12 August 2012
The bus to Uyuni was the oldest bus we have got in SA. The mechanism to recline the seat was barely working, the bus had no suspension and it was freezing. We felt like we were in a WW2 tank.
Surprisingly the 12 hour journey went really quick. It was funny when we got there, Stevie tried to ask the guy in the seat in front of us if we had arrived in Uyuni in Spanish and he replied in a thick northern accept in English. No need for her to embarrass herself with her poor Spanish vocabulary.

Uyuni at 3,669m was freezing! We managed to shiver our way to a hostel and get a few hours sleep. This is a small town with a main square where we were based. We spend the morning, booking our 3 day tour of the salt flats and surrounding attractions and our bus ticket to Potosi. We did a bit of shopping and brought an alpaca jumper each. Not as a gift, just because it's so cold and we only have summer gear. With time spare we went to a food market, which was great! It was like a wholesale farmers market. There were bags of veg, fruit, nuts everywhere. It was fresh and impressive. If we lived here this would be the place to shop! There was even a meat section that sold all types of meat in its raw state, so there would be pig head here, chicken claws there. Blood covered the floor where the meat was cut, evidence of its freshly butchered quality.

After a quick kip we headed out for dinner and watched the olympic closing ceremony. As there is no wifi in Uyuni we headed to an Internet cafe to see if there was any new regarding our flight tickets or work in NZ before heading back to the hostel for a shower, and when we got out the lady who runs the hostel was there waiting for us and accused us of washing our clothes in the shower!!!!! Random! We headed to bed ready for our 3 day trek...