Lake Titicaca & (Salar de) Uyuni

Hey everyone, we’re back! 

Our trip to Lake Titicaca and Uyuni (Bolivia) was wonderful, but also very tiresome. We had to take a lot of buses in order to get to Uyuni and back. Some of them were very warm and uncomfortable, but we got there in one piece :) Apart from the buses, the trip on the lake was – obviously – on a boat and the tour in and around Uyuni was done by Jeep. So you can image we are now a bit tired of sitting down!

During the trip, we again got to see a lot of magnificent things. Lake Titicaca (which is almost twice as big as Belgium) is a very special place, with a lot of authentic islanders who practically never set foot on the mainland. First of all, we visited the island of Uros, which is a ‘floating island’ (“floating artificial islands are generally made of bundled reeds, and the best known examples are those of the Uros people of Lake Titicaca, Peru, who build their villages upon what are in effect huge rafts of bundled totora reeds” (quote: Wikipedia)). Afterwards, we also visited the islands of Amantí (where we stayed the night) and Taquile.

 

During the trip to Uyuni, we saw a lot more than only the salt flat (‘salar’). We saw, for example, a ‘train cemetery’, many colourful lakes (with flamingos), a ‘rock tree’, geysers, an island full of cacti and hot springs. Unfortunately, it hadn’t rained before we visited the salt flat, so the surface didn’t reflect the sky.

And, on top of all of this, we saw a deserted bus in the middle of the desert (~ magic bus – Into the Wild)!