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Salar de Uyuni (17 April)
Friday night we got an overnight bus to Uyuni, to visit the salt flats. We arrived early Saturday morning, but our tour didn´t start until 1pm so we booked ourselves into a hostel for 4hours. We were told that our tour was with 2 other guys of undetermined nationality, but when the s***ty old 4X4 turned up, it was occupied by 2 Argentinian coffin-dodgers who didn´t speak English. We knew it was going to be a long 3 days...
We set off into the salt flats where we shown traditional salt mining techniques and a salt hotel. The flats themselves were pretty spectacular, it was really surreal being able to see salt as far as the eye can see. However we spent the majority of the day in the 4x4, just getting out for 5min photo opportunities. We were told that our driver would act as a basic guide...in reality this meant his primary language was quechua and he only spoke a little spanish, not much of a guide really! We also went to see some mummies in a cave, which were quite obviously set up purely for tourists!
Having gone for the 'luxury' option we were staying in ecolodges, and the first night one was quite dece, apart form the insect Schills found in his bed. It was advertised as having heating, which in reality meant about 10kg of bedding, which did the job I suppose. The llama and chips dinner was edible, but the continued chat with the argies was pretty f***ing painful! We did go out to the salt flats for sunset, and bevved some coca liquor and champagne which was pretty good, althought we weren't allowed to finish the bottles!
On the second day we spent even more time in the 4x4. We visited Isla Incahuasi where we were supposed to be the only people there, we obviously weren't, plus saw some views of volcanoes and a couple of lagoons. Lunch was particularly grim, it was essentially chicken soup without the hot water so just dry bits of chicken and vegetables with bread! When we got to the ecolodge we decided to hit the Bolivian red wine, which wasn't associated with a particular grape, was just "classico"! 3 bottles had quite an effect and although I wanted to continue Schills made the wise call of stopping there and hitting the sack!
There was an early rise the final day to go see more volcanoes, lagoons and flamingoes. We also visited some guisers and were able to swim in hot spings. Lunch was so bad this day that another group (who had a steak and pasta lunch) offered us their leftovers. Although we were desperate we couldn't stoop to that!! The Bolivians in this area had started blockading the roads in some sort of protest so we were unsure as to whether we would have been able to get back to Uyuni. That would have been long! Fortunately we were able to get back and were taken straight to the bus station to get a bus to Potosi. We got the last 2 seats on the bus so I had to sit next to a bloke called Sergio and had no legroom for the 7 hour journey! Bad times!
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