Civilization at last!
I am back from Uyuni and our three-day Land Rover tour across the salt flats and nature reserve.
Yeah it was pretty awesome. First of all, the idiot travel agent I talked to here was very unhelpful. I rode a ghetto bus down there and my feet were so cold by the time I got there that I couldnt feel them for 45 minutes. Then I didnt have a tour booked because she told me it was better to book one when I got there, except it was 6am on a freezing Sunday morning and nothing was open. I finally sat down in the main square to layer on a few more pairs of socks under my hiking boot when a travel agent lady came up to me and offered to open her agency for me, and since I was cold and wanted to go inside, I went with her. So I booked my tour with her even though her agency was obviously pretty bottom rung, because she had a space heater and let me sleep on the couch while she went back out to hustle.
Our car was like an hour and a half late, but it was like an hour and a half late for everything the whole time. We..re on Bolivian time here.
I had two French guys, a Spanish couple, and a Chilean guide. One of the French spoke fluent Spanish, the other only basic, both spoke some English. The Spanish woman spoke no English but some French. Her husband didnt speak either comfortably but he preferred attempting English to French. The Chilean and the tour guide only spoke Spanish. So we ended up speaking French most of the time, and a little Spanish. (Which I dont speak.)
It would be too much for me to recount the whole trip here. We went to the salt flats, which were pretty crazy as you can imagine. It was just white and flat. With neat piles of salt here and there. But it was really salt. Yes, I tried picking it up and licking it. It was salt.
There was also an island of cactuses in the middle of the salt flat. If my guide spoke English, I could probably tell you why.
They can also make really solid things out of the salt, like buildings. We stayed in a hostel made entirely of salt- even the beds! (Some things were made of cactus though.)
The next day we saw flamingo-inhabited lakes. I..d never seen flamingos in the wild so that was neat. We also went to a red lake, which was incredible. Like, it was really red. Not like just kind of pink or purple, like it was red. Pics to follow!
We also saw giant stone things and an active volcano in the distance.
That night we stayed in a real shitter of a youth hostel. Forget hot water, they didn..t even have showers! My whole group of 6 was squished into one small room. The hostel had a little shop that sold lots of wine, so we acquired a lot of it. There was only one heat stove in the building so we all gathered around it and drank and hung out for hours. I kept getting everyone to sing.
OK so here..s the thing about me- i have a really high alcohol tolerance (for a cute little girl), I dont puke from drinking, and I NEVER get hangovers. Once in my life I threw up the day after drinking too much, and once in my life I woke up with a mild headache after drinking too much. And if you know me you know its not for lack of imbibing, that..s just the way Im built. (I actually theorize that its because I drink so much water, and hangovers are largely caused by dehydration.) Anyways, I got SICK. I threw up, went to sleep, woke up with a violent headache, and proceded to be sick on and off all morning- couldn..t even hold down water. Im thinking this has something to do with altitude sickness- some people get really, really ill from it- head, stomach, the works. Im not one of those people, but maybe the combination of the drinking and the altitude? (I drank plenty the night before with no problem though.) Or the eggs. The vegetarian substitute meals they gave me were all eggs, and i cant stand eggs, but I was choking them down anyways. But a lot can go wrong with eggs, and Ive heard Bolivia has an alarmingly high salmonella rate. Whatever. We went to some hot springs, and they were the nicest-feeling hot springs Ive ever been in- consistant temperature, and just hot enough. I felt much much better after that. In fact, shortly after I felt fantastic- I couldnt stop singing. I guess I was making up for how crappy I felt that morning, when we were in the car and at the geysers. Everyone else was jumping through the geyser, but I couldnt bring myself even close to it because I felt so sick and the smell of sulpher was not helping.
We kept having car troubles, and at one point the driver dropped us off at the trashy hostel to have lunch and disappeared with the car for about an hour or more, leaving us just hanging out. It was really boring, but then a herd of vicunas walked right up to us and hung out for awhile. They were so used to people- one of them came right up to me and just looked at me. Not close enough to touch, but considering that when we were in the car they were always running away from us, I didnt know they could be so friendly. Then they just wandered around the grounds for awhile, between the buildings, looking for something to do.
When I finally got back to Uyuni, I found that almost all the buses back to La Paz were sold out. Freaking travel agent, she told me I could just buy the ticket there! It was at the very last minute that I found a crappy little bus company Id never heard of that had a few seats left. It was even more ghetto than the first one- Im talking a bad day on the Chinatown bus- but it got me to La Paz in one piece. I was afraid Id be sick again on the bumpy ride (the vast majority of roads in Bolivia are not paved), and there are no bathrooms on the ghetto bus, so I just forced myself to fall asleep, which worked out.
Today I am back in La Paz but I am too tired and lazy to really do anything- just recouperating. Tomorrow I go to Titicaca.
See ya!
Love always,
Amanda