34 - Uyuni

All right blog readers... things are about to get good, so brace yourselves. I arrived in Uyuni on April 21 after a very long 7 hour bus ride on a road so bumpy it was an effort just to stay in my seat.

Uyuni was a small town with not much to do but watch the little old people wander the streets. Which is what I did...

Here´s a photo of a Michael Jackson commemoration in the middle of Uyuni´s main plaza. Good to see that some cities have their priorities straight. Boston has Paul Revere. Uyuni has Michael Jackson. They win.

Uyuni doesn´t really have much to do except for go from tourism agency to agency deciding which to use for a tour of the nearby salt flats and lagoons.
I signed up for a three day, two night tour that would take me down through the salt flats and lagoons and end by dropping me off at the Chilean border.

Our first stop on the tour was a train graveyard with lots of old rusting trains. Pretty cool, but the fun part was climbing on top of the trains. It´s always fun to play on giant rusty objects.


Our next stop was the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat (4,086 sq mi).
Here are some interesting Wikipedia facts about the Salar:
- The Salar was formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes.
- It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with the average altitude variations within one meter over the entire area of the Salar.
- The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium. It contains 50 to 70% of the world's lithium reserves, which has yet to be extracted.
- The large area, clear skies and exceptional surface flatness make the Salar an ideal object for calibrating NASA´s Earth observation satellite and for taking amazing, incredible, supercool creative photographs (wikipedia´s words exactly)


The walls in all the tourism agencies in Uyuni were filled with photos like the following.

SOOOOOO fun taking these.....
A little break-dancing

Elephant attack

Big foot

Queen of the card house

Queen of the salt mound

Token jumping picture

Oh look.... a hotel made of salt. And a table made of salt. And a chair.
¨This chair is too salty,¨ said Goldilocks.

After taking lots of fun pictures we drove in our jeep for another couple hours through the seemingly endless white salt flat when all of a sudden ahead of us was a big mound like an island popping out of the ocean. The ¨island¨ was actually the top of a volcano. Back when the salt flat was a lake the volcano was underwater, so now it´s covered in coral-like structures and fossils. It was also covered in hundreds of cacti.

Lost my body for a bit... I found it a couple hours later though, so no biggy.






After the Salar we continued driving until we got to a tiny town in the middle of desert nowhere, which was where we stayed the night. About a fifteen minute walk out of town was a sort of museum with ¨mummies¨. They were actually just creepy human skulls and bones hidden in these rock formations. This picture sort of romanticizes the whole experience because of the pretty sunset background, but seeing the skeletons was just disturbing.

Yet another incredible South American sunset.

The next morning we were back in the jeep for more exploration. This, as you can see, is a train going by.

Our second day of the tour was a flamingo filled lagoon day. We stopped at three different lagoons to look at the flamingos. Yay nature!


Yowza that´s a good picture I took. Wanna know a secret? We weren´t very close to the flamingos, and I don´t have much zoom on my camera, so I just stuck my camera lens into my binoculars and took this shot. Pretty good, eh?
Fox in the desert.

Arbol de Piedra - translation: Tree Rock


I took a walk, and look what I found. A herd of vicuñas of course (related to llamas and alpacas).

Another beautiful lagoon.

On our third and final day of our tour we woke at 4:30 AM, so we could get out and watch the sun rise over the geysers. So we´re driving along through the sandy desert when all of a sudden we stop. Why? Cause we´re stuck in the sand. Our driver drove forward and reverse and forward again, and all it did was sink us deeper. So we all piled out in to the absolutely freezing night (we were around 5,000m at this point) while our driver worked to get us unstuck. After about 20 minutes of waiting outside and freezing our bums off we finally got unstuck and continued on our way.

Good thing we finally got unstuck ´cause those geysers were cool... and they were nice to warm my hands in.
Oooooohhh.... ahhhhhhh....
Pretty sunrise!

And that was the end of the Salar de Uyuni tour. What an amazing tour with some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. By the way none of the photos were photoshopped or anything. That´s just pure natural beauty. Yay nature!

Okay, it´s late and time for me to get going. Hope everyone is doing well.
Love to all,
Amanda

33 - Sucre, Potosí, Tupiza

Casey and I parted ways after La Paz. She headed back to Peru, and I headed on an overnight bus southeast to Sucre.
In Sucre I checked out some dinosaur bones and footprints.
This is a picture of some dinosaur bones.

The dino tracks used to be flat, but then some mountains formed, so then they were vertical on this slab of rock. Kinda hard to see in this photo, but trust me... they´re there.

On my dino tour trip I met Robert from Holland. He was a really great guy, and I ended up spending the next week with him traveling all around Bolivia. Together we went to a small town about 65km outside of Sucre with a huge Sunday market. The market was hustling and bustling with all sorts of people and things to buy. Man alive was it different from our supermarkets.








Next stop on my Bolivian travels was the small mining town of Potosí. Robert and I signed up for a tour of the mines, and the next morning we were decked out in our helmets, gumboots, and yellow mining suits ready to head into the mines.
At first the mines were really cold, and I could see my own breath, but as we got deeper and deeper into the tunnels it got hotter and hotter until we were all dripping with sweat. Meanwhile the whole time we were crouching and ducking and crawling as we moved through the long, narrow, dusty tunnels. I hit my head on the rocky ceiling many times.


We stopped at one point to have a miners´drink of this stuff that was 96% alcohol.
As you can tell from my reaction it was disgusting. As the liquid moved down from my mouth down my throat and into my stomach it felt like my insides were covered with gasoline and then lit on fire. I don´t know why the miners drink it.

After our ¨drink¨we continued on into the mines sweating and squeezing our way through the tunnels until all of a sudden there was an urgent ¨Hurry hurry!¨from our guide. We raced ahead and got out of the way just in time for four men to race by us working like horse mules pushing and pulling a two ton cart filled with rocks and boulders.



Throughout the next two hours we saw many more miners huffing and puffing their way past us. I have never seen such difficult work or seen people work under such extreme conditions in my life. No wonder they need a 96% alcohol drink by the end of the day!


When we finally got out of the mines, and I could stand up straight again, we got to blow up a stick of dynamite. When it blew up it was incredibly loud, and even though it was over 100 meters away the power of the explosion was so strong the wind from it hit me in the face and shook my clothes. Intense.

After Potosí Robert and I took an overnight bus to the cowboy town of Tupiza. Tupiza is known for its multi-colored mountains, rock formations, and all the canyons. We took a 5-hour horse ride through it all, and by-golly-gee was it beautiful. Check it out...
Did I mention that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from the American western film were finally caught and killed right near Tupiza?
A true cowgirl.
Suns out guns out!


I felt like Simba from the Lion King when a herd came running down the mountain into the canyon below. Except that they were goats instead of wildabeests...and I´m not a lion.

Sucre, Potosí, and Tupiza proved to be towns filled with great adventure. Next stop... Uyuni!