Traveling from the Salar de Uyuni to Chile

What I'm writing about today was the best part of the trip for me so far!

We set off from La Paz to go to Uyuni. From there, we wanted to take a three-day tour through the Uyuni Salt Flats to the Chilean border and reach the Atacama Desert.

Arriving in Uyuni at six o'clock in the morning, it didn't take long for us to find a tour operator - or rather, one of the many tour operators found us.... So we could start right away!

After all the suitcases and backpacks were packed on the roof of the car and secured South American-style, we set off: First, we visit the Train Cemetery, a former train station that lost its access to the sea to Chile, is no longer in operation. Rusty locomotives and freight wagons wait there on the old tracks for their end through rust or locals who steal the old iron at night to recycle it in various ways. In the salt factory, which we visit next, we recognize old rails as door frames. The rest of the house consists of the best available building material in this area: salt! During the rainy season, large blocks of salt are carved out of the desert, then transported to the surrounding towns and used as building material - or of course brought to Juanito's small salt factory, who processes, grinds and sells the salt in handy packets, just like his grandfather did a hundred years ago.

Afterwards, we finally go "for real" into the desert, where the famous Dakar Rally logo, carved in salt in this case, welcomes us. Then we drive through the absolutely unreal landscape in the Land Cruiser: salt as far as the eye can see! In the midst of the approximately 12,000 km wide (!) and up to 200 m deep (!) salt desert, we climb a small mountain covered with huge cacti. It served as a sacred site of the Incas a long time ago, who used the exposed location of this oasis for rituals and prayers.

What we experienced after the mountain was an absolutely unique, wonderful experience that still takes my breath away even now, several weeks later: we saw the sunset in the middle of the desert on a water surface about 10 cm deep. When there is no wind, the water surface on the hard salt crust creates an incredible mirror effect, which left us speechless! After dinner in the salt hotel, where both the bed and the tables and chairs are made of salt blocks, we headed out to the desert again for a night excursion to see the starry sky in the mirror effect. Unfortunately, the slight breeze ruffled the surface of the water a bit, so the stars didn't reflect visibly - but that didn't matter, because even without reflection, we could see countless stars and the bright moon, which were beautiful!

The next day, we continued through the first foothills of the Atacama Desert. Past large lakes populated by countless flamingos, glowing red, green, and blue, bizarre rock formations in the desert, colorful shimmering mountains with snow-covered peaks, sulfur springs, and geysers with hot springs, we continued on towards Chile. Although we had to get out of bed at four o'clock in the morning to see the geysers at sunrise and maybe sang Schlager songs at the fireplace a bit too long in the evening, we never tired of looking out the window to admire the beautiful and completely unusual landscape.

At the border, we had to say goodbye to our travel group, who returned to Uyuni, Bolivia. We got on the next bus to go to Chile, to the small town of San Pedro de Atacama, in the middle of the Atacama Desert.