What the hell are the pink flamingos doing at 4800m altitude?

Short description of the Salar de Uyuni 3 days tour:

DAY 1 :

Started later than expected, the guide and the cook were 2 bolivians that soon proved to be along the worst ones. The other people of the group were Lindsay (american), Mikkel and Louise (Denmark), Reut and Michael (Israel). At least the group was fun.

We visited the salar, a totally white ground that looked like snow. Borja actually collected one bag of salt for his mother that we eventually lost... In the middle of the salar there was a hotel made totally of salt, including beds and chairs. For those who have seen the desktop image from my computer, it´s actually a photograph of that hotel. I had no idea what that picture was, I just liked it enough to put it on my screen. Surprise - surprise!! It was the salt hotel from Uyuni, Bolivia!!

Next stop was an island in the middle of the salar that contained cactuses as high as 14 meters. We avoided paying the entrance, thought that cactuses are everywhere, we did not have to pay to see them.

In the night we slept in a comunal bedroom together with the other 5 people from the group. As incredible as it sounds under those primitive conditions, we actually took a shower!!

DAY 2:

It´s the day we´ve visited lots of lagoons of different colours as you will later see in the pictures. The big surprise were the big variety of birds that were populating the waters. At more than 4000m and with a temperature during the day of aprox 5 degrees C, you can only wonder how come they survive the cold nights. Besides... who brought them there? Such remote lakes at such high altitude!

The valley of the volcanos was another incredible sight. Imagine a plain sorrounded by volcanos. And from place to place very big rocks, once parts of the volcanos, in shape of all possible forms and figures. Belive it or not, some volcanos lost their entire craters during the erruption. A peaceful area now that was in the past a terrible place to be. No survivors I guess, since it looks like a desert. One of such valleys was called the Salvador Dali valley, I guess due to the similarity to some of his drawings. A perfectly deserted valley that had here and there big rocks in shape of all you can imagine. We asked the guide why the valley it was called like that and the answer surprised us: ¨it was named like that by the Spanish conquistadores that came to these lands 3000 years ago¨ So much for the accurate information. He could be inventing everything!

Sleeping place? Close the the ¨Laguna colorada¨ another Bolivian reservation. This time we could not avoid paying the entrance fee. The hostal was the coldest bedroom I have ever had the chance to be in. Under these conditions, no wonder we went to bed really early. The nice thing was that Mikkel had his laptop with him and we could see part of a movie (until the battery died).

DAY 3:

Last day of the tour, started at 5 o´clock in the morning with the geysers. A bit boring for us as it was not something new. Wé had already seen some of them in Chile. This time it was twice as cold though!

Then the termal waters, where most of the other groups went bathing. With an average temperature of 30 degrees, the bath looked promising. It was the idea of getting out of the water that made us not to take that opportunity. We will wash another time...

There we took breakfast after one hour of waiting. Our mean cook probably spit in the food. We hate her too anyway!

Then came the Green Lagoon that was close to the Licancabur volcano. The same one that we could see from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. This time from the bolivian side.

And the Laguna Colorada (red waters due to the algas that were growing in its´ depts). The surprising and understandable at the same time dead baby flamingos at the shore: at nights it gets so cold that some of the young ones do not survive. Laws of natures as I was told...

And then getting back to Uyuni.

In Uyuni there was a surprise waiting for us: no more bus tickets to Oruro, our next destination. As sleeping in the village appeared to us as a horrible idea (there is absolutely nothing to do in there), we bribed the driver of one bus to take us to Oruro. We slept in the coridor of the bus, one of the worst travels of my life. My butt still hurts from all the shaking and bumping (the road was without asphalt).

But we finally got to Oruro at 3 o´clock in the morning and from there we took the bus to Cochabamba, the place where we are now.

We slept in a beautiful hostal, full of flowers, ate good food from the market place, and now, full of energy we are heading to our next destination, Villa Tunari, a village where the animal NGO is. We should be spending in this village 2 weeks or so if everything goes right and they accept us as volunteers.