Overnight buses,Salt flats and lots of diarrhoea

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It has been almost a week since we last posted a blog, and let me tell you it has been a very eventful and even somewhat colourful!

We left La Paz at 9pm on a delux overnight bus. I think the Bolivian idea of luxury is a fair bit different to the Australian first class bus! 12 hours, food that you wouldnt feed your dog and stupid bus drivers that stopped every 2 hours for a coffee.. for themselves that is, we werent allowed off the bus! We made it to Uyuni in the morning, stiff necks, frozen toes. After taking a quick look around the town we decided to go find a tour that started right away, the town god forgot! We paid for a 3 day tour of the Salar de Uyuni or the salt flats, and we were quite excited to be going, because we had heard so many great and amazing stories about this secluded place.

The first day we checked out the train cemetry, and the salt flats. The first night was spent in a hotel made of salt. It was cold, had 2 toilets, one shower which you had to pay 10 bolivianos for hot water.

Day two we woke up and Sam was ill. Not feelig the best we knew we had a long drive ahead, we saw lots of rocks, more rocks and a few more rocks, they were great and the landscape was like another planet. We drove, and drove and drove some more on the bumpiest, dustiest road. That wasnt the hightlight of day two that came when we were looking at some rocks, at an altitude of nearly 5000m and Sam came a waddling towards me with a grimmaced look on his face, his first words were ´gretchen bloody come here i have just sharted´....if you dont know the meaning of this you need to watch the movie ´along came Polly´, with that i had to run to the toyota landcruiser grab some more toilet paper and meet him behind a rock where he had removed his soiled jocks, a souveiner to the Bolivians. Poor Sam, it was quite amusing for me although we think he had a bit of possible food poisoning from the night before because another guy in our car was also ill. It was a long day, an even longer night with day three still to look forward to.

Day three was a 430am wake up call. We visited the sulphur geysers, hot springs, and some lagoons with pink flamingos. We got back to Uyuni 11 hours with 7 people in a Landcruiser, and for the last hour the drivers two children decided to join us. Stinky hot, and dusty we booked into our motel, grabed a pizza for tea and went to bed.

Yesterday we bussed it to Potosi, altitude 4060m. The bus was a 6 hour dirt road, but only 200km in distance. Picking up locals along the way, regardless of the seats available on the bus, we arrived, and survived... gretchen only just!

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