6 days La Paz to Uyuni tour: Via Sajama

We pick you up at your hotel in La Paz early in the morning and drive across El Alto onto the open altiplano, heading west toward the Chilean border. On the way we stop at the chullpares, pre-Inca funerary towers standing alone on the plain, and at Curahuara de Carangas, whose small 17th-century church is known as the Sistine Chapel of the Andes for the paintings that cover its interior.

Lunch is charquekan, the local dish of sun-dried llama meat with potatoes, corn and cheese, or lunch at the hostel if you prefer. In the afternoon we enter Sajama National Park under the perfect cone of Nevado Sajama (6,542 m), Bolivia’s highest mountain. We visit the lake with flamingos, the colonial church of Tomarapi and end the day at the hot springs at sunset, with the volcano turning red in front of you. Dinner and overnight in Sajama.

We leave before dawn for the geyser field, where dozens of steam columns rise out of the cold ground as the sun comes up over the volcanoes. Back for breakfast, and at 10:00 we depart Sajama across the altiplano to Oruro, the mining city of the Bolivian highlands, for a local lunch.

In the afternoon, private transfer from Oruro to Uyuni on the paved road, about three and a half hours, arriving in the evening. Dinner and overnight in Uyuni town.

Your private 4×4 and guide collect you after breakfast. First stop is the Train Cemetery, the open-air graveyard of 19th-century locomotives, then Colchani, the village at the edge of the salt flat where salt is still processed by hand. We drive onto the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on earth: the salt eyes, the crystals, the Dakar monument, and a picnic lunch in the middle of the salt with nothing on the horizon.

In the afternoon we walk up Incahuasi Island, an ancient coral reef covered in giant cacti with a 360° view over the white expanse, and we stay out on the salt for the sunset, with a celebratory toast. Dinner and overnight in Uyuni or at a salt hotel in Colchani, according to your accommodation category.

A second full day on the salt flat, and you choose how to spend it. Option one: we cross the Salar to Coqueza on the northern shore to visit the pre-Columbian mummies and hike about three hours to the viewpoint on the Tunupa volcano, with the whole salt flat below you and the quinoa fields and llamas of the shore in between. Option two: a relaxed photography day on the salt, with time for perspective photos, the salt sculptures, an optional sunrise, and the light changing over the flats all day long.

Lunch out on the salt or in Coqueza. Dinner and second night in Uyuni or Colchani.

We leave Uyuni southwards into the Eduardo Avaroa National Reserve. The road climbs past the village of San Cristóbal to the chain of altiplanic lagoons — Cañapa, Hedionda, Chiarkota and Honda — where three species of flamingo feed in the shallow water with volcanoes behind them. Picnic lunch on the way.

In the afternoon we cross the Siloli Desert, at over 4,500 m, to the Árbol de Piedra, the stone tree carved by the wind, and reach Laguna Colorada, the red lagoon, in the late afternoon light. Dinner and overnight at a refuge in the reserve (Huayllajara or Polques), or at the Tayka del Desierto hotel in the upgrade categories.

Early start to see Laguna Colorada with its flamingos in the morning light, then up to the Sol de Mañana geysers at 4,900 m, the highest point of the trip: boiling mud pools and fumaroles in a lunar landscape. We descend to the Polques hot springs for a soak with a view over the lagoon, cross the Salvador Dalí Desert and finish at Laguna Verde, the green lagoon at the foot of the Licancabur volcano.

Lunch, and then the long drive back north to Uyuni, arriving in the evening, where the tour ends. If you are continuing to Chile, we can transfer you instead from Laguna Verde to San Pedro de Atacama across the Hito Cajón border, at extra cost.