Salar de Uyuni: Woah.

Welcome to Bolivia! After my painful bus crossing my friends and I hopped onto another bus to head to Tupiza where we would start our Salt Flat tour.  Four days of driving through some intensely dramatic landscapes and no showers. Ew. haha.

Day 1:
We left bright and early in the morning with two other jeeps after meeting our driver, Diete, and our cook, Carmen.  The day was full of red landscapes and jagged terrain.  We ascended up a crazy amount and the altitude just kept getting higher and higher and higher.  I am pretty happy that I am not affected by the altitude, because even though we are well past 3000m, we are going higher later during this trip.  The best part of the day was the fact that we started to see LLAMAS!!!!! Lots and lots of llamas! In fact, for lunch we stopped at a field where llamas were grazing! And then I tried llama. haha.  It was in a tamale which is a traditional food found in Bolivia made from corn, potatoes, veggies, and meat sometimes and they are wrapped in the corn stalk and cooked somehow. Super tasty, and the llama meat was pretty good too! Bolivian food is 91047891234798132748923 times BETTER than any of the food I have had in South America bc 1. it is vegetarian friendly, which even though I am not a vegg, it is nice to have options that don't involve only red meat, and 2. they make their food spicy!! FINALLY, some flavor in food and not just salt! I was beginning to really question South American cuisine since Brazil and Argentina are obsessed with ham and cheese and cows. Ended the day at our first refugio--a super basic hostel that has no showers and just two toilets.  I tried to climb up a mountain to watch the sun set, and after huffing and puffing my way up this mountain in my sandals for 15 minutes, I thought I was finally at the top and then I saw that if I wanted to see the sun set I had to hike another 20 minutes at least, which my body was basically incapable of doing at that altitude. haha.

Day 2:
We started the morning super early jamming out to some Michael Jackson, courtesy of Diete, and caught some of the sunrise before driving up to one of the highest altitudes I have been so far: 4,855m.  That is REALLY high! Walking 10 ft is tiring when you are that high. haha. We kept driving through and the highlight of my day once again involved LLAMAS!! We stopped at this beautiful meadow with this perfect view of a snow capped mountain.  Omg, they are probably my favorite animal, and I even met an Indian couple where the girl was as obsessed with The Emperor's New Groove as my brother, sister, and I! Super cool!! I got close enough to one to touch it!!! Probably the best moment of my life! haha. We started to see our first glimpses of ¨salt¨on this day, although it wasn't really salt, it was actually something called Borax.  I had to wiki that since I had no idea what it was but figured it involved Boron in some way.  My friends were a little disappointed that I didn't know what it was since I took so many chem classes, but I was at least able to recite the first line of the periodic table to them. Wow, I am such a nerd. We also got our first glimpses of flamingos today! I really had no idea that there were any in South America, but I guess I never really thought about where they lived.   We kept on driving through and we got to see the area of desert that inspired the Salvador Dali painting with all the clocks. Then we stopped off at Laguna Verde, which translates to Green Lake, and it was DEFINITELY green!! After that we drove up to our highest altitude yet, a bit over 5000m, to go see guysers (sp??).  Smelled like sulfur (eggs..ew), but they were pretty cool and you could hear the bubbling of the sulfur even though you couldn't see it through the steam.  We even got some snow flurries up there!

Day 3:
Flamingo day!!! And what day would be complete without LLAMAS!! Went to Lagoa Colorada which is actually up to be voted for one of the 7 natural wonders of the world! It is flamingo central and the red mountain that is directly behind the lake reflects onto the lake to make the whole thing look red. Pretty amazing.  We spent the day driving to 3 or 4 different lakes, all incredibly beautiful and filled with three different species of flamingos.  My camera is unfortunately really crappy and my pictures aren't as amazing as the boys' pictures since they have professional cameras basically. Going to have to take those from them so you all can see the flamingos instead of squinting to see them. haha.  We also got to see some volcanos--non active and semi active.  No smoking tops or anything even though the active side of one of the volcanos is on the Bolivian side while the non active side is on the Chilean side...not sure how it can be half and half, but I will go with it since that is what Diete told us. Ended the day by driving to a hotel made entirely of salt! Third day without a shower, and I could have paid 10 bolivianos (basically $1.30US) but Candace and I opted not to and figured the giant dreadlock forming on our heads could get one more day and we just used wet wipes again. Sounds really dirty, and it is, but we were wearing the same clothes for four days since there was so much dirt and dust on the road.  Four days of driving on unpaved dirt road is not very pleasant.

Day 4:
On the salt flats finally!! We woke up to watch the sun rise on the salt flats and it was pretty spectacular since you can only see salt in every direction you look! We spent the day driving across about 30km of salt flat to an island that had over 3000 cacti! After eating our final amazing meal courtesy of Carmen (whose cooking probably helped me gain some of the weight I've lost back) we started to take some super sweet perspective photos that make us look like giants eating each other or me posing on a can of beer.  We spent the entire afternoon doing that and stalling for time because it was election day in Bolivia and apparently it is illegal to drive on the roads at all.  Our driver told us if he got caught driving that day, he could get thrown into jail for up to 3 days. What the shit! I really love Bolivia so far, but what a ridiculous system! The entire country shuts down--nothing on the roads, almost nothing open--just for these elections. How much money is lost in that one day because no businesses are open?? We ended our journey in Uyuni, the town where I have to get my visa. Hopefully that all works out.

It has been so hard for me to keep up with this blog as more time goes on and more things come up to do.  I really enjoyed my time and Brazil and Argentina, but after my first four days in Bolivia, I am pretty sure that this country is going to blow me away more than the other two.  I never expected to see such beautiful landscapes---and all of them so completely different!---and the people here are absolutely lovely.  So sweet and friendly (not the best smelling) and always helpful. The people here look more like they are Nepalese than what I expected Bolivians to look like, and they look completely different from the people I have seen throughout the rest of the continent. The children are so round and chubby, and apprently the women wear tons of layers on their hips to make them look bigger, because once again, bigger is better. The women mostly wear their hair in two long braids with bowler hats, and they wear long skirts with apron like coverings.  They carry their babies on their backs in big shawls. Everything is so different from what I have seen.  There has only been one ATM in the last two towns I have been in. One ATM that has a line of gringos a mile long. haha.

I am really really really excited about my time in Bolivia.  After the last four days, I am pretty sure that this country is going to blow me away. I have a five year visa for this country now, so hopefully I want to come back! Next stop is Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia even though everything government related is in La Paz.  The boys are heading up to La Paz, but Candace and I are going to spend a few days there.