Can I Have Some Salt With That Flat?

This week found us at Salar De Uyuni, or the great big salt flats. I must say that before coming to Bolivia that I did not really know much about it other than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid got killed there. What I have found out so far is that Bolivia is one of the most amazing places on Earth. Highest, Largest, Most Bio diverse, these are all descriptions of landscapes that get tossed around all of the time here. It was Lotta who came up with the idea to go the salt flats. I was very enthusiastic about the idea "uhhh it´s a lot of salt, right" was my first jump up and down statement. After dragging my feet about going "ohhh can we go see the hot sauce lake, and the nacho valley next" we committed. Turns out this was good because there is nothing like this place on earth and to top it off the salt flat was really only the first day. We booked our tour with four other people: Michell from Colorado, Lucas from Australia, and Amanda and David from the U.K. Turned out that everyone was cool, good thing too because we spent every hour together for the next few days. The tour consisted of our driver/guide driving over the salt flats and pointing things out to us in Spanish.

Our first stop was a train graveyard-0000hhhhhhhh very scary, it is a place where all of the trains come to die.

O.K. I am not sure why they did the train thing but we snapped some picks anyway. By now we had all hear about the amazing Salt Flats. 3653 meters high, 12,106 Kilometers wide, a massive amount of nothing. A huge lake evaporated some 14,000 years ago leaving...well.. salt and some mini lakes. So, after the train thing we zipped right back into town to hang out in the jeep outside of the driver/guides house for.... well who knows what... while we passed the time hanging out in the jeep we got to see some lady butcher a sheep? cow? something in the back of her car.

Now it was time to hit the salt flats. They lived up to the hype, and there really was nothing there but salt (well duh) none the less I found myself just sort of looking around going "Wow". Here is most of our Salt flat crew.

Here is also Jeep we drove around in which Lucas aptly christened "The Bullet".

It was a great jeep that Alfredo, our Driver/guide would pop the hood up on every other time we stopped to gently massage the hamsters that kept the jeep running.
Here is Lotta on top of the world.

A photo of the two of us because nothing is more sexy than salt and lots of it.

I had to lick the salt too because I had to make sure as a matter of fact I had to lick a rock later and even a llama but it would not stand still.



But, salt was just a part of it, later that day we came to an island in the middle of the salt flat, an island full of cactus, somehow some water got out there.

Next we all sat down for some lunch, our guide made everything and it was good, he made some pasta, fried style, and it was fine after we used Lotta's secret: drown it in ketsup.

Then everyone got really creative and we took some goofy photos.

Back into the jeep and out of the salt flats. Into some amazing landscapes. It was like the MTV of landscapes, every hour an completely different one appeared, you would just space out for a little while, then look around and think "Am I on THIS planet?" Fist there was the nothing landscape.

Then we hit mountain, and strange rock formations.


Then a lake that looked red because of algae, plankton, and deposits of sodium, magnesium, and gypsum.

For all you people who love birds, we saw some flamingos. O.K. so that might not be so cool BUT, these flamingos live in icy lagoons at 5000 meters high, and they have developed a way to filter out the alkaline water of the lake from their food. So, these flamingos ROCK, alas I did not get a very good photo of them but you can see yet another funky colored lake.

Here is another great mountain and lake and the water is probably thick with Borax or micro fossils, or mayo or something.

The nights did get cold and once we reached the hotel, and I am being soooooo generous calling it a hotel. Really, more of an old army barracks, speaking of which while we were driving we got to see a bunch of military guys drilling for something, but I hope NOTHING because to be realistic Bolivia's military conquest record has been nothing short of CRAP. Sorry Bolivia but it is so true, it seems every time they get aggressive they actually end up loosing their own land. But we did see a lot of very tough looking Chuck Norris shoulder rolls going on.
So, two chilly nights later we were off on the bone shaking ride again. We found some snow and some of the strangest wind swept rocks I have seen.

Lucas made a snow Llama that was so cool I had to get some shots of it.

More rock filled roads and then another cold night where a rabbit hopped into where we were eating and chewed on a chicken bone, the creepy rabbit invaded our dreams, "bad bad scary rabbit."

We woke up very early to see the geyser basin. Bubbling mud pots, and bellowing sulfur, then after days of not showering we all endded up at a hot springs that was heated from the core of the earth. Never have I liked the core of the earth more.

Oh and with all of the amazing landscapes we also had come cookies with happy faces on them.

Overall we had a great time on that tour, our tour buddies made it just that much more fun. Once we got back into town we waited for our train that was leaving at midnight, we backtracked to Oruro and then worked our way back to La Paz, where we will be meeting up with a friend of ours from L.A. who is flying down

This has been a pretty photo intense blog because I have been able to find an Internet place that has a really good connection, if you have any comments or questions about anything in the blog feel free to ask. If you would like further information about the countries and have some complex political or historical questions I will be sure to make up something that sort of sounds right.