Uyuni is COLD! Especially if you brave it during the cold winter months as I did; coldest is May-July. Beyond its freezing nature, Uyuni is an interesting place and, of course, gateway to the Salar de Uyuni: the largest salt flats in the world. If you take a look back at Uyuni as you leave, once you’re at a higher altitude than the little city, you’ll see that it really is quite tiny and stretches itself in the shape of a diamond about two kilometers in one direction and maybe three in the other. It’s dusty and there is hardly any hot water, but the pizza in Uyuni is delish.

The Salt Flats: Uyuni is the spot to find a tour around the largest salt flats in the world. The tours comes in three, four, and five day varieties and the longer drives end up in Chile where the tourists depart and head on their next adventure. The three and four day tours are circular and bring you back to Uyuni at the end of the last day, usually by around 6 pm. The days on tour are spent driving and stopping for short breaks at fabulous sites along the mad landscape. Such stops include: a hotel made entirely of salt, a cactus island in the middle of the white stretching wilderness, a cave full of crystallized algae, a red lake, a green lake, and lots of weird rock formations. The evenings are passed in small hotel/residences along the journey and are famously cold. Usually the meals are quite good, balanced, and I often found myself eating as much as I could in the hopes that the hot food would keep me warmer. Bring a sleeping bag definitely, and be prepared to only wear the clothes you start in – it will be too cold to ever take them off!

In regards to which company to take your tour with, it is hard to recommend any one tour guide in particular. They all seem to be linked together in a lot of ways, and throughout your tour you will be amongst other tours the entire time. The price for a three day tour runs about $70 American dollars. All the tours seem to stop at the same places, so what sets some apart is the quality of information given by the guide, whether or not you get a hot water bottle for your toes at night, and whether vegetarian options are really options or just the rice or pasta without the meat. These are questions I would have liked to ask of my company had I known in advance.