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Traveling at night is always a bonus: you don’t see anything on the way and you arrived tired at your destination (sometimes in the dark) and have to find a hostel wearing an 18kg backpack!! …. Perhaps the English sarcasm is getting to me, I don´t know? Uyuni was no exception! This was our first port of call after the night bus from La Paz! As a town it has nothing to offer (infact by the end of the trip I christened it ´Freak Town´) but all the tours out to the Salt Flats go from there!
After traipsing around the somewhat wild west town made of mainly mud brick houses and going into various tour agencies we found a 3 day tour to the Salt Flats, one of Bolivia’s most amazing attractions! Below is a short account of our trip.
Salt Flats
Day 1
Chaos! International mayhem (angry Koreans, chilled Dutch, no descript Austrian, half drunk Australians, quiet English etc)! Local troubles! We were supposed to have a driver and cook…! However, when they can sell one more place in the jeep you end up with driver/cook! God bless our stomachs!
After departure with our two jeeps we quickly got to the Salt Flats which were amazing! The shallow layer of water on the flats reflects the whole sky and it’s like you are in another world driving through a never ending sky! And the size of the cacti on Cactus Island, huge!
Our first nights stay was in a very basic hostel in the middle of nowhere! All the guys on the tour were great and we consumed all the bottles of wine we had bought, plus some, whilst being entertained by some very cute little Bolivian kids!
Day 2
No problems with stomach so perhaps drivers can double up as cooks after all?!!Again an early start.. Having left the salt we found ourselves in desert type terrain! Amazing colours and strange rock formations! In amongst all of this were volcano’s (only with a little smoke) and lagoons with flamingos…. A totally different experience to the whiteness of the salt the day before but still beautiful, if not slightly less impressive!
Our last night was in a very basic hostel! Luckily some lady had a little liquor store that doubled up as her bedroom and our alcoholic group could get some Bolivian rum and god knows what else! Drinking games during dinner lead to more consumption… went to bed late and set the alarm clock at 4.30 in the morning!!!!
Day 3
After hung-over panic to get up we drove straight off to see some geezer (still in the dark) before arriving at our breakfast place at 7 in the morning. Here some of the group got in the hot springs with beers! I was too hung-over to even consider it and it was absolutely freezing cold outside!! Crazy b******s!
Most of the third day entailed driving 12 hours to get back to Uyuni! The most exciting part of the afternoon was taking various trips to ´natural toilets´ and finding out the driver still had a load of boiled eggs for us to eat!
Back in Uyuni we learnt not ever to ask a local to organize a train journey! Not having showered for a few days and covered in dust we stamped around trying to organize ourselves before going out to meet the tour group for dinner! After a very satisfying meal we left for Tupiza at 10.15 pm on the Christmas Carol playing night train! Maybe they got confused by the cold weather…?
Tupiza
Don’t ever bring an over exciting Korean (bless his cotton socks) with you at 4.30 in the morning to find a hostel! It’ll do your head in! Tried to sleep for a while in the stench of my roommate’s shoes before being awakened by Amanda and Garth who had found a hostel with a pool! Yes please, lets move!
Tupiza is a nice little town but as most of the Bolivian towns particularly dusty and poor and good restaurants are few and far apart! We booked a triathlon tour to see the surrounding area so on our second day our sporty side could be satisfied! Tupiza finds itself in a wild west filmscape with impressive rock formations and large cacti! Beautiful!
Bike: Chris’s pedal fell of and most of gears did not work! All I could hope was we wouldn’t get three legged horses to ride!
Horses: Were great! Poor Mr Choi fell off his though!
Jeep: Not much to complain about!
Another crazy bus journey along Bolivians terrible roads and we arrived on the boarder of Argentina! Convinced that there must only be one blind and deaf boarder official we finally got through immigration some hours later only to find out that there were copious staff, doing what….?
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