The Uyuni Salt Flat is one of the best-known places of Bolivia, and during out Machu Picchu & Uyuni Salt Flat motorbike tour represents one of the most enthralling goals of motorbike enthusiasts.
But what is it like to cross it by motorbike and what surprises await one who enters it?
This is a place of surreal aspect from its particular morphology: in very few places in the world is it possible to penetrate physically into a salt flat of such large dimensions and anyone who has never experienced it will inevitably be attracted.
Reaching the Uyuni Salt Flat already on its own makes for a pleasing experience: the roads in this whole area are most beautiful and have been very recently asphalted. The bends can be taken at speed, and the almost non-existent traffic allows one, for long stretches, to really feel master of the road. Right until the moment when, from a high position on the plateau, is laid out in front of one’s gaze that endless white extent: the signal that Uyuni is now close.
The size of the Uyuni Salt Flat is impressive: enough to think that the extent of its surface allows one’s gaze to reach the horizon and to observe the characteristic curved profile of the Earth.
We lead our group to admire the Dakar Totem, raised in honour of the drivers who competed here, and we shall reach the most central point of the Salar (Salt Flat) to discover Fish Island. This is a little island, whose shape recalls that of a fish, inhabited in the past by the Inca civilisation, who left several still visible traces. Fish Island is characterised by desert vegetation, largely made up of cactus, and by the presence of alpaca and guanacos.
But the magic is not yet over: we pass the night in an excellent hotel, built of salt, equipped with spa, sauna, massage centre and every other comfort which our clients could possibly wish for, where we shall toast each other while watching the magnificent sunset over the salt flat. The salt hotel has a particular peculiarity: being built of a material which, by its very nature, partly dissolves in periods of rain, it needs to be partially rebuilt every year, before the new tourist season.
Our evening ends with a toast and view of the sun setting over the salt, before we turn in with the thought of the unpaved kilometres that will take us the following day to Chile and into the heart of the Atacama Desert.
