The night we camped by the old locomotives near Uyuni turned out to be the coldest night we’ve spent in the van, getting down to about 13 degrees F (-10C). We didn’t really expect that, since we were at lower elevation than in Potosi, and we didn’t run the heater.
We were fine in our down sleeping bags, but our water pipes froze! We were really worried that we’d broken something, but once everything thawed out we were relieved that no damage had been done.
We spent a few hours stocking up on food, fuel, and water for the next leg of our journey. We planned to drive out onto the salt flats, spend the night there, and then head south through a national park to enter Chile. From talking to other travelers, we expected the roads to be very rough and for the whole trip to take three to four days.
We were told we could find fuel in a couple of the towns along the way, but we filled our tank up to the neck and filled our 5 gallon jerry can as well. We also filled the tank that supplies fuel to our heater, expecting more cold nights.
The first 25km from Uyuni through the town of Colchane where the access to the Salar is was very rough, but once on the salt flats all was smooth sailing.
The salt flats are not mis-named. They’re flatter than most of the roads in Boliva, and you can go pretty much as fast as you want. It’s a lot like driving a boat. You pick a spot on the horizon and head for it. Who needs roads?!
Q gets his first driving lesson. We got the van up to 80mph out here!
Jen finds her bliss…
… And Quinn uses his dump truck to push the van out when we got stuck!
It’s really hard not to look at this as a frozen lake. We kept calling the salt ice, and we camped on an island.
We enjoyed an amazing sunset that evening, at least for as long as we could stand the cold.
The next day we re-filled our salt container.
Because of the cold weather and high altitude, we decided to skip the southern part of our planned route past Laguna Colorado and take the shorter and easier route directly into Chile. We camped that night in the Valley of the Rocks.
There were dirt piles at the campsite, which to Quinn are second only to wifi in making for a great camp.
The next morning we enjoyed a spectacular sunrise with a full moon setting over the mountains.
We passed many lakes and salt flats on our way into Chile the next day. This one even featured flamingos.
Exotic scenery, innovative photography, what else could an arm-chair traveler ask for. HTS
awesome photos! 🙂 looks amazing. super creative!
Looking at your photos and reading your posts we feel that we are there with you.
Thanks for the compliments on the innovative photography. Unfortunately I can’t take credit for the idea; I’ve read other travelers’ blog entries about the Salar, and apparently if you leave there without taking pictures of yourself holding your vehicle in your hand or in some way involving a giant garden gnome biting off someone’s head you haven’t really “done” the Salar. 🙂
Love the wine and dump truck. Any chance you can add a map with a little “Sparks are here!” arrow to your postings?
Hi Marcia! We do have the Sparks Tracker — does that help? We can’t figure out a way to put our location on a web update. We have our location on the Tracker and I often tag our current location when we post to FB.
Correction: Witt says that he knows how to add a map, but he might not be able to find time to do it anytime soon.