The Rough Guide to Bolivia by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Bolivia
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2025-01-30T04:57:54+00:00

Colchani

Tours generally enter the Salar via COLCHANI, a salt-processing village on its eastern shores about 20km north of Uyuni. Here, at small salt factories, you can see how locals extract salt, scraping it off the ground into small mounds, which are then carried off for processing. Until relatively recently, communities like Colchani exploited the salt primarily to exchange with other indigenous communities. Every year dozens of pack llamas would set off, carrying salt as far away as Tarija, and returning with maize, coca and other goods. There’s a small museum of salt sculptures (free) and another with explanations about salt and llamas (charge; pick up the English explanation at the entrance).

Some budget travellers, to avoid the cost of a full tour, come to Colchani by bus (any service between Uyuni and Oruro), sleep in a basic lodging here, and set out into the Salar on foot. It’s certainly possible to do this, but you’re obviously restricted by walking distance; don’t forget to carry enough water.

A short drive west of Colchani is Hotel de Sal Playa Blanca: it used to be possible to spend the night, but this has been curtailed due to well-founded environmental concerns regarding the serious damage operating a hotel had on the Salar; travellers are advised to boycott the hotel, which now claims to be a “museum”, should their tour stop at it.

Isla Incahuasi

Entry charge payable at an office at the base of the island

From Colchani, tours head 60km or so west across the Salar to Isla Incahuasi, one of several small islands in the Salar, called Inca Wasi (“Inca House”) in Quechua. From its peak, a short sharp climb up on a well-marked trail, the views across the immense white expanse of the Salar are unforgettable. To the north is a series of snowcapped peaks, including the imperious Thunupa, the extinct volcano that is considered the region’s most powerful achachila, or mountain god. To the west you can just make out a straight line like an old agricultural terrace running along the mountainside that rises from the shore: this is the ancient shoreline of Lago Tauca, 70m above the surface of the Salar. On the island itself, the rocks are covered in fossilized algae.

The island is also covered by giant cacti, some more than 9m tall and thought to be hundreds of years old; in January and February they produce bright white flowers that attract giant hummingbirds. The trunks of these giant cacti are about the only locally available source of wood, and you can see their distinctively pockmarked timber in doors and roofs all around the Salar.

In the rainy season this part of the Salar is sometimes too deeply flooded to be crossed by car, but during the high season the island gets very busy with tours. Some people therefore head on to Isla de Pescado, a fish-shaped island that’s less spectacular but correspondingly less crowded (and has no entry fee).

From the Salar de Uyuni to the Reserva Eduardo Avaroa

There are two routes south over

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