I´m Back

It´s been a long 4 days and 3 nights travelling around Salar De Uyuni in a jeep, but man was it worth it. The photographs will prove it, but the scenery is absolutely spectacular.

So, last time I wrote, I was just about to leave. We left on Thursday at about 11.30am and first went to a train cemetry. Pretty weird, but still cool. After that, we headed towards the salt flats. Wow! They were absolutely incredible. Just the sheer scale of them is what makes them so amazing. Shortly after we left, we arrived in a village just on the edge of the salt flats. There they process the salt which they take from the salt flats. We were shown the steps involved in processing the salt. They dry it, grind it and bag it there. 50kgs = 40Bs or 4€! All that work for such little amounts of money. Before they process it, they have to pile it into mounds to let it dry before transporting it to the little town.

Anyway, from there, we drove across the salt flats that just seemed to go on and on. I think they´re 12,000 square kilometres in area and growing every year. Our first stop was the Hotel De Sal, which is a hotel made completely out of salt. After that, we stopped on a cactus island in the middle of the flats. It gave us great views, even if we had to share it with a group of 20 people on a Tucan Travel tour! When we finished, we had lunch and headed to our accomodation.

All 3 nights accomodation was basic, but sufficient. We were all expecting to get frozen to death, but it wasnt too bad. Multiple layers, a sleeping bag and about 4 blankets did the trick!

The second day we saw loads of lakes and beautiful mountains. Actually, thats basically what we saw for day 2, 3 and 4. The photos will tell the whole story, so I wont go into great detail here.

Yesterday was a pretty cool day actually. We left at 5am and got into the bitterly jeep and travelled for a while. We stopped for by some geysers, but it was so cold, so we only got out for about 1 minute. We drove past some others, but our hands and feet were so cold, we just enjoyed them for the comfort of our freezing jeep!

After the geysers, we stopped at a lake that had thermal springs. We just started to warm our hands and feet, but eventually decided to get on our swimming shorts and go totally in. It was bloody freezing getting in, but it was so worth it. We were later joined by some people from another tour. After that, it was back to admiring the mountains and lakes.

So fast forward to today. We left at 8am this morning from a little village called San Antonio De Lipez and arrived in Tupiza at aobut 3pm. We had a beer in the hotel with our driver and cook before we said our goodbyes. Neither of them had any English, but Joke, the Belgian girl has excellent spanish, so she made a good translator.

Billy and I are going to probably stay in Tupiza tomorrow and leave Tuesday for Argentina. Its a 2 hour bus journey to the border. From there we have to walk about 1km to Argentina and from there we´ll go to Salta.

Well, I have to go get food and scrape off 4 days of dirt and enjoy a long shower back at the hotel.