9 days in Chile & Bolivia
 

Hi all,

My friend and I are planning a 9 day trip across Chile and Bolivia in the first half of January AFTER doing a mountaineering trip in the Andes (heading to Cerro el Plomo) that we've already booked separately.

We definitely want to go to Salar de Uyuni, likely also the Atacama Desert and Lake Titicaca (Copacabana) since we'll probably end our trip in La Paz. If we have time (highly unlikely), would ideally like to take a day trip to Valparaíso as well.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get to/from/around these locations (trying to figure out transportation options has been difficult), and whether or not it makes sense for us to do these things in 9 days? Is there somewhere else that's really worth going to that we're missing on this list?

Thanks a lot in advance!

I think you fly Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama (try Sky Airlines) and book a tour with a crossing into Bolivia.


Another option would be to fly Santiago to La Paz and see if it makes sense to do it from there flying round trip La Paz-Uyuni and booking the tour to return to Uyuni.

You'd want to cost out time and savings. Usually the Salt Flat tours are more expensive when booked in Chile.

I'd recommend starting with Kanoo Tours (La Paz based) and see if they can provide options

https://www.kanootours.com/

I think crellston had posted some reports of the crossing to San Pedro de Atacama although I can't recall which direction he did it, so maybe he will post a link.

There may be some redundancy if you do both sections of desert.

Lake Titicaca can be done as a day trip from La Paz to Copacabana, but they don't have reed islands on the Bolivian side. If you have to chose between the lake and the Salar, I'd pick the Salar (and the other colored lakes esp. L. Colorada).

In January crossing all the way from the south to Uyuni could be affected by rains, another reason I'd look at doing it return from Uyuni, since they will just take you to the Salar and back.

That is a lot of ground to cover in nine days. We covered all of those places in various trips and in different directions and found the travel to be pretty straightforward but very time consuming.

You don’t mention where you are going to after this excursion which could make a difference to the order of things but, assuming that you are flying onwards from LP I think I would probably do something like this:

Valparaiso is a couple of hours by bus from Santiago so, if you do want to include it, I think do that at the beginning either as long daytrip or as an overnight. You could easily get a bus back to the airport. Flight timings may be the decider.

Fly to Calama from Santiago and get the bus (2 hours) to San Pedro de Atacama. Unsurprisingly that ride is sand desert all the way. Interesting but enough for most people. We did the trip in the opposite direction getting the bus from Calama down to Iquique on the coast. A pleasant town but the bus trip was sand desert the whole way. It is the only other alternative but we almost gave up the will to live after the first 6 or 7 hours! Cheaper though.

As mlgb suggests, SPdeA is considerably more expensive than Bolivia. Tours do operate there which would go through the various lakes on the altiplano en route to Salar de Uyuni. I would not miss these out. IMO they are just as impressive as the Salar.

There is a lot to see and do around SPdeA but much of it is very similar to the Bolivian side of the altiplano so I feel there is little point in doing both. That said, San Pedro is a pleasant, of expensive town, in which to hang out awhile. As suggested Kanoo is a good starting point for tours. Banjo Tours are very good and worth a try. We used Tupiza Tours a couple of time and I know they do Tours from SP but I hesitate to recommend them as, whilst they were good the first time, our experience was not so great last year. They may be one of the few though.

Finishing a tour in Uyuni, it would make sense to fly to La Paz (Amaszonas or BOA) LP is worth a couple of days IMO. There is a lot in the city and around. Not sure I would bother with Copacabana. I really like it there and parts of the bus ride ( we used Panamericano) were spectacular but it does take 4-5 hours each way. The town itself is small but worth a day and a boat ride out to Isla Del Sol, even if a little touristy, is worth it for the views. Some stay overnight but we were happy with a half day trip.

I think you could probably do all you want in the 9 days but you will need a break after!

Here is a link to my trip report: https://www.fodors.com/community/sou...th-america.cfm buried somewhere is some stuff on at least parrot of that route. I am in the process of transferring more of this fro our now defunct Travelpod blog to our current blog but this will take us some time. In the meantime here is a link to a couple of entries re Titicaca and La Paz https://accidentalnomads.com/category/bolivia/