Uyuni Day 2 -Thunupa Volcano

June 2, 2016

In the morning we set out at 4:30 to climb Thunupa. In the dark we started up with our not-so-talkative 'guide' who basically just walked ahead of us the whole time. We knew where to go thanks to him, but there was no interpretive anything.

This little dog, who we dubbed 'mop dog' or the 'Bolivian mountain dog' went with us at least halfway up the mountain. We were impressed.

Sunrise over the flats from a thousand feet up was amazing.

After the sun came up we had a couple more hours of trekking towards our goal, as the crater became larger and larger.

Epic Bolivian mountain dog

We passed out of plants and into pure red rock

The saddle at the edge of the crater. From here we turned and climbed up the side of the crater to the summit.

We finally arrived at the top lip of the crater, at an elevation of 17,457 ft (5320m)

We were definitely feeling the elevation by then. My legs didn't feel too bad, but I was just WIPED and a little nauseous.

We hung around long enough to get a couple summit shots, and then headed straight down to lower elevation and more oxygen.

The view from the top was incredible, no denying that. Looking down 1600m (5300ft) to the flats below.

Coming down was significantly easier than going up, we glissaded down the gravel on the the back side.

Yep, it really was that steep.

And left the volcano behind us, conquered, though not without it doing a little butt-kicking of it's own.

We grabbed our things from the hostel, and met up with our second day tour group to complete the loop with. There was a Bolivian couple and a Peruvian couple, and everyone was super nice. We ate lunch in the park before setting back out into the flats.

We stopped for more photos, since it really wasn't possible to have too many. And you just got to play around in the middle of nowhere for a while.

Taryn got another super cool close-up salt shot.

Our next stop was Incahuasi, an island in the middle of the flats filled with cactus. It was also called 'fish island' since they said it looked like a fish in the salt. I thought maybe it looked like a dead...squished fish... But the cacti were super cool!

So big!

Everywhere. Literally everywhere.

The sun started doing some crazy rainbow reflecty things with the sky, and we managed to get it on camera

The 4x4s parked way down at the bottom

The fluffiest baby llama ever

And on the way out of the flats back to Uyuni we were treated to a wonderful sunset.

We finished out our Uyuni adventure by eating llama steaks for dinner. Verdict was not bad, but the meat was a pretty poor cut and kind of overdone, so it wasn't really that great. We left determined to find a better one in La Paz for comparison.