dred

There are two types of Subway customers. Those who change the ingredients of their sub and those who get the same one every time they want a 12 inch sandwich. I fall into the latter group. Footlong Chicken Fillet on Italian Herbs and Cheese with Onion, Lettuce, Carrot, Spinach, Swiss Cheese and South West Sauce. Delicious.

As someone clearly unfazed by repetition, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that when Claire, Erin and I decided to do a tour of the Uyuni Salt Flats that I booked us with the exact same company on exactly the same tour that Erin and I had done with friends three years ago.

But here’s the thing. Even with the same order, every Subway experience is different. Sometimes the bread is stale. On other occasions there isn’t enough salad. On a great day, everything comes together nicely. The bread is fresh. You get a generous serving of salad, and the right amount of sauce.

The second tour of the Salt Flats for Erin and I was like one of those perfect subs. It was a completely different experience to 2013, and the weather in both the lead up and during the tour meant that the scenery was more impressive.

While we started the tour with a perfect sunny day, there had been a lot of rain in the days beforehand. Rain on the Salt Flats ends up settling as a giant puddle. While this makes the funny perspective shots that you see everyone take difficult, it means that on a calm day you get great reflections on the water. The enormous puddles also create incredible optical illusions where cars, islands and mountains near the horizon appear to be floating.

We were lucky to have a really colourful sunset on the first night, and the fact that this was then perfectly reflected in the giant Salt Flat puddle made it an unforgettable sight.

The Salt Flat tours actually spend the majority of their duration off the Salt Flat and instead driving through the Bolivian altiplano, a 4,000m high plain which in this area features numerous volcanoes. The poor weather in the previous week had covered the peaks in a blanket of snow, adding to the already stunning scenery.

Late on the second day the fine weather we had experienced began to change. First it clouded over and then, as we made our way over the high point of the tour (4,900m) and towards the nearby geysers, it started to snow. Heavily. We assumed this was a rare sight, as our driver with 13 years’ experience on these tours was filming the snow on his phone.

It’s a great indication of how unique conditions are on your tour by looking at the drivers and guides. Seeing our driver almost as excited as us was great, although filming in one hand while steering with the other on snowy dirt roads wasn’t exactly what I wanted to see. We spun out once, which after hearing other stories about drivers on these tours, sounded like we got off lightly.

Seeing boiling mud pools and steaming geysers while it was snowing was a surreal experience, and the weather then cleared as we arrived at our second nights’ accommodation, located close to some hot springs which we spent some time relaxing in while gazing up at the night sky.

The tour finished the next morning, and we re-entered Chile to spend a few days at nearby San Pedro de Atacama. The Atacama Desert is the driest in the world, and the desert landscapes along with 6,000m high volcanoes make it a very scenic place to visit.

The sights are located outside the town, so you can either join tours or hire a car. Tours were the cheaper option, and the next three days included some great and surprisingly diverse landscapes. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I would have enjoyed it more if we had our own car. I’ve mentioned my dislike of tours before, and the same things applied here. It was still great, but on the occasions that we saw people viewing the area on their own schedule, I was pretty jealous.

After San Pedro, we found our way back to La Paz via the Chilean coastal town of Arica. After a day relaxing on the beach (as usual nothing on the quality of Australian beaches), we caught a bus from there back to La Paz.

This 9.5hr bus was one of the strangest we have been on. Going from sea level to 3,700m, we knew that it was going to be predominantly uphill, but we didn’t expect to climb 4,600m within the first two hours. The next few hours featured three lethargic Australians falling in and out of sleep, battling hunger (there were no food stops), rationing water and trying to admire the amazing scenery we were driving through at 5km/h due to all the roadworks. It turns out even I get sick of looking at 6,000m volcanoes when you’ve barely moved for two hours.

At one stage our dozing was interrupted by the bus driver who asked for some strong men on the bus to lend a hand. Naturally the strong man that I am (I actually am bigger than most Bolivians), I offered my assistance. It turned out that a car had left the road and flipped onto its roof. So a few of us from the bus pushed the car back onto its tyres, got thanked by the driver (who was miraculously completely fine) and jumped back on the bus. It was only when I got back to my seat that I realised the car had cut my hand. Lucky I got my tetanus shot before we left.

Thankfully we made it back to La Paz without any other further incidents, where I’m sure to everyone’s surprise, I booked us into the same hostel we had stayed at previously.

Andrew