BootsnAll Travel Community

My hubby and I are cruising over to San Pedro de Atacama from Salta and plan on booking a tour up to the Uyuni desert from there. We have two muy imporantante questions that we were hoping the wise booties could help us out with:

1) Being as we are carrying American Passports, we need to get a Bolivian Visa. how can we go about doing this from San Pedro de Atacama? Can we do it at the border with the tour group? It is 100 US$, correct? It is so difficult to find info on the web we can understand. Have any of you guys done this before?

2) Since we will be booking our Uyuni tour from SPDA, we were hoping someone could give us some recomendations or advice. We definitely appreciate it!

All the good stuff

I'm a U.S. citizen, and in February, I crossed from Puno into the bolivian border. You don't have to get a visa beforehand as it's given to you at the border. You Do however, need a yellow ferver vaccionation certificate, a clean copy of your passport, or a possible copy of your credit card. And then you will have to fill out a visa request card with your emergency contacts. it's a longer process, but it's really fine and you should have no trouble.

Buen viaje!

I went on Salar de Uyuni tour starting from Uyuni (the opposite direction than yours).
You'll need to get your chilean exit stamp at San Pedro de Atacama. On the Chilean/Bolivian border there is only the Bolivian immigraction (in fact, it's only a hut with two officers stamping passports and collecting the fees).
I suppose, your tour operator will take care of all these practicalities.
As for the vaccinations - I went to Bolivia twice within the last six months and nobody ever asked me about any vaccinations (I hadn't taken any either).

And yes, the tour should cost around $100

SO the jeep tour was UNREAL! definitely just an all around great experience. Never have we seensuch sureal and infinte landscapes. We booked through Cordillera tours which we would recommend highly (they have an office in san pedro and uyuni). THey took our passports at the border, gave themto our drivers and then took us to the migration office once in Uyuni. All we neededwas a copy of our passport and a copy of our vacination for yellow fever. It took about 30 minutes, but since it was sunday, they had to open the office for us. No problems!