Our three-day Uyuni adventure begins

In the morning, Yoli and I headed to Avenida Ferroviaria to find a tour company.

I had researched tours online before our trip, and was leaning toward either Salty Desert Aventours, Lonely Planet’s top recommendation, or Skyline Traveller, which had a good Facebook presence and many nice reviews. After visiting the offices of both companies and asking a bunch of questions, we chose Salty Desert. We paid them 5,400 Bs for a private tour for five people with a Spanish-speaking guide. (This was 200 Bs lower than they quoted me online before the trip). This included meals and accommodations, but didn’t cover entrance fees and taxes we had to pay to enter certain sites and national reserves.

We returned to the hotel to get the kids and gather our luggage. The tour company was supposed to send a 4×4 (most companies use Nissans) to the hotel at 10:30 to pick us up for the tour, but they ran about 20 minutes late.

Jafet was our driver. He was a friendly, knowledgeable guide, and kept everything on track.

Our tour began with a visit to the “train cemetery” outside Uyuni, where you can see rusty old locomotives and cars that were used decades ago in support of mining operations. The kids had fun figuring out how to climbing on top of them.

There were also a bunch of really neat steel sculptures of popular characters ranging from Optimus Prime to the Predator. Each one was welded together from gears, bolts, and other bits of steel.

After that, we drove back through Uyuni and the town of Colchani, where much of the salt processing and exporting happens. We stopped briefly to look at a salt “museum” with various sculptures made of salt, and knick-knacks to buy. As we neared the Salar, Jafet asked us to close our eyes for a few minutes. Eventually he stopped the 4×4, and guided us out of our seats, one by one, with our eyes still closed. He told us “Abre sus ojos” (open your eyes), while recording our reaction with my iPhone. It was a startling vision — even for Yoli and I, who had been there before. Intensely bright white as far as we could see. “I was not expecting that,” Ludi said, after taking it all in.

The Salar de Uyuni has two faces throughout the year. In the wet summer season, parts of it will be covered by water, turning it into a vast mirror. Eighteen years ago, Yoli and I came at such a time, and got photos with reflections of the sky.

But on this trip, we have come during the dry winter season, when all you from one end of the Salar to the other is a vast pure white landscape broken up into a roughly hexagonal grid.

One popular activity for tourists on the Salar is taking trick-perspective photos. The vast flat landscape makes it possible for people or things to appear at different sizes inside the camera, if they stand at different distances from the camera. It’s pretty common for tour guides to bring toys or other objects to use as props to set up these photos.

I had shown the kids examples before the trip, so once unleashed on the Salar, we decided to try our own. The first two that we tried, with Ludi and Joseph taking turns as giants stomping the other siblings, turned out pretty well. I held the camera too high, though, so the illusion isn’t perfect.

We also tried some shots with Joseph’s stuffed tiger, but I couldn’t find the right focal distance. So I settled for taking two sets of photos: one with Tigy in focus, and one with the kids in focus, which I combined later in Pixelmator Pro.

Next, we drove to the first salt hotel ever built on the Salar, and the only such structure still allowed there. Nowadays it’s more of a museum and eating hall, with several big salt monuments outside. The most notable of these is for Dakar, the famous auto race. Jafet told us that several years ago Dakar was actually held on the surface of the Salar for the first and only time. It turned out to be a bad choice. The spray of salt water murdered the engines of many cars, and the wet surface was difficult to drive on.

We ate a nice lunch, then continued driving into the Salar, making for one of the islands in the middle: Isla Incahuasi. During our trip 18 years ago, Yoli and I visited a similar nearby island called Isla del Pescado (Fish Island), but according to Jafet, tourists have not been allowed to visit Isla del Pescado for years, because 4x4s were getting stuck in mud around the perimeter of the island.

Standing on Isla Incahuasi, you feel like you’re on an alien planet, looking out at a vista you could never have imagined. This rocky, hardscrabble island is covered with cacti (and tourists), surrounded by the brilliant emptiness of the salar and purple mountain shapes on the distant horizon.

There is animal life here, too. We saw a pretty yellow bird, which we learned later was a black-hooded Sierra finch, and were told there were also vizcachas, a species of sleepy-eyed, mouse-like rabbits.

And in fact, the Salar de Uyuni has stood in for an alien planet. The final battle in “The Last Jedi”, which takes place on the fictional planet Crait, was filmed in Uyuni and later enhanced with special effects. (Unlike the real Salar, the surface of the fictional Crait contained a crimson substance under the salt, which was visually compelling on screen)

We left Isla Incahuasi, and continued through the Salar. At a certain point, we stopped again for more photos, this time led by Jafet. First he used a toy dinosaur to make another set of trick-perspective photos. Then he arranged us into a line and had us try different poses in unison. One thing we learned is that our family cannot seem to get all five people to begin a jump at precisely the same moment, no matter how hard we tried. Finally, he made a fun time-lapse video by driving around us in circles and calling out poses for us to switch into. Since we were in the middle of the Salar, the horizon just goes on forever in the video.

As the day wound down, we drove near the end of the Salar to a road where we awaited the sunset. On one side of the road, there was a small pool or lagoon used for extracting lithium. The Salar de Uyuni has vast reserves of lithium, as well as borax, potassium, and other important minerals. The sunset was beautiful.

We weren’t done quite yet — we had to drive farther to get to our first night’s accommodation — a salt hotel in the town of Colcha K. Along the way, a group of llamas ran across the road in front of us, sporting bright pink bows on their ears.

Moonrise began not long after sunset, so I asked Jafet to stop so I could take some photos. It was an enormous yellow full moon.

We spent the night at the “Tambo Loma” salt hotel in the town of Colcha K. I knew from my research that this first night’s hotel, though lacking some amenities, would be much nicer than where we would stay the second night (which is usually described with a warning that it is very “rustic”).

Still, I was pleasantly surprised how good it was. The rooms, though not heated, had good beds with plenty of blankets, and a private bathroom with a good shower. There were outlets to recharge devices. The interior was nicely decorated, and the salt walls in the dining room featured reliefs of llamas, cacti, and other cool designs. We ate a good dinner, and got good sleep. You can’t ask for much more.