Day 15- Uyuni & El Salar, Bolivia

The early morning was spent on the incredibly bumpy "luxury" bus, and I kept waking up. On some dirt road that was more or less invented since it had no sort of marking or pavement, the bus broke down for about 2 hours. Finally, after the rough journey we arrived to the small isolated town of Uyuni. It was very hot since it is located in the middle of the world's largest salt flats. The salt flats, known as the Salar de Uyuni, look more or less like a desert. The city had a really deserted and lonely feel since it was out in the middle of nowhere- literally. A girl met us at our bus stop, and we followed her with our bags around the town to a tiny office. The whole space was filled with luggage and the title of the building, Toñito Tours, was a completely different company name than the one we arranged our tour with. That was where the sketchy business practices began! We had some time before our tour, so John and I walked around town. We stopped and bought bus tickets for after our tour and got some food. Finally, when it was 11am, our designated departure time, we went back to the building. There were only 2 workers, and mass confusion. People were waiting outside and sitting on the street curbs trying to find shade. We sat and waited on the dirt road for about 45 minutes, since they were running late. The sign for the company also said we would have an English speaking guide- we later figured out this was just an advertisement white lie.

Finally, we learned which jeep we were assigned to for the trip. We were paired with 2 British girls and 3 Brazilian guys. The man who sold us our tour in La Paz said there would be no more than 6 people in our jeep tops, but there were actually 8. Another white lie maybe? Then, randomly, this girl started yelling at us saying since there were so many people in our jeep that some of us couldn't bring our luggage, and to just pack a small bag for 3 days. Why would they not inform us of this ahead of time? I argued with the woman and refused because they had already misled us enough, and I didn't trust leaving my backpack in the tiny office. Nobody else wanted to leave them either, so the driver stacked all our bags in a giant heap roped to the roof of the jeep. He made the guys help him do this, which made me wonder what he would have done if his passengers weren't strong guys. All the bags fit, so who knows why they were so mad? Basically, the scene on this tiny street was one of mass confusion and disorganization.

Finally, we crammed into the crowded jeep, introduced ourselves to each other, and headed out of Uyuni onto the "roadway" (there are no roads, haha). Our guide/driver Andrés was very quiet, and spoke about 10 words of English. He wasn't much of a guide since he was so silent. Despite this the drive out was great, and almost surreal. It was so amazing that it made all the trouble worth it! The salt flats were intensely bright to look at, and they stretched on and on into the distance. The whole place is so unique and unlike any other environment I have ever seen. Many people say it has an "eerie" feel to it, and I'd definitely agree. It is considered a very harsh and diverse landscape, and is often aptly described as "blindingly white". Some parts had collected water, and you could see the reflection of the sky onto the ground. According to my guidebook, the Salar "was formed as a result of transformations between prehistoric salt lakes. It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness. The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine very rich in lithium. It contains 70% of the world's lithium reserves which have yet to be extracted. The large area, clear skies and surface flatness make the flats an ideal location for observation satellites."

Video panorama of the Salar

Once we were in the main part of the salt flats, we all got out for photos. Because it is so flat and continues out into the horizon, it is easy to take fun pictures with confusing depth perception. All of us passenger kids had fun coming up with different scenarios, and got some great photos. Kneeling in the salty mush felt a bit like sand, and it bleached my jeans! The Salar was such an awesome sight though, almost indescribable. We then got back in the car and drove over to a little building made entirely out of salt. There was a salt llama sculpture, and being curious, I decided to lick it. It was gross!! Not sure why I did it. Oh well, "it's all about the story".

The very bouncy and bumpy ride continued on for a while to our next stop, which was called Isla de Los Pescadores. Guidebooks say that it's actually called Isla Incahuasi though. Not sure which one is more correct. It basically looked like an island of rocks and cacti just hanging out in the middle of the Salar. There were gigantic cacti everywhere on the rock formation. Some of them were over 20 feet tall and around 200 years old! While our guide was setting up our food for lunch we all went up on a trail to climb the rocks and get a view of the flats as well as the volcanoes off in the distance. It was crazy hot, and I learned the hard way that the sunscreen I applied had expired! Ouch. Once we came back down from the rocks we took some more fun photos with our British jeep-mates, two girls in their 20's named Emma and Jo from London. They were a lot of fun to be around and had been in S. America for several months already. They were on a 6 month trip and had started in Mexico and traveled their way down through central America and spent time in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru already. After later conversing with an Argentinian hippy guitar player and seeing a wild ostrich we went back to the jeep for lunch.

After a tasty meal that we ate sitting on tables made from salt (with the Tunupa Volcano in the background!) we packed up and continued on. During the ride we chatted with the 3 Brazilian boys and found out that 2 of them were friends from Rio de Janeiro (Marc & Léo), and the third guy (Yuri) was also from Rio. Since Yuri didn't fit in his group's jeep he was separated and put in ours, but he seemed to make friends with everyone fast. The guys were all fluent in about 4 languages too, making us Americans look bad!

We drove for a long time, passing interesting landscape features and seeing volcanoes and unique salt flat animals. That evening we arrived at our hotel for the night. It was in a very tiny town called Aguaquisa. From the outside, it looked really sketchy. Us girls were all getting worried and talking about finding somewhere else to stay- though being that we were in the middle of nowhere there weren't many other options. We went inside to check it out, and luckily it wasn't as bad as it seemed. It was a "salt hotel", and literally everything was made out of salt: salt tables, chairs, beds, walls. It was actually really neat! Our room had 7 beds in it, so we were glad we all knew and trusted one another. Emma told me the guy they booked the tour from said they'd get private rooms and vegetarian food options- both untrue. The company's reliability just keeps getting better! There were about 30 people total in this little hotel, and there was a common room everyone hung out in. We had dinner served to us on salt dishes (just kidding) and chatted a lot with our jeep-mates. After discussing that you could take a tequila shot there and simply lick the wall to offset the taste, we got on the topic of how drinking games are totally different in all of our 3 countries represented. So, the Brazilian guys said they'd teach us some Brazilian drinking games that night. I also made a little video tour of the hotel, CLICK to see it.

After dinner, I discovered there was actually a shower in the building! If you wanted hot water you had to pay for it, so I forked over the cash and went into the shower room. It had a large open window next to it with no shades, so I was scared people outside would see me, which I think they maybe did- awkward. Also the water was freezing cold. I told them, but I didn't get my refund. After hanging out some more our group tried to hunt down our guide Andrés because he had disappeared, and we had no idea what our schedule was. We never got any itinerary or brochure from them of course. Finally we found him and he said "oh yeah, well you have to be packed and ready to leave by 5am." Wow, good thing we took the initiative to find him; how else would we have known that? We then watched the sunset over the Salar, and the strong winds kicked in over the isolated town.

The rest of the night was a blast! Some of the Brazilian guys bought some drinks at a little store in the valley and since there were 2 more jeeps of the Brazilian students at our hotel, it made for a fun night. Everyone sat at a long table and though I just watched at first, John learned how to play a game called 21 which required him to learn to count to 21 in Portuguese. The Brazilian girls thought his attempts were cute, and I could tell they were eying him! (haha) We also learned a new game called "pa-pi-po". Overall, it was a very fun time, and we plan to bring these games back to the US. Maybe they'll really catch on?