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WE left Sucre and the dinosaurs behind and took a nightmarish bus to Uyuni. It took about ten hous on onje of the worst roads ever. In fact most of it was desert not roads!!! I cant wait until a road means something tarmac!!! Anhyway we arrived in the early evening and fpound our hostel. We stayed at an ok little palce called Avenida, it was cheap anyway. First things first we headed off to find something to eat, and endewd up having pizza. Apparently you can only set up a restaurasnt in Uyuni if you agree to sell pizza and pasta- well thats what it seemed anyway!! Either they think tourists will only eat that type nof food or tourists will only eat that type of food...
Next day we woke and went in search of a tour. The whole reason for coming to Uyuni was to do a jeep tour of the salt flat. Apparently there are lots of ´rogue´ operators about so we had to choose carefully. We eventually settled for Esmeralda Tours whi turned out to be pretty good. We then spent the rest of the day looking around the market and then playiung some cards in a cafe. We were still travelling with a girl called Charlie who m,anaged to teach us some new card games.. That night we went for (surprise surprise) another pizza. This place was pretty cool though- called Minuteman and run by a Dutch couple- they served some of the best pizza we´ve ever had- we would defenitely recommend it.
Nerxt day we got u and packed reeady for the tour. We left Uyuni about 11am and headed off in out Toyota Land Cruiser. We were joined by two Scottish girls and a Canadian guy which made six of us including Charlie. It wasnt too bad a squeeze into the truck but it wasnt muc fun over the really bum,py bits. We also had a driver, called Emilio, and a cook. Our first stop was the train graveyard. Vewry muh a time filler in my opinion!!! Literally its just a place where old trains have been left. Not much going on but worth a few photos perhaps... Then it on into the salt plain. The salt plain was created by an ancient inland sea that dried up leaving a huge salt deposit. Its over 1200 square km big and is a truly amazing site. Its white as far as you can see, and apprently its 7-25 metres deep. There is a town right on the edge which is where people live who who wor on the salt flat. There job is to literally dig the salt out with a spade. We then headed out to Inca Huasi Island- this is a crop of land that sticks out from the vast flat and isd home to some of the biggest cactus in the world. Some of them are 10 metres high. We climber to the top of the mountain- peretty hard work considering thew altitude we were at- where we got some cool views of the salt flat around us. It was then lunch time before we drove the remaining 100km or so away rom the flat.
We spent the rest of the day driving toward our hostel for the night- mainly through desert. We reached our dsestination, a small town in the desert, and settled in for the night. We went and played some cards on the towns square (literally a patch of grass with a pond) which was cool until a herd of llamas came in for the evening and surrounded us. Luckily we managed to escape :). We spent the evening back in the basic hostel where we had dinner.
Next morning was a gentle 7am start and we were off on the road again at 8am. We were heading towards a volcano viewpoint which is one of the highest and still active in the world. I should also point out that by this point we had a new companion, a dog whihc the cook had collected from our hostel the night before!!
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