The Salt Flats

Uyuni, Bolivia

I had a hell of a time getting into Bolivia.

Because I was an American, I had to pay $160 and jump through a bunch of hoops that the Europeans on my salt flats tour did not. I knew that I need passport photos, photocopies of my passport, and the yellow fever vaccine.

What I didn't know was I needed an itinerary and to fill out a giant ridiculous visa application that included my mother's maiden name and the maiden name of my emergency contact. They also had some rule about other people being in the immigration office when visa applications were being processed, and they kept my yellow fever vaccine card, which I thankfully realized not too far into Bolivia and was able to go back and retrieve.

Because of all my holdups at the border, I missed out on the English-speaking jeep and ended up sharing a jeep for 3 days with two French couples and one French bachelor. They were all friendly but mostly spoke in French and so I had a lot of quiet time to myself.

Eduardo Avaroa National Park was different from anything I'd ever seen. The landscape was a mix of desert, mountains, and lagoons. The lagoons were packed with tens of thousands of pink flamingos and somewhat fewer llamas. The elevation was insane - the first night we slept at 4800m. That's 3 miles high!

Every night of the tour I drank wine and played a card game called Cambio with the French contingent. Cambio is a fun memory-based card game you can play with just a regular deck of cards. It's pretty great for nights when you find yourself in the middle of a desert with a bunch of strangers and a couple bottles of wine.

The Uyuni salt flats themselves were actually my least favorite part of the tour. A salt flat is just a flat piece of land where the ground is salt. When we visited them they were covered in about 3 inches of freezing cold water. So you could see your reflection in the water.

I spent 2 hours standing in freezing water while everybody else took 1,000 pictures. I heard many justifications for this. A picture lasts a lifetime. What the fuck ever. More like everyone is obsessed with their online profiles and needs to get that perfect pic that will get 1,000 "likes."

In Uyuni after the tour was over we all met up at a bar and played more cambio. Once I had a few drinks in me I shared my anti-selfie sentiments, but I don't think I made any new converts.

All in all it was a pretty cool tour with pretty cool people and a pretty cool card game. And without a tour company to provide me an itinerary I can only imagine the trouble I would have had entering Bolivia.