Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing room has salt tables with a splendid view over the
salar
. At night, a camp fire and
candlelight illuminate the place.
In the nearby village of Tahua,
Hotel Tayka de Sal
(
7202-0069;
www.taykahoteles.com
;
s/d US$88/95)
is built entirely of locally extracted salt, apart from
the thatched roof and the black-stone bathrooms. These hotels come with heating. Reser-
vations required.
CHUVICA
Many tours spend the first night in the handful of salt hotels around the village of Chuvica
that sits on the eastern edge of the salt flat. A signed
trail
(1km) just south of the village
takes you up the hillside to a small cavern (make sure you get down before sunset).
There's a basic store here. The
salt hotels
(
7441-7357; r per person B$30)
in town are
nearly identical, with salt floors, furniture and walls, and common dining rooms where
you can eat dinner (and shiver). The hotels have no heating, but an extra B$10 gets you a
hot shower.
At the southwestern tip of the
salar,
off the beaten track, is
Hotel Takya de Piedra
(
www.taykahoteles.com
;
s/d/tr US$88/95/115)
. Built of rugged local stone, it lies near the
village of
San Pedro de Quemez
, near the burned-down ruins of a pre-Columbian settle-
ment.
Los Lípez
Entering the remote and beautiful region of Los Lípez on the second day of the standard
Southwest Circuit, many tours pass through a military checkpoint at the village of
Colcha
K
(
col
-cha
kah
), where there's a pleasant
adobe church
and a series of fairly rudimentary
dormitory accommodations.
About 15km further along is the quinoa-growing village of
San Juan
(elevation
3660m). It has a population of 1000, a lovely
adobe church
, and several
volcanic-rock
tombs
and burial
chullpas
(funerary towers) in its vicinity. The community-run
Museo
Kausay Wasi
(donation B$5)
displays regional archaeological finds.
At this point the route turns west and starts across the borax-producing
Salar de Chi-
guana
, where the landscape opens up and snowcapped
Ollagüe
(5865m), an active vol-
cano straddling the Chilean border, appears in the distance.
The route then turns south and climbs into high and increasingly wild terrain, past sev-
eral mineral-rich lakes filled with flamingos and backed by hills. After approximately
