Uyuni marked the start of our crazy ‘get to Rio in a week without flying’ journey. We arrived in the dark, after a full day on a bus, to a power cut. With no time to waste, we went straight to a hostel that did tours to the salt flats, took a room and booked a tour for the next day – although we weren’t exactly sure what kind of tour we would be on: the ticket we were sold had basic Spanish spelling errors that even we could spot, the date had to be corrected (twice) and after confirming that we would definitely not be visiting a certain area because we had no desire to go there, the lady we were dealing with then wrote that destination on the ticket. This was all done by candlelight but we felt in the dark in more ways than one.
Then we were collected late (why is that the poorer countries always seem to have a ‘relaxed’ attitude to punctuality? – ‘Don’t worry it’s ‘Laos time’, ‘Peru time’, ‘Bolivia time’! They give you a ‘between’ time, like ‘between 9:30 and 10’ but they’re always anywhere from half an hour to an hour later than this. It gets annoying after a year... How about ‘Get here at the time we agreed time’?!) but, somehow, the tour turned out to be exactly what we wanted.
The salt flats were really unworldly. They are massive: a huge expanse of salt, stretching as far as the eye can see. In the midst of all this was Isla Incahuari, an island covered with petrified coral and living cacti. Millions of years ago this area was sea. Tectonic shifts raised the sea up to create enormous salt lakes and over millions of years these evaporated, leaving behind thousands of tons of salt.
The area is so big tourists seem to spend half their time setting up photographs that play with perspective. We were no different, as you can see from our blog pics!
We arrived back to town to pack our bags in the dark as the power had gone down again and we got an early night, ready to leave on the 6am bus and to spend another 12 hours having our brains almost rattled out.
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