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The Lesser-Known Sites Of Salar de Uyuni In Bolivia

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While many people know of the famous Salar de Uyuni 3-day 4×4 tour to see the salt flats in Uyuni, Bolivia, the other amazing sites of the journey often get overlooked. After experiencing the tour for myself, I feel these other natural wonders and rare landscapes are deserving of attention, as well. I booked my tour with Cordillera Traveller, a higher-rated tour operator. Like all Salar de Uyuni tours, however, you should be prepared for extreme cold, high altitiude, guides who only speak Spanish, very basic accommodations, spotty electricity and plumbing and simple meals. You’re making your way across the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa and the Siloli Desert, so you’re really in the middle of nowhere. While you’ll have to rough it, the spectacular sites are worth the small amounts of discomfort. The journey encompasses many rare attactions. There are the numerous colorful lagoons, my favorite being Laguna Colorada, a hot pink lagoon due to the pink algae in the water. It is filled with flamingos, hot springs and spots of blue, yellow and white. There were also a mixture nonactive and active volcanoes, Sol de Manana, an enormous geyser, Rocas de Salvadore Dali, named after the area’s resemblance to the artist’s paintings, Arbol de Piedra, an unworldly rock tree, the Train Cemetery, filled with antique trains once used to transport minerals, and Valles de las Rocas, an immense rock valley of odd stone formations. For some luxury, we also visited Polques, a hot spring that we were able to go into. My advice is, no matter how freezing you are and how much you can’t bear the thought of stripping down into a bathing suit, go in the hot spring, as it warms the inside of your body. As the group visited each site, it was hard for me to understand how this part of the tour often goes unmentioned. And once the tour was complete, I felt extremely lucky that I had gotten such a unique opportunity. For a visual idea of the experience, check out the gallery below.

About Jessie Festa

Jessie Festa is a New York-based travel content creator who is passionate about empowering her audience to experience new places and live a life of adventure. She is the founder of the solo female travel blog, Jessie on a Journey, and is editor-in-chief of Epicure & Culture, an online conscious tourism magazine. Along with writing, Jessie is a professional photographer and is the owner of NYC Photo Journeys, which offers New York photo tours, photo shoots, and wedding photography. Her work has appeared in publications like USA Today, CNN, Business Insider, Thrillist, and WestJet Magazine.