Salt Flats: the remaining 3 days

So the second day I awoke with a stomach that seemed to be out to get me, which is nothing too atypical for Bolivia, but really sucks when you have 10 hours of offroading on your schedule for the day. The first day, we became acquainted with several traditional Andean musicians. And heard their CDs on repeat for the whole drive. Naïvely we hoped for a new selection the second day, but soon were disappointed to hear the same traditional Bolivian songs about 'La Patria' blaring. It was the same 15 songs over. And over. All. Day.

Our first stop was an amazing view, at almost 5000 meters. I wasn't really supposed to get out of the car because it was too cold and not good or something, but I hopped out long enough to take a picture. Then we visited a ghost town, which was very eerie, but again I pretty much slept through it. Apparently it used to be a mining town thought to be possessed by the devil, which was actually poisonous gases realized from the mines.

The desert was expansive, with towering mountains in the distance in assorted colors that made them look like sunsets. Llamas became more and more sparse as we got deeper into the arid landscape, but vicuñas still roamed and animals that be described no other way but as jackalopes. We came across another huge but shallow lake every few hours, always filled with clans of flamingoes and sandpipers hopping about. At one of these lakes there was a hot spring and we stopped for lunch, which I had to excuse myself from early to digest alone in the car after a single roll of bread.

After lunch I started feeling better, until we stopped at the geisers, which were more like giant muddy craters with soccer ball-sized bubbles bursting up...they looked like the awesome purple villain in the My Little Pony movie. The colors varied from crater to crater, depending on the chemicals, but they all smelled like rotten eggs and emitted thick, hot steam, which was painful in the cold, windy air. They made me absolutely nauseous, but by the time I realized I wanted to vomit, I was too far into the maze of walkable pathways through the geisers and I had to call Luis, the cook, to help me out.

Fortunately, I had time to recover in the unmoving car because just after leaving the site we got a flat tire. Kelly and I sat in the car while they changed it, while everyone else got out and looked around at the wind blown sand (and not much else). But our capable driver, hair as glossy as ever, handily fixed the damage and we were off, praying to not get another flat.

We drove through the Dalí desert, which looks just like his surrealistic paintings, minus the melting watches. Alien-like natural rock formations and rolling mountains against bright blue skies. It was beautiful.

That night we stayed in a similar-looking town, in that I wouldn't call it quite a town, in much more comfortable beds that were just as cold. The little girls in the town became attached to our group and sang us songs. Then they hammed it up for the camera with the adorable kittens roaming around town, the perfect photo op for our whole group. It's hard to imagine what it would be like living in such a remote area. We said goodbye to them in the morning and were off to the Laguna Colorada (red lake), one of the highlights of the trip.

The tour is known for passing by several colored lakes (from natural chemicals), the biggest being the red lake, where we started the third day of travel. Flamingoes were everywhere, clouds of pink and white over the red water. We also, during the middle two days, saw a green lake that looked like a giant opal, and a yellow lake that was the strangest color I've ever seen. We had lunch by the yellow lake, which was filled with 3 species of flamingo. Then we noticed that they were all pooping, little spurts that shot from their behinds whilst they continued digging with their beaks for food....it ruined the magic a bit.

At night we finally got to shower, though we had to pay for it. Our accomodations were made of salt - salt walls, floors, tables, chairs, everything. It was like living in a litter box, but slightly more pleasant. We played cards with another group after dinner, until they turned off the electricity at 10.

We decided to wake up for our last day at 5 so that we could see the sun rise over the salt flats. Our driver was less than pleased by our decision, but it was his fault for giving us the choice.

We drove out to the flats, where I imagined all the jeeps gathered for an amazing viewpoint of the interminable white nothingness that is the flats. I didn't quite realize how large the largest salt flats in the world would be, at 10,582 square kilometers. This is also the size of Los Angeles County.

The salt flats look like dry snow, if that makes any sense. The flats were formed 40,000 years ago with the explosion of a volcano and have the worlds largest lithium reserve and some 10 billion tons of salt (thank you, wikipedia). Water running underneath the flats forms small ridges crisscrossing the terrain and everything looks small and distant. Because it is. There are several 'islands' within the flats, basically big dead coral reefs covered with cactus. Several cacti had signs dating them: one was 900 years old, another died in December 2007 at 1208 years, may he rest in peace. We got to explore one island while our breakfast was prepared, and after breakfast we drove out to another desolate area (of which there are many to choose) to take the famed pictures as there is no perspective on the planar salt.

Conchita, Kelly and I took pictures for about half an hour playing with perspective, since you can make it look like one person is very small. Kelly was a tiny dancer in my hand, we walked on Conchita's back, etc. While we did this, the men all searched for ojos del agua (eyes of the water), which are salt crystals that you can dig out. After a half hour, Rene the driver told us that we were taking pictures in the wrong place. Awesome. So we moved to the better place, and Rene set up some excellent scenes, including Conchita driving a shoe with me flying off the back and me hatching out of a broken egg shell. Then he arranged us all in the ground in a circle to form a star. The shocking part was when he unexpectedly grabbed our ankles and spread our legs apart...I was so surprised that I said 'Oh!', which everyone was taken a bit back by. We all couldn't stop cracking up and making gynocologist jokes after that.

We made one last stop in Uyuni after the salt flats, and bought some souvenirs. We also happened to run into Kevin, our amazingly bearded friend who we met in La Paz and hopefully will see again when he comes to Buenos Aires.

For the car on the way back, Luis had bought new CDs, a godsend to us all. We had memorized by this point the words to such love-torn songs as 'Una Copa de Vino' and 'Ojos del Cielo' as sung in the traditional style with violins and panflutes. The first was an oldies CD, and we all gave our best for the Four Seasons and Diana Ross. Then was Michael Jackson, and then a mega-CD with 177 songs from the 80s. I think our best perfomance was of 'I Come from a Land Downunder,' making Luis officially regret his decision to cater to us with this purchase.