Extreme Climate
Our last day in Chile was our first day in Bolivia, which might as well be known as The Day of Extremes. We booked ourselves on a 3-day trip from San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni through some of the strangest, and most beautiful landscape in a pretty harsh climate. The first day out, we crossed the border dressed for heat; this was a mistake. The wind whipping across the high altitude desert was icy cold and even the sun didn’t provide much warmth. We quickly dug out our sweaters and jackets and even then, we were chilly with each exit from the truck.
However, with the arid cold came some extraordinary features. We drove past Volcan Licancabur, which I think last erupted in 2006 (?), and this is where we started feeling the altitude. It started with a bit of a headache, sort of like a dehydration headache, which got progressively worse as we climbed to 4800m. after lunch. We spent the night at 4300m. and each time I rolled over in bed, I was short of breath. At least this will be a good warm-up for Cusco (3600m.) and Macchu Picchu (2800m.).
We stopped at several lakes throughout the journey, but some of the nicest pictures we got were of Laguna Verde, green from the copper in the lake’s sediment. Amazingly, many of the lakes in the area are home to pink flamingos. I somehow thought they only liked hot climate but they were feeding in abundance at several stops. Apparently, it’s the red colour of the tiny shrimps that they eat that pinks them up.
At lunch on the first day, we stopped at a thermal pool which looked out into the scrubby desert. This was our first bath in a year and felt brilliant- especially because we knew there would be no hot shower for a couple of days. 
Not so far from the thermal pool was a field of geysers and steam vents. Unlike other geysers I’ve visited, this one had no warning signs or barriers and we could, if we had wanted to, get quite close to the pits of boiling mud. We heard from another guy on our tour that a tourist fell into one of the 85C pits last year and, though they pulled him out alive, he only lasted another four hours. Our visit was highly uneventful.
One of the last stops before the piece de resistance of the trip – the Salar de Uyuni – was a field of marvelously eroded Dali-esque rocks. The result of centuries of wind erosion, these rocks became sculptures against a backdrop of brilliantly blue sky and red-coloured mountains. The area had a strangely Mars-ish feeling about it with wide rocky plains and distant, sometimes shimmering mountains. Incredible, really.
However, even these most amazing of extreme landscapes paled in comparison to the largest salt lake in the world…