Salt Flat Tour

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Trip Start Jan 25, 2008 Previous
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  Uyuni, Bolivia
Thursday, March 27, 2008

To get to Bolivia, we had booked a 3 day Jeep tour to Uynui across the salt flats, a little apprehensively after hearing stories of drunk drivers, broken down jeeps, freezing cold nights and altitude sickness.  We met with the rest of our group outside the Cordilleria office at 8am in the morning and got into a minibus which took us to the Bolivian border to meet the jeeps.  We were in a jeep with Anne, a French girl we´d met in Salta and Dan and Paula, from England.  We also met up with some other Brits (Kieran and Mel) and a Canadian (Justin) who were mental party animals and hadn´t been to bed the night before taking the trip and were in our company´s other jeep!  We had the old favourite ham and cheese sandwiches at the Bolivian border, weeed behind a wall and were on our way, with some traditional Bolivian music soundtracking the journey.

That morning we stopped at Laguna Blanco and Laguna Verde, both were stunning, we then stripped down to our swimsuits to get in some natural hotsprings which were like lovely hot baths but made us feel a little dizzy when we got out

Red Lagoon

. We arrived at our accomodation for the first night and were given the most bizarre looking frankfurters in the world for lunch.  After the lunch we vistied Laguna Colardo which was stunning cause of all the red algae and pink flamingos, the other jeep didn´t make it, its occupants opting to have a few beers at the hotel instead.  That night we had a pretty good meal consisting of soup and bolagnaise and then donned all our clothes to prepare for the cold night ahead.  As it turned out it wasn´t all that bad, and Katie who´d rented an extra sleeping bag, ended up throwing her blankets off for being too hot! 

The next day we got up early for breakfast - not too hot as half the rolls we were given were mouldy, although we did get some yoghurts.  We set off on our second day to marvel at geysers, climb over rocks and oohh at some more lagoons, stopping for a lunch of rice and tuna in a beautiful canyon.  The highlight of the day though was when our driver turned off the traditional Bolivan song he´d been playing on repeat since we started, and Aha´s "Take on Me" came blasting out of the stereo, followed by more classics from Abba, The Village People and Enya! I think the driver regretted it when we all started singing along tunelessly in the back.   We stopped at a little village and we all wanted to leave as soon as we got there cause there were swarms of flies that invaded the jeep, it was crazy, they were everywhere (exept the toilet oddly!), horrible!

That night we stayed in a salt hotel just outside the salt flat.  The walls, tables and beds were all made from breeze blocks of salt, even the carpet was salt and was crunchy underfoot, like snow.  We were given a few bottles of vino tinto with our meal and stayed up drinking until they killed the electicity. 

The last day was the visit to the salt flat, we drove across the salar to Fish island (not sure why its called this) which was basically a little island with cactai in the middle of the salt flat. The salt flat is amazing, just endless salt for miles and miles.  We had a walk round took some pictures and then got onto the salt flat to have a go at taking some altered perspective photos that everyone does - soon found out its harder than it looks!!  We then went onto the salt hotel museum which gave Katie the creeps but it sold Pringles so we stocked up fearing the same mouldy rolls we hadn´t eaten at breakfast, turning up again for lunch.  As it happened it turned out to be pasta and chicken but you never know! 

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