Let me backtrack a bit

This morning I woke up and realized that I never posted anything about my favorite part of Bolivia- Salar de Uyuni!!



Let me backtrack a bit...

Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world, has been the most surreal piece of landscape I've seen. Roughly the size of Connecticut, this completely desolate plot of land looks like snow and ice, but is actually the remains of a former great lake. Wow!!



The only way to get there is by a tour, unfortunately, but luckily our guide Edgar was awesome! It was 3 days of waking up at 5:00am in the bone-cutting cold and cruising around the salt flats and the incredible area around it. It is seriously one endless blanket of salt. The people in this area of Bolivia use this salt for everything from cooking to building homes and making toys for their kids.

About 45minutes further down from where the salt flats begin there is this bizarre island of cacti. There were hundreds of cacti all in the middle of a salt island with some dating back to 1200 years and being over 100 meters tall!







There were lagoons, flamingos, geysers, volcanoes, canyons, poisonous lakes etc... all within this 200km radius. Things that scientist have been trying to explain and speculating about for decades!





And there were things I was trying to explain like Why are there gigantic llamas made out of salt? And why is it that I'm always going to places where I have to sleep in all of my clothes as well as under 2 sleeping bags & alpaca wool because it is so damn cold everywhere? Or why is it that people from Europe want to bicycle to the salt flats in the middle of the road so they can get ran over by a tour jeep??

Yep. That almost happened. On the last day our driver was speeding along desolate salt earth, and then, as we cross over the hill there were 3 hippie bicyclist with all their gear strolling along in the middle of the road. We would of ran over all three if Edgar, with his mouth full of coca leaves, jolted the wheel to the left, the hippies jumped to the right, and Edgar's chewed coca leaves went everywhere! No one was hurt, but I think everyone was a little pissed off. Edgar was speaking what seemed to be Quechua swear words, the hippies were giving dumbfounded stares and lifted middle fingers, so I decided my job was to translate what each one was gesturing to the other.

I turned to Edgar and said The hippies think you are a reckless driver.

I then walked over to the hippies and asked if they were okay and then proceeded to give them a lecture on the etiquette of cycling.

What the hell guys?!! I asked. You can't cycle in the middle of a road where tour jeeps go and are notorious for driving crazy, and furthermore, you need a flag attached to the back of your bike so people can see you! I felt like a minivan driving soccer mom lecturing her kids about seat belt safety or something.. It was strange. But there is nothing that bothers me more then people who don't know how to ride bicycles or drivers who don't know how to drive around them.

After I calmed down Edgar and lectured the hippies I got back into the jeep and we drove off while the hippies tried to get back on their bikes and continue their 1 year of cycling across S. America (one guy actually started in San Francisco, California, cycled all through Mexico, Central America, and finally made it to Bolivia..)

It was an 8 hr. drive back to Uyuni, in which I slept the whole time until I had to make Edgar stop so I could go pee behind a cactus. We got back to Uyuni around 5:00pm which was just enough time for me to buy a train ticket to the Bolivian border, then hop on another 7hr bus, get checked by Argentinian officials across the border, then hop on another 7hr bus into Salta. Total driving time= 30hrs. Finally made it to Salta, but that is a whole other story.... :)