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Day 1 Highlights:
Left Uyuni, the nearest town to the Salar, in our fleet of jeeps, and made our way to the salt factory, and met the owner and his 8-year-old daughter who worked all day filling up salt bags. For this she would earn the equivalent of a pound.
Next we headed to the Salt Flats. They are dazzling! Pure white ground as far as the eye can see, it's hard to open your eyes without sunglasses. I didn't have any so I bought a pair at the Salt Hotel, and they lasted a whole day before the lens fell out!
We took the mandatory cheesy photos (holding someone in your hand that's actually very far away) but they didn't really come out. The Salt Hotel was amazing though, built entirely of the salty stuff, even the furniture inside! Not used any more but a little tourist shop to buy cheap sunglasses from.
Next was the train cemetery. We went over to mourn the loss of the trains that were used regularly in the 19th Century, and played inside the rust buckets, including a cool maths train!
Day 2 Highlights:
The scenery as we
The first salt hotel
Made entirely of salt bricks! They do havea lot of salt here!drove around was breath-taking. We were about 4000m high, but since we were above the clouds we enjoyed clear blue skies and snow-peaked mountains wherever we looked. In the rock valley, the ground was peppered with millions of rocks that had been projected from nearby volcanoes, all varying in size and shape.
We also visited some of the highest and most colourful lagoons in the world, most of which were home to hundreds of fantastic flamingoes. A lot more driving followed, and then an early night was had to prepare for the long day tomorrow.....
Day 3 Highlights:
We woke at 5am. It was still dark, so we headed to the hot geysers to watch the sunrise. It was by far the coldest we'd been so far, early mornings and high altitudes are not a great combo!
The geysers were majestic though, if not incredibly smelly! (There's a lot of sulphur in the area, and those of you who remember what it smells like from chemistry will appreciate our cooks' sense of humour when they served us scrambled eggs for breakfast!) After this we drove to the natural hot springs and had a fantastically hot early
Dinner time!
In case you weren´t sure, everything is made of salt! morning bath, with frozen grass surrounding us. We then had breakfast, and started our 36 hour journey to La Paz, by jeep, train, taxi and bus. Along the way:
Our jeep span off the road with a flat tyre
The jeep behind us got stuck in a stream, got flooded, and had to be towed out
The midnight train we were on was delayed by a few hours after it was involved in an accident
Three of our group had to run after the bus as it drove out of the bus station
Eleni fell out of the bus window and we had to go back and look for her!
But finally.......we made it to La Paz!
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