Salar de Uyuni - The Salt Desert

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Back to La Paz, more of the same, shopping and drinking. We lost some of our original biking group at this point but stuck with Tristan and Diana, another couple. Traveling as a boyfriend-girlfriend pair, you make friends mostly with other couples. I don't know why this is, certainly it wasn't intentional on our part. Maybe single people don't want to hang around with couples. When I was traveling alone and single, I don't remember making friends with couples at all. Again this wasn't deliberate; it's just the way things work out.

My cash card got swallowed by a belligerent ATM in La Paz just before we were due to leave, and we had march into the bank and demand they open up the machine and retrieve it. Kit had managed to lose both his cards by this point, so we were relying on my dwindling supply of money. His bank helpfully offered to send a replacement card to the nearest branch... which was in Buenos Aires. Great.

Next place we headed was to the Salar de Uyuni, the salt desert. This doesn't immediately sound too thrilling, and in some ways it wasn't. It involved a great deal of time spent in the back of a Jeep. But if you've traveled a bit and seen a lot of beaches, plenty of jungle, various mountain ranges, even the regular sand deserts... this is something different, maybe unique.

Or driver for the trip was a bit of a dick. Thinking about it now, we've been very lucky with guides. We've had some that were fantastic, notably climbing, biking and horse-riding guys. All the others have been good or at least ok. Just this one was difficult. He wasn't exactly horrible, just mardy... complaining all the time, trying to rush us through the sights. We dealt with this by ignoring him or deliberately winding him up, which by day 4 has escalated into a fun game, leaving him clearly on the verge of abandoning us in the desert. He also had a terror of drafts. He believed that if we opened the Jeep window to let air in he would get sick, and so we had to suffocate. Kit and Tristan took to farting deliberately in order to try and provoke him into allowing us some ventillation. This was a risky tactic.

The trip took us high up into the wilderness. You couldn't tell you were at altitude because the whole thing was one great plateau, but it was bitterly bitterly cold. My record of a night was 7 blankets. I had to be carefully sealed into bed with only the tiniest of little face gaps through which to breathe. During the day I went around wrapped in my manky blanket at all times. I am such a pansy when it comes to the cold. Really, it's pathetic.

We stayed in remote villages where we played football with the local kids and got our arses kicked because we couldn't breathe their thin air. On the last night, we stayed in the middle of nowhere in a hostal constructed entirely of salt. Including fixtures and fittings... beds, tables, chandeliers. It was all salt. I licked it.

Over four days we saw wild west style countryside, isolated villages, volcanoes of boiling mud, hot springs in the freezing cold, impossibly tinted lakes dotted with neon pink flamingos, mountains that looked to be made of melting ice-cream, caves and wind sculpted rock formations, finishing up watching the sun rise on a rocky island studded with wonky cacti in the middle of the sea of brilliant white salt.

It felt like being on another planet, and was well worth all the time spent Jeeping.

We went back to Tupiza at the end of the tour because we were heading for the Argentine border. That night we had a little incident with two obnoxious Americans. It started off pretty standard. They had their TV turned up stupidly loud at stupid o'clock in the morning. Kit asked them to turn it down. They turned it up. The guy who worked at the front desk could clearly hear this from downstairs, because he ended up cutting power to the whole floor in an attempt to quiet them. This failed, and each time power was restored they turned the TV back on even louder. Eventually the power went off for good, and realising they'd lost their TV they proceeded to seek vengeance by shouting at the tops of their voices what DICKS we all were, then pretending to have very loud, graphic, pornstar style sex. All night. So we had to listen to them shouting such gems as "yeah baby, stick that all the way up my ass''. FOR HOURS.

It's funny how angry you get when you're tired and someone is being truly obnoxious. Honestly, I've never in my life hated anyone more (aside from the guy who pushed in when I was at the front of the four hour long queue to get the bus home from Glastonbury last year, who I could happily have murdered with a brick). So there were two ways we could have chosen to respond to this. We took the classic, passive-aggressive British approach. Kit wrote them a nice little note entitled ''Dear Cultureless Contemptible Yankee Fucks'', informing them that they are the epitome of all that is hateful in the world and wishing them a slow, painful and imminent death. It was about three pages long. I wish I could remember it to quote from, because it was a work of art.

So yes, they were dicks. But I take some comfort in knowing that sooner or later, someone will definitely punch them in the face and rob them. Probably in La Paz.

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