Lagoons, volcanoes and saltflats!
Thursday, January 29th, 2009Lots of pictures from my jeeptour from San pedro de Atacama (northern Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia)
At 8am we started the 3 day jeep trip in Chile, but after 1 hour of driving and constantly gaining altitude we arived at the Bolivian border at about 4000m above sea level.
this wild fox managed to survive in an environment where there wasn´t anything to eat, except for perhaps flamengos and lamas?
Laguna blanca, the first laguna we crossed. I really feel like the pictures don’t do the lagoons we crossed justice… they were ”maravilloso”
Laguna verde was more turquoise at the moment, didnt make it less beautiful though! The active volcanoes gave the ground certain minerals that made for different colours in lots of lagoons…
Volcanic activity does wonders for this area…
Halfway day 1 we took a break at a hotspring. The water was like 36 degrees celsius and somehow came out of the soil. A great break after a couple of hours cruising in the landcruiser!
The geysers were at the highest point of 4950 meters. Since I decided to party the night before with my Italian travelbuddy Fabris, my body had no idea what was going on and I had to pay for it later the day…
Because that night I suffered from some very heavy altitude sickness. It was horrible for 6 hours with a strong headache and fever.The next morning I woke up alot better, and when I saw this view of the valley I felt like traveling again…
Laguna colorada is nominated for the new 7 world wonders and it is indeed, wonderful. Lots of different minerals and algs create all those colors and the flamengos love it as much as we do.
Take a closer look…
There were lots of flamengo colonies, they weren’t bothered by the altitude or cold and they lived of the algs in the lagoons.
The flamengos weren’t too easy to photograph here…
Those surrealistic rock formations inspired the world famous Salvador Dali since he visited this area of bolivia and was as impressed as we were.
This was all the green there was growing in this dessert…
Touring Bolivia was absolutely amazing, just being the only two jeeps in this big and beautiful Bolivian world was almost mythical!
Just make sure you do this tour if you’re ever in Bolivia or nearby, It’s more than worth it! This lagoon was partly yellow because of the mineral sulfur in it…
Wild flamengos at 4400 meters above sea level. You had to be very quiet to approach them, this time we were lucky they didn’t shy away…
This volcano was currently smoking as you can see at the left of the top of it.
A Glacier in the Bolivian dessert, standard?
And oldskool Bolivian train, from nowhere to nowhere…
We saw a lot of lamas on the way…
On the 3rd day we arrived on the famous salar de Uyuni after sleeping in a hotel completely build of salt (although the roof wasn’t salt, but let’s consider that Dutch nitpicking on my part)
Those fantastic machines brought us all the way to Uyuni without the slightest problem!
The salar de Uyuni is bigger than Holland and only a very small piece of it is being used to win salt for consumption…
Back in the day, this used to be a lake, or better a locked in ocean. All the water evaporated and only the salt remained. It’s a 7 meters thick layer!
In the middle was a cactus island. It was such a bizarre atmosphere…
Giant cactuses in the middle of a salt flat…
Gangsta on a seat of stone!
In case you were all thinking this was just snow…
Next time I’ll do this tour by caravan!
I didn´t have much time to make a good story of this blog, but hopefully the pictures made up for it! I madw acouple of nice videos in the tour, but I don’t have solid enough internet to upload them, But I promise I will come up with them later.
If there’s anything you want me to write about, or anything else you want to say, just send me an e-mail or leave a comment…
Greetings from the Caribbean!
-Veron
