San Pedro (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia) Jeep Tour - Day 1

Keith and I had the most incredible 3 days travelling by jeep from Chile to Bolivia. We spent the majority of the trip stunned by the beautiful scenery. Day 1 began with a short bus ride to the Bolivian border. The photo above shows the border office.

The jeeps were waiting at the border. We had heard many horror stories about the tours that follow this route, with drivers being constantly drunk or falling asleep and dreadful food along with cold and nasty sleeping arrangements. We had therefore carried out a lot of reserach before booking with an agency and were quite relieved on meeting our guide, Alexandro, who had been driving for the company for over 10 years and seemed to take his job very seriously. He spoke no English but with the help of Keith´s improving spanish skills and a Brazilian guy in our group we were able to understand everything he explained to us.

A very remote outide toilet!

On the first day we quickly climbed out of San Pedro to the Bolivian mountains at 4500m where we got our first real taste of trying to breath at high altitude. Over the next few days we discovered that standing up to fast, sleeping and even taking a deep breath could leave you breathless at these altitudes.

We visited several vividly coloured lagunas nestled in amongst the mountains. High concentrations of different minerals cause the lagunas to be bright red, green, white or blue. We also travelled thorough several huge desert valleys scattered with huge wind sculptured rocks and saw countless flamingos.

Our jeep group - 3 Brazilians, 2 English and 1 Scot!

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Bubbling mud geysers at our highest point - 4970m

The stunning Laguna Colorada with 100´s of flamingos!

After visiting the lake we returned to our basic hostel for the night (6 to a room!) and had a lovely dinner. Unfortunately this was the night that the altitude really hit Keith and I and we were really sick for most of the late evening and throughout the night. Both of us had really terrible migraines and no painkillers would help. Luckily we woke feeling a lot better and by lunchtime of the second day we were feeling back to normal.

Despite the altitude sickness the first day was amazing!!