O for Awesome

Speaking of the alphabet, have you ever done the actions to YMCA while speeding across salt flats? I can now cross that particular item off my to do list.

But wait, I´m getting ahead of myself. Last post was from Potosi.

It as a long bus ride from Potosi to Uyuni where we started our salt flats tour. The bus, a private one, was apparently quite a lot better that the standard public bus even though we took orders from a 10 year old kid. No, you can´t have the windows open, turn down the sound on the video.... There was no toilet in the bus and there is literally nothing between Potosi and Uyuni so the toilet stop on the 6 hour bus ride was behind a rock while truck drivers watched on from above (at least, so I´ve heard).

The scenery was amazing. Mountains, little valleys with willow and poplar trees, rock scapes. Very beautiful. I´ve taken way too many photos.

There is nothing to do in Uyuni except go out onto the Salar de Uyuni and three 4WDs picked us up the next morning from the hotel. Our 4WD was driven by Gonzales (I kid you not), but we weren´t very speedy. He was a careful driver for whick my right butt cheek was very grateful. He had three CDs in his car - Disco Fever 1 and 2, and a bolivian national music. We were to hear much of all three over the next three days.

After playing silly buggers in a train graveyard, we were out on the plains. They´re like nothing I´ve seen before. You see a little mountain peering over the horizon and then a couple of hours later you´re dwarfed by that same huge mountain. There are little ´islands´along the way. And they´re covered in cactuses - I hadn´t expected there to be cactuses. The white of the plains stretches on forever and it´s really hard to get proper perspective. Great for photos. We had lots of fun for several hours playing with our cameras. Debbie has a great photo of her flicking me off her hand. I got to be the tiny person in a lot of photos.

Next we were off to our accommodation for the night. A hotel made entirely of salt. It was nothing like I´d expected. They cut bricks of salt our of the ground and build it just like a normal house. Only difference is that tiny pieces of salt fall off the walls and ceiling during the night and hit you on the head - I had a wee chicken little moment until I realised what it was.

The evening started badly with drinking games. I cheated massively as I just don´t recover like I used to and only had four drinks for the whole evening. It was quite fun though.

Everything in the salt hotel is run by generator so the lights are on until 10pm. Poneh and I went for a walk outside after lights out. The stars (no moon) were absolutely magnificent. Unfortunately, they locked the doors on us so we had to undertake a bit of banging on the door before they´d let us back in.