It was 11pm, and although I was tucked up in one of the most comfortable beds imaginable in Bolivia’s newest luxury lodge, Jirira, I just couldn’t sleep.
My body, unaccustomed to being at 3,700m above sea level on the Bolivian Altiplano, had been behaving strangely all day: my heart thundering, my head thudding, my lungs panting. But that night it wasn’t just me that seemed topsy-turvy. Looking out from my window, on a hillside above the Uyuni Salt Flats, the world outside felt like it was too.
For a start, thanks to millions of glimmering stars outside — including Sirius, whose celestial beams were so clear that my sheets glowed white — it looked as if it was day, with star beams illuminating the huge green arms of a prickly cactus and lighting up bluey volcanoes on the horizon. Above, galaxies looked as if they were right above my head: the giant purple and gold ribbons of the Milky Way twirling amid clouds of twinkling silver. And out in front lay the Uyuni Salt Flats, shimmering in the starlight like an infinite snowfield or a moonscape, an eerie landscape of white.
It wasn’t just the look of it all but the make-up that was befuddling: the fact that this great white expanse looked like snow but was in fact billions of tonnes of compressed sodium chloride; that aeons ago this was the site of a prehistoric lake estimated to have been 100m deep, now gone; and that although it was freezing cold, many of the surrounding volcanoes spewed hot sulphurous gas and gurgling boiling mud. I didn’t need to sip local coca tea to feel as if I was on one mind-bending trip. My brain had already been blown.
That there is just one luxury lodge on the salt flats (in which I’m the first journalist to stay) isn’t surprising given the remoteness, the size and the aridity of this extraordinary wilderness. Located in the very south of Bolivia, the world’s biggest salt pans are so enormous — approximately 10,500 sq km, half the size of Wales — that it is said Neil Armstrong saw them from space and thought they were a gigantic icefield. Situated below the eastern slopes of the Andes, they get so little rain (in some places 1mm a year) that potable supplies have to be trucked in from a river 40 minutes away. There are no tar roads; while traversing the terrain sometimes we plough through thick sand, at other times we shudder over volcanic rock before tearing across plains sending clouds of white borax into the skies.
And there are certainly no shops or petrol stations. In this inhospitable desert region, other than a handful of farmers who make a living from llamas and quinoa and an occasional mining compound (primarily for salt or lithium, of which Bolivia has the world’s largest reserves), the only people I see over six days are backpackers, who have historically made up the majority of the country’s visitors, staying in basic hostels and travelling in cramped minibuses. Which makes the way I’m journeying — in a leather-seated, air-conditioned four-by-four, with a private English-speaking guide and an eagle-eyed driver over 900km from the border between Chile and Bolivia to the Uyuni Salt Flats — feel very spoiling indeed.
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The Chilean brand Explora has been organising trips to wild South American destinations for a while. Set up in 1993 by the explorer Pedro Ibañez and a group of friends to showcase their country’s wildernesses and offer bespoke experiences that combine nature, local culture and physical activities, the company now has lodges in Chile, Argentina, Peru and, since 2023, Bolivia, designed by the Chilean architect Max Núñez. The latest, Jirira, opened in 2024 on the salt flats.
A room in the Explora lodge
Sprinkled across the south of Bolivia, the trio of new lodges enables travellers to explore this wild and beautiful part of the planet on a six to 11-day private cross-country journey, or Travesía, with one or two nights at each lodge. Some guests select the longer time frame so they can explore each destination thoroughly — and perhaps climb a volcano in each place. Others, like me, choose varied activities: cycling across the crunchy salt flats, hiking up hills to take in the views, herding llamas to the amusement of their shepherds, and puffing in the thin air to the tops of the cactus-covered islands that dot the pans. Each day was totally different. After a hearty breakfast featuring tropical fruit salads from Bolivia’s verdant valleys and quinoa cereals, warm breads, muffins and local eggs from nearby villages, my cheerful and inquisitive guide Victor Sosa and I set off with our driver (and local llama farmer) Cesar Cruz, to explore yet another weird and wonderful part of this otherworldly landscape.
Amid the volcanoes rimmed with creamy sulphur, the weather-sculpted rock towers half-buried in dunes and the rainbow-striped mountains glimmering with colourful minerals we kept a lookout for wildlife. Near the Bolivian border, a pair of Andean foxes scampered, nose up, towards us, hoping (in vain) for a morsel. Along the journey, fat viscacha — like big bunnies, with poor sight and extra-sensitive whiskers — sat sunbathing on rocks. Occasionally, a herd of vicuñas — which live only between 3,000 and 5,000m — darted about nervously, then settled back into finding a rare green shoot to chew, or a llama herder waved as his long-lashed charges eyeballed us.
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Mainly, though, we stopped to examine the rises and ruts and the pustules and cracks on the raw skin of this portion of our planet. On the first day we traversed the aptly named Coloured Lakes region: remnants of one ancient mega-lake, each rock-trapped salty puddle a different hue thanks to the concentrations of minerals or algae within it. At Laguna Verde — a lake containing substances including arsenic and magnesium — the water shimmered in shades of turquoise and emerald that sparkled like an enormous gemstone as the wind churned the shallows. On the White Lake, crystalline with borax and salt, the impressive cone shape of the great Licancabur volcano was reflected perfectly on the concentrated surface of the water. And at the Red Lake, rusty-red and white clouds of colour swirled in the water like a massive slab of rock candy: the red from UV and salt-adapted microorganisms, the white from borax that puffed into the sky in clouds.
Flamingos at Laguna Colorada, the Red Lake
Around most lakes there was little sign of animal life other than a vicuña or two. But at the Red Lake the surface was aflutter with thousands of chirruping James’s flamingos, feeding on the red microorganisms. Thanks to Vincent, I soon became adept at identifying the three species found in these parts — not by the colour of their legs (yellow belonging to Andean, grey with red knees to Chilean and red to James), but by their call. “The Spanish scientists gave them those English names,” he explained. “But to local people, if you just listen to them, you’ll know whether they’re a Jututu, Tokoko or Chururu.” As I cocked an ear to muffle the wind, I knew instantly which they were. All I could hear was a constant “chururu”.
Long distances between each Explora camp gave me plenty of time to learn from Victor about other things in Bolivia: how, after the Incas invaded, the land was taken over by Spanish aristocrats and the Catholic church; how it won its independence in 1825, thanks to the efforts of Simón Bolivar (hence its name) and how, finally, the rights of its native people had been recognised by its revolutionary former president, Evo Morales, whose 2009 constitution granted various indigenous people the rights to administer land on which they had lived for thousands of years. It was the indigenous people in the country’s south to whom Explora turned for permission to construct three lodges and it’s those communities who run them. At each of the four or six-bedroom prefabricated lodges, which look like brutalist shipping containers cantilevered above a lake, then a desert, then a salt pan, Explora has trained locals to be hosts, housekeepers and chefs.
Within cosy, wood-panelled rooms, genial women make up beds that are cosy and feathery; in the elegant Scandi-style living room with modular sofas and art depicting the environment and local traditions, they deliver herbal teas for guests to sip while watching the setting sun paint the desert shades of apricot, then red, then lavender. Later at night they deliver hearty feasts designed by Virgilio Martínez, the owner of one of Bolivia’s finest restaurants, Ancestral, which showcases indigenous food. After a soup (one night made with silky “elephant ear” mushrooms), there might be delicious roast eel, inventive salads and colourful little Andean potatoes, followed by a dessert that could have been made in a Parisian patisserie (and usually featuring dark Bolivian chocolate). Even the picnic lunches of pastas and grain and corn salads, then nutty cookies, were delicious, carried on expeditions in tiffin tins and set up in a surprise location at the end of a morning’s expedition.
Las Catedrales rock formation
Each day, a new route revealed another wonder: one morning, the blown-out cone of the 5,400m Tunupa volcano, striped in ochres and oranges and tipped with white, up which we climbed; another a sand desert scattered with skyscraper-sized, wind-sculpted rocks (nicknamed Salvador Dalí Desert, because of the area’s resemblance to that of his Melting Clocks painting). We traversed an island in the middle of the salt flats, from whose summit I got a 360-degree view of the otherworldly white expanse below, and visited the Derek Jarmanesque garden of an eccentric artist, planted with cacti and the skulls of animals and people.
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Because I showed interest in how people are traditionally buried, Victor had even got hold of a village key to some highly protected, gated caves that, millennia ago, were carved out of the mountain by water when the area was a giant lake. Walking into the holey mountainside with a torch, we discovered triple-height spaces walled with ancient petrified sponges and coral and honeycombed with tombs — some forced open and full of skulls, pottery and skeletons. The caves were locked, Victor told me, “to protect our ancestors: in the past academics have taken them away to museums. If you want, we can come back tonight — although it can be strange. Sometimes people hear languages being spoken that haven’t been spoken for centuries.”
Suddenly feeling as if the eye sockets within one skull were focusing on me (“Perhaps you need to offer him some coca leaves or cigarettes,” Victor joked), I declined. Instead I opted to sit at sunset in an equally otherworldly spot: miles out on the salt pans on my own, where nothing had changed for hundreds of thousands of years, and where I felt as tiny and insignificant as an ant. It was as white, as cold, as dry, as empty as it had always been, without a trace of man in sight.
The night sky above the salt flats
In our packed, tech-filled world, just hearing that silence, and feeling that remoteness, was enough of a mind-bending experience for me. And I still had another starlit night to look forward to …
A 12-night, fully-inclusive trip to Chile and Bolivia featuring Explora’s eight-night Travesía costs from £13,500 per person (based on two people), including three nights’ B&B in Santiago, transfers and international and domestic economy flights, audleytravel.com/chile; explora.com