Salt Planes

We only spent one night in San Pedro as we plan to visit there on the way back. Our night there however, was quite an eventful one. That evening we returned to our hostel to find we were locked out. Maja had the key and was sound asleep. We spent a good hour outside the hostel texting, ringing, banging and shouting for help. Finally a guest at the hostel heard us shouting for help and came running to the door. He thought we were in trouble and let us in. We made our apologies and went to bed, so much for an early night. The next morning we had an early start and were due to leave for our 3 day 2 night tour of the salt planes. We woke to find that this time we were locked in our room. None of the keys we had would work and we had to bang on the windows to get the other guests attention to help us out. We luckily made it to our tour on time and set off with the five of us in a jeep.

The first day of the tour we visited Laguna Verde, the green lake, a mountain named Salvidor Dali after the artist, Laguna Colorado, the red lake and hot springs. Unfortunately neither of us had our bikinis so we had to skip them this time. The landscape was beautiful, the mountains looked fake beause their were so many colours and so rich. In one morning we drove through a sand storm and a snow storm. The driver had trouble keeping control of the jeep and only just missed jeeps travelling in the other direction. The wind was so strong on the first day it was hard to walk and hard to see. It was a great day but we had climbed a lot in altitude, both of us suffered from constant headaches and feelings of sickness. That evening we spent the night in a very cold hostel in the middle of nowhere. We had hired two sleeping bags for the trip but they had forgotten them. The guides managed to find us one to share. That night the temperature reached -12 degrees. We were freezing. We huddled together in one bed, slept in all the clothing we had including hat, scarf, gloves and as many blankets as we could find over us. It was the worsts nights sleep but definately an experience.

The next day we visited the tree of the rock and several more lagunas. The tree of the rock was huge. The picture shows we were tiny compared to it and these rocks were completely random in the middle of nowhere. That evening we stayed in a hostel made of salt. Everything from the walls, the beds to the tables was made of salt. We watched the sunset outside our hostel, it was amazing and the perfect setting. This hostel was a lot warmer and we even had hot water for a few hours that evening. People actually lived in these hostels and it is hard to beleive they live like this day in day out. The food on the tour was really good though, served to us in handmade pottery dishes and typically soup for starters followed by pasta or rice.

Our last day on the tour we visited the main attractions the salt planes and fish island. The salt planes were as white as snow. The sun reflecting off it was so strong we ended up being red. We spent hours taking pictures to get the right shots (below are some of the best ones) and had a great laugh trying to capture some of them. The strange thing about fish island was there were no fish but hundreds and hundreds of cactuses, small ones, big ones and of all different shapes. The salt around fish island was different to the main salt flats as it was in hexagonal shapes. Again in was fantastic scenery and like nothing we have ever seen before. As we left the salt planes the outskirts was being farmed by the locals. The salt was being piled into pyramids and then taken back to a very small town on the edge.

We arrived in Uyuni the end of the tour later that afternoon, booked our bus to Potosi, looked around the town and went for Pizza. After an hour of waiting only Maja had been served her food and we were still waiting for 3 pizzas. We had to board the bus as it was about to leave. Maja and Ingrid went to try and get the bus to wait. The three of us waited at the restaurant to discover they had only cooked one pizza in all that time. We made a dash for the bus and had to share it between the four of us.

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