Day 3 started with a visit to Laguna Colorada a short 10km from where we stayed the night before. The laguna is one of the largest flamingo habitats in the world and three of the six species of flamingos feed here. Like just about everything else on this tour, the lake sits at high altitude (4,270m).
We spent about an hour marveling at the flamingos and the nonstop chatter with one another. There are three distinct species that live in this lake but they can be tricky to tell them apart. To be honest, I am not really sure which of the three we saw. One group was definitely the James’s Flamingo but who knows about the other two types (Chilean and Andean).
After Laguna Colorada we drove to the overly famous Arbol de Piedra. It’s a big rock that has been eroded away at the bottom and looks vague (very vaguely) like a tree. Like all the other tourists, we stopped and took photos wherein we pretend that it is about to fall on us.
Driving northward from the Arbol de Piedra, we passed a string of five high-altitude lagunas. I tried to take panoramic photos of them but only three of them worked out. By the fifth lagoon everyone in the jeep had that “oh boy, another laguna…” sarcasm about them but, in retrospect, they were all incredibly spectacular. One tends to lose track of how incredible the landscape really is when faced with it day in and day out.
Our lunch stop was in another rock-littered valley, conveniently named the Valle de las Rocas, that was also home to a bunch of viscacha. Chasing them about to get good photos proved to be quite a challenge.
A couple hours after lunch we rolled into the town of San Cristóbal. We stopped right in the center and had a brief walk around. My first impression of the place was “Civilization! My money is actually good here…I could BUY something if I wanted to.” I guess that is pretty normal after three days out in the middle of nowhere. San Cristóbal is a mining town and is home to Bolivia’s largest mine. Workers at the mine work 12 hour shifts for three months straight (no weekends off) and then get two weeks of leave. A hard life that must be.
Colchani, a small town with about 500 people, was our resting place for the third night. The town is located on the shore of the Salar de Uyuni and seems to eek out its existence on tourist dollars and salt production. Our accommodations for the night were in a lodge made almost entirely out of salt. The walls were salt, the floor was salt, and the beds were salt. Pretty weird. The main downside was that there was no running water which meant we were on our way to our fouth showerless day!
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