would have been fine too, but we couldn’t find extra 2 people willing to share the price. Here’s some tips we learnt on the way:
- Bring snacks, water and toilet paper for the three days. You won’t be hungry but it’s nice to have some stuff with you.
- Take warm clothes, in summer (december) it goes around zero celsius at night.
- Bring cash and pocket money with you to pay all the toilets breaks.
- Private tour rocks, but it’s more expensive. The best is to be four people.
- The second hotel is very basic with electricity only few hours at night. Bring charged power banks.
Day one 🏝
Our first stop was at the train cemetery. A pretty cool place where we saw very old train abandoned which used to carry minerals from the mines to the cities, combined with huge mountains in the background.
We then headed to the Salt Desert, stopping by Colchani to see some sad tourist shops. At the first stop in the Salar, we admired some natural paddle of salty water, apparently known for helping curing skin conditions. A 20 minutes drive later, we arrived at the salt hotel nearby to grab a good lunch prepared by our driver, where the DAKAR race used to pass.
