Arriving in Uyuni our dream had been to ride out and camp on the famous salt flats – Salar de Uyuni. Because of the rainy season the salt flats where flooded though. So we just rode up the side and got a glimpse of the amazing mirror effect with the water on the Salar.
After the Salar we had planned to ride the Lagunas Route. The route is 470 km of sandy offroad at high elevation (4’000 – 5’000m), leading past many Lagunas with amazing views, flamingos and lots of other wildlife. It is renowned to be a challenging ride, due to many sandy trails with deep ruts, the high elevation and remoteness/length of the trail. To prepare for the route we stayed in Uyuni and filled up on water, food supplies and fuel. The hotel owner got really mad when politely asked for a discount for the second night – it ended in her coming after Basil waving a cooking spoon in her hand! In general Bolivian hospitality wasn’t great. It seemed like they were quite hostile towards foreigners. Maybe this was also because of the touristy town.
Buying fuel in Bolivia was also very interesting. We had heard that they don’t like to sell fuel to foreigners, as there fuel is subsidised by the government. They have an official local fee and a tourist fee, which is more than twice the price. At gas stations though you can ask for gas “sin factura” and haggle over a price.
In the morning before we set out on the Lagunas Route we checked the weather – unfortunately it had changed for the worse. Forecast for snow, rain and temperatures far below freezing for the next 3 days. This was hard to take. But we didn’t want to take any risk, so decided to give the route a miss. Heavy hearted we set out heading South direction Argentina. The beautiful landscapes managed to fascinate us one more again and we sort of managed to forget about the disappointments of the last few days. We hope to come back again…some time in the future. But definitely in a different season!
