Day 17- Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

At 4am John, Emma, Jo and I woke up and struggled to pack our backpacks up in the darkness. Luckily everyone had a flashlight! We walked outside and it was surprisingly cold considering we were basically in a desert. Andrés loaded up all the bags and we headed out from the hostel. There was a really disgusting, moldy smell in the car though. I'm still not sure what it was, but it was sick! Us girls in the back had to cover our faces for most of the ride. It was still dark, and that was because our first stop was at an area of geysers known as the Sol de Mañana geyser basin, and the geysers are most active early in the morning (hence the early wake up call). My guidebook describes the area well: "The main interest here is the 16,000 feet above sea-level geyser basin with bubbling mud pots, hellish fumaroles, and the thick aroma of sulfur fumes". We all stood around and watched the geysers shooting up steam and water with the sunrise in the background- it was amazing! This area is known as the "geothermal hotbed of Bolivia" due to all the underground activity from the volcanoes and such. It reminds me a bit of Yellowstone in the US. It was also the most crowded place I'd seen in days, many of jeeps were there in addition to our own.

Geysers in the morning

After the sun rose, we drove on to another area filled with active geysers. I was a bit surprised at the lack of rules or restrictions around them, because they could potentially be very dangerous. People were stepping on them and getting uncomfortably close, and some people got splashed. Also if you stood at certain parts, the sand would start to sink in a little, and it would be all too easy to slide down and fall onto one. My guide book says "approach the sites cautiously; any damp or cracked earth is dangerous and cave-ins do occur. Serious burns have been reported by tourists." People never listen! Anyways, these geysers were even taller and more bubbly than the first ones, and despite watching dumb people be risky, it was amazing!

After that, we were off to our next destination- the natural hot springs known as Las Termas de Polques. Although everyone was talking about bathing in them, it was so cold us girls couldn't imagine putting on a swimsuit, plus I didn't have a towel handy. When we arrived there was a decent crowd of people, and at 6am all the Brazilian girls climbed in the water sporting their lovely not-leaving-much-to-the-imagination style bikinis. Actually that choice of swimsuit seemed to be the trend there, haha. Some of our group ended up swimming, and the rest of us just put our feet in. It felt great, plus the view was fantastic. After a quick breakfast consisting of stale rolls, we were back in the car for another long stretch of bumpy driving.

Most of us slept, somehow, during this portion of the trip. Our next destination is known as Laguna Verde, and it is another beautiful multi-colored lake. In the background was the giant Volcano Licancabur. It is very popular for people to climb actually. We learned that in pre-Incan times the top of the volcano was a site where the locals made human sacrifices for the Pachamama (Mother Earth)! Crazy stuff. After we took a group photo, we drove on through an area filled with randomly placed, crazily shaped rocks everywhere. They're known as the Rocas de Dalí since they look like they came out of one of Salvador Dalí's surrealistic paintings. They look like someone just stacked together several individual stones, so it's weird to think they are naturally formed. We also drove by a rock that looked like the Devil's face, it was a bit creepy actually. The area we drove through after Laguna Verde is described as one of Bolivia's "harshest wilderness regions", and I can see why. Our next stop was at the Chilean border. At the border crossing office travelers had the option to take the jeep back to Uyuni, or to continue on to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. At this point Yuri left our group to go climb the volcano with some friends, and Emma and Jo left on their way to Chile. I was sad to see everyone go, we all had so much fun together!

After that, there were only four of us passengers left in the car. It was much more spacious, but still an incredibly bumpy and long lasting drive. We continued on past more strange and interesting sights until we arrived at another tiny town for lunch. I find it interesting that throughout this whole trip, whenever you have to pay to use a restroom (the majority of times) you never get paper or soap. When it's free though, you usually do. Odd. After we left, there were hours more of driving. We didn't stop at all, except to help other stranded broken jeeps along the way or change tires. Once we were nearing Uyuni again a storm set in. Because of the flat terrain of the altiplano you could see how far the clouds went on, and which way it headed. It looked like a bad storm, and with the heavy rain I was a little worried about our bags on the roof. Despite the bad weather, we stopped at one last place called the Train Graveyard, or Cementario de Los Trenes. Out there un the middle of the Salar there are just tons of abandoned trains sitting there. No tracks. It was a little creepy feeling. John loved it. As he put it "there was a large silver boom at the turn of the century causing explosive expansion in Bolivia, but once the silver mines 'dried up' there was not a need for the large train network they built. The leftovers were then parked in one place to spend eternity. This allowed for some creepily awesome pictures."

The storm finally died down, and we arrived back in Uyuni. The streets were all uneven and there were massive puddles everywhere- walking was interesting. We headed to an Internet cafe with the world's slowest connection, and then had lunch at this little place. For some reason, it was really dark in there. Also, our server was a 10 year old boy, and John got his food and ate it before mine was even brought out, haha. Our next task was to find the bus station in the town. We started walking, and realized it wasn't where we thought. We were a little lost, and continued wandering around for a while until we finally found it. As usual, it was a place of confusion and disorganization. It was very crowded, and local traditionally dressed women were loading multiple giant bags of seeds and crates of food into the storage compartment at the bottom of our bus. I was surprised they don't have bag limits.

Finally, John and I sat in our seats. During the whole ride people were standing in the aisles of the little bus though. I think it's a normal custom in Bolivia to let people without tickets just stand up in the aisle on the bus if they pay the driver a little bit. It was aggravating, plus being that close to someone's armpit who doesn't use deoderant can be pleasant. Our overnight bus, en route to Oruro, also stopped continuously about once every 20 minutes it seemed to pick up random locals and drop off the people in the aisles. To top it all off, they had loud and cheesy hispanic music blaring on the bus speakers all night. Luckily, it kept cutting out. Also the bathroom on our bus broke, and we never made any stops or breaks, so at one point I had to get creative. This "creativity" involved the middle of some dark Bolivian street behind the bus. Anyways, as you can imagine, sleeping was a bit tricky. As a side note, John and I hadn't showered in about 3 days, so I know that we looked and smelled amazing, haha!

To sum up our time at the Salt Flats, John's journal entry does a good job: "The Salar is home to many salt hotels and adventure seeking tourists. There were not many older people on the Salar, I believe due to the bone rattling 4x4 rides. This was three days of the bumpiest ride of my life (I couldn't even read a book it was so bumpy). Everything was covered in salt and dust, but I loved it."