saltwatersteve.com/travel

We just got done with a 4-day tour of the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia. It was quite the adventure! We had a wonderful husband and wife team that were our guide and cook respectively. Our guide, Alberto, knew everything about the region and told us really interesting facts and stories. Also, at any point you could ask him the elevation and he would know within 10m. Impressive. Our cook, Eli, made us llama meat tamales that were so good! She was amazing because we would have been driving in the car for 4 hours, pull over to the side of the road, and in 10 minutes we have a hot lunch!
So really only the last day consisted of going to the actual salt flat, which is the biggest in the world. It is really amazing. Flat and white until the horizon in every direction where there are mountains. We also stayed in a salt hotel where everything including floor, walls, beds, tables, is made of salt. There is no electricity there so we ate by candlelight. It reminded me of the ice palace in Dr. Zhivago.
Before getting to the Salar we toured through mountains going up to more than 15,000 feet in elevation! I don’t think we prepared ourselves enough for that change in elevation. The first night I couldn’t sleep because I was so thirsty and had a headache–we had to wake the guides up to get more water. I chugged a liter and from then on I was completely fine. It is quite something though to walk around at 15,000 feet. You get pretty winded!
The land is bleak and dry with lots of llamas, sage-type plants and not much else. Suddenly, you will come to a beautiful green, red or white lagoon, with flamingos! Flamingos on top of a 14er! Weird. Even the scenery in between lagunas is very beautiful in a wild and vast sort of way.
We went to the Valley of the Rocks which was a lot of fun. In the middle of endless plains, there is a section completely filled with strange rocks, balanced precariously but naturally on one another. Here we had fun scrambling over rocks (kind of hard at 14,000 ft), and searching for the rocks that look like turtles, lions, elephants, etc.
We had several other adventures including barely functioning brakes (thank goodness for a skilled driver!), non-functioning 4-wheel drive (we got stuck in the sand at one point), and another traveler getting altitude sickness manifesting pulmonary edema (a very long story for another day).