Uyuni

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After exploring Tiwanaku, that evening we jump on the night bus to Uyuni. This is pretty horrid, although we have opted for the tourist option, its bumpy bumpyness into high altitudes make me run to the toilet, although this may have been the extra large pizza i ate a few hours before...who can tell. anyway, neither of us get much sleep, and rolling into freezing cold Uyuni at 6 in the morning is not the nicest experience. But, thanks to pre-booking, we are whisked off to our luxury salt hotel (yes, thats a hotel made of salt) for breakfast, shower, and a little well deserved nap. Then its off on our day tour of the salt flats. Totally bonkers. Thats pretty much all i can say. Our hotel borders the salt flats, and it is basically just miles and miles and miles of white salt, surrounded by a few volcanoes. Thats it. There is an island of cactuses in the middle, but otherwise, its just a hell of a lot of salt. Pretty cool. Its fun to jump around, take distortion pictures, marvel at the insanity of it, but spend a long time there and it would be pretty easy to go insane yourself. We watch the sunset over the salt, which is beautiful, and then snuggle up into our salt beds to wait for morning.
Morning comes, with a sunrise that we just catch, and then we jump into the jeep for our 3 day tour. We are a group of 6, a very nice group, plus our quiet but very cool driver/cook/guide Carlos. It begins again with the salt flats, we drive for most of the day through miles of white. But if we think this is cool, which it damn well is, there is a lot more bonkers stuff to come. Basically I spend the next few days completely overwhelmed. We drive through mountains, at points going up to 5000m, with lakes of all different colours, red, green, white, pink, geezers and hot springs, huuuge rocks that are just huuuge, we see snow and sand, mummies trapped in stone pods, volcanic trees and cities, flamingos, llamas, alpacas, eagles...its totally mad! everything is just huge, and silent, it makes you want to scream and jump around, and curl up in a tiny silent ball at the same time. For three days, it feels like we are space travellers, and we keep landing our space ship on lots of different crazy planets. Everything is wrong, or not wrong but different. Grass is yellow, rocks are purple, lakes are pink and white, there is red sand on the ground, but snow also, snow that glitters with silver fairy dust. It is quite amazing, but also very very cold. Ill let the pictures speak for themselves, but I will mention the cold at night. Because that was also quite amazing. On the second night, it was so cold it burned your bones. I was wearing every single item of clothing I had with me (4 pairs of socks, thermal underwear, 3 t-shirts, two pairs of trousers, two jumpers, one coat, two hats, two pairs of gloves, i was huddled in my sleeping bag, with a thick rug around me, we were hunched over the tiny fire, and still it was so cold it hurt to move. But despite that, i totally loved it. There was a lot of driving, and mum was itching to go walking (more than one person uttered that familar sentence, when mum had disappeared yet again over some rocks, and we were all huddled in the car desperatly trying to keep warm, "your mum is very hardy isnt she?") But the scenery was too beautiful to complain about the driving. It was just out of this world.

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