Bolivia's Uyuni salt flats: what the experience is really like

The photographs are accurate. What they leave out is the altitude, the cold and how you get there.

The Salar de Uyuni is one of the strangest places on earth and worth every bit of the effort. But it is not a day out — it sits at over 3,600 metres in the Bolivian Altiplano, and reaching it is part of the experience rather than a detail to be skipped past.

In short

• The salt flats sit at over 3,600 metres, and the days around them are higher still
• You reach Uyuni on an overnight bus from La Paz — worth knowing in advance
• Three days by off-road vehicle: the salt itself, then lagoons and flamingos, then geysers and the Chilean border
• It is cold, especially at dawn, and the geysers are a pre-sunrise start
• It sits inside our 23-day Peru, Bolivia & Chile route, not as a trip on its own

This is the part most articles skip, and it is the part travellers most want to know.

From La Paz you travel to Uyuni on an overnight bus, arriving in the early morning. You will be tired. There is breakfast and somewhere to freshen up at the hotel before the day begins, but nobody arrives at the salt flats rested, and we would rather say so than let you discover it on the day.

The reason the itinerary is built this way is simple: it is the route that gets you to the Salar at the right hour and then keeps going south into the lagoons, rather than doubling back. The alternative — flying in and out — turns three extraordinary days into one.

Once you are there, everything is by off-road vehicle, which is the only way to cross this terrain.

Day one — the Salar. You start at the old train cemetery, rusting locomotives standing in dust, and then the view opens onto the salt itself. It reads as ice and is not: pure salt, so flat and so white that the horizon disappears and the sky appears to meet the ground. This is where the photographs come from, and they do not exaggerate.

Day two — the lagoons. From San Juan you cross into a landscape of coloured water: Cañapa, Hedionda and Honda, deep blue to turquoise, with flamingos wading through the shallows. Vicuñas move in small groups across the grassland, and chinchillas vanish between rocks. Later, the Árbol de Piedra — a rock shaped by wind into something that looks deliberately sculpted.

Day three — geysers and the border. A pre-dawn start for the Sol de Mañana geysers, where steam and mud pots erupt out of bare ground, then the Polques thermal springs, the Dalí Desert and the improbable green of Laguna Verde, before crossing into Chile and the Atacama.

Altitude is the real demand. Uyuni is above 3,600 metres and the lagoon route climbs higher. There is no way to design that out — it is where the salt flats are.

The itinerary earns its place here by arriving overland from Peru, having already spent days at Cuzco height, so you reach Bolivia acclimatised rather than stepping off a plane into it. That matters more than anything else you can do.

Cold. The Altiplano at dawn is genuinely cold, and the geyser morning is the coldest of the trip. Pack for it properly; this is the one place on a Latin American itinerary where people are caught out.

Physically it is undemanding — you are in a vehicle for much of it, and the walking is short and flat. It is the air and the temperature that tire people, not the exertion.

If altitude is a concern, read where to go in Latin America if altitude is a problem first. This is the wrong trip to test it on.

Uyuni is not a holiday on its own. It is the Bolivian heart of our 23-day Peru, Bolivia & Chile route.

Before it: Lima, Nazca, Arequipa, the Colca Canyon, Cuzco, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca and the Uros islands, then the crossing into Bolivia at Desaguadero, Tiwanaku and La Paz — where the city tour is led by a shoeshiner who talks about the city from behind his mask, and the afternoon is spent in the Moon Valley.

After it: San Pedro de Atacama, the Valle de la Luna, and home.

It is the longest and highest trip we run, with a maximum of 12 travellers, land-only, on guaranteed departures. Our comparison of Peru alone or the Andean trilogy is the right page if you are still deciding between this and Peru on its own.