Some of you may know of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni (salt flats of Uyuni) without even realizing it. Have you seen photos like these before and wondered if they are a Photoshop trick rather than something real?
Your fellow travellers for lunch? Photo courtesy Jodi Ettenberg.
Wine yoga at dawn on the salt flats, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni.
Well these are from Bolivia’s famous salt flats. When it comes to this region though, Mother Nature’s palette and paintbrush go far beyond the white of the salt flats. She has her fun and her way with green lakes, red rocks, pink flamingos, blue skies, and bright yellow sands. The area surrounding Bolivia’s great salt desert is itself vast, stunning, and barren, and a stark, yet colourful, reminder of how small we humans are in the face of nature.
This landscape is surreal and travelling through it, there are moments when you may feel as though you’ve landed in the background of a Salvador Dali painting. Colours and shapes in this place are otherworldly and you might find yourself wondering if you’re hallucinating because of the high altitude. (“Am I really seeing pink flamingos in a flaming red lake?”) Well, it’s not your imagination. It’s just a landscape, if personified, that seems bent on altering your sense of what’s visually possible in nature, intent on stealing your sense of beauty and infusing it with something you’d never imagine seeing on Earth.
That is the exceptional – yet entirely natural – beauty that’s been carved out by the passage of time in southern Bolivia around the Salar de Uyuni. Here are a handful of images from the southern Bolivia road trip we took, from the town of Tupiza to the Salar de Uyuni. So you know, these images have not been altered in any significant way. What you see is what you get.
Lake Charcota, where flamingos play in a mineral-laden lake. Notice the danger sign.
Extreme landscapes, extreme altitudes. This is Bolivia.
Llamas!! They’re among the only animals able to survive such high altitudes.
Laguna Verde. Beautiful to admire from afar, but dangerous to touch. The colour comes from high concentrations of arsenic and magnesium.
Colourful fumaroles release fragrant, volcanic gas. Warning: smells a bit like rotten eggs.
Termas de Polques at 4,400m or 14,435 ft. Difficult to imagine a more beautiful setting for jumping into hot springs.
Sunrise over the salt flats. Taken from Isla del Pescado or Fish Island.
Enjoying the vastness, a Salar de Uyuni eyeball bender.
Getting There
G Adventures runs a number of departures in Bolivia encompassing a wide range of departure dates and activities to cater for different tastes. We’re thrilled at the prospect of showing you this big blue planet of ours — check out our small group trips here.
