Salt Flats Day 1: Too tired for salt

I was not looking forward to the bus ride to Uyuni. Famed for being the coldest journey in all of Bolivia, the night ride is also 12 hours long and unforgiving when it comes to bumps. However, in some sheer stroke of uncommon Bolivian luck I was given the seat above the engine. Sure, it was a little louder but it blasted hot fucking air onto my body for the whole journey. And for that I am thankful. Got off the bus and proclaimed how good the "heating" was without knowing... oh, the envy in the other passengers´ eyes...

Found another girl, from Belgium, wanting to book the Salar tour for that morning and we both got into the car of a woman from an agency booking said tours. We didn´t have to book with her but the offer of a warm (and free) ride to the central plaza was a pretty good one at 5:30am in the morning. Yes, the bus was early, the second inappropriately bus I have caught in South America (the other arriving early at the Argentinian border before it opened). Amazing how the buses are never early arriving in the afternoon, or in the evening... can you tell I´m getting a little frustrated with this continent??

So we got to the plaza where nothing much was open, joined the others from our bus to a place for an expensive breakfast that also came with heating (bonus) and waited for the agencies to open. The one that had picked us up looked appealing but I wanted to shop around.

Gladly I was right, as it appeared I could get the tour better and cheaper elsewhere, and another agency downright pointed the finger at my first agency for having drunk drivers. So I didn´t go with the first agency. Or the one that pointed the finger, just for being bitchy. That one I went with was super cheap, and I still maintain to this day that it is the cheapest price I have ever heard for this tour. Boom. And the wind blows in my direction.

The first day of the salt flats tour takes in the actual salt flats - the biggest in the world I think - so it was all about bright white and dry skin. But it was spectacular. I was still getting to know my car - a kooky French couple, 2 cute Bolivian girls and a typically crazy guy from Buenos Aires - and we were all speaking Spanish so at least that was good practice.

After my last days in La Paz and then the bus ride to Uyuni, I was feeling pretty tired and even though the view was fantastic out my Jeep window, I could not help but fall asleep. So I drove through most of the salt flats with my eyes closed. Nicely done.

We stopped for lunch - again along with the rest of the Salt Flats tour crowd, much to my disappointment - at a nice Island with lots of cacti on it. One was about 9m tall and reportedly over 900 years old! Good effort. Lunch was nice except for the meat being so tough it almost ripped my other moler out. I went crazy with the dental floss after that puppy.

Accommodation for the first night was in a salt hotel, made as the name suggests entirely from salt. You had to walk the floor with shoes on since it was loose salt (and no one wants to be a wrinkly prune), the beds were basically hard slabs of salt with a mattress and the walls were constructed with bricks made of salt. The furnishings were mostly dried out, hollow cactus trunks that make for great lamp shades because of the little holes where spikes used to be... and when it wasn´t salt or cactus, it was alpaca. I felt right at home in my poncho.

As it was, I roomed in a double with the Argo boy who I was beginning to think was quite cute, but I was so tired by the end of dinner that I basically just downed a glass of wine and retired to the warmth of my bed. The shower had no hot water until the next morning anyway so I was sleeping salty and dusty. As was to become the norm in the coming days...