The Salar de Uyuni

After Potosí, I headed down to Uyuni to visit the Salar de Uyuni. It is a huge expanse of salt flats (the area used to be a salt ocean, or lake or something) it is approximately 12 square kilometers. It is white and flat for as far as the eye can see, and is surrounded by the desert of the Bolivian southwest. The salt is approximately a meter deep, and is intrusive. In the first hour of the tour everything I was wearing or carrying (including the 4x4 jeep that was our home for the next three days) was covered in salt.
I traveled from Potosí to Uyuni with a few Australian boys that I had done the mine tour with, and we arranged the Salar tour together, since you need groups of 6. Uyuni, like Potosí, is a bunch of nothing. A few pizza shops and lots and lots of tour companies. So, we got in, found a hostel, and went to book a tour. We picked one company kind of at random, and made a bit of a mistake. Although I´m sure all the companies kind of sucked, ours was pretty bad. Promises of english speaking guides and pancake and egg breakfasts were forgotten once we got out into the desert. Our tour guide was less than to be desired...We had four flat tires in one day (and one spare, which also went flat in the end). At one point, alone on the road with the tire completely flat, the guide tried to fill it up with LP gas from the grill. Simultaneously the four of us yelled NOOOOOO!!!!! In spanish I said "What are you doing?? That´s really dangerous!" To which the guide replied "I know what I´m doing. It´s gas, it´s fine." And we put our foot down. No way were we getting in the jeep if he put that gas in the tire. No way. Eventually he must have realized how stupid it was, because he stopped and then asked us to delete the pictures we had taken of him doing it. No. Eventually another jeep came along and we used its engine and air hose to pump up.

The Salar and surrounding areas are beautiful, though, and I enjoyed getting out there to see them. We stayed in hostels built of salt and got to climb rocks, see flamingos, chase llamas (that wasn´t exactly part of the tour), and soak in some hot springs (at 6am in the morning, it was pretty cold outside of the 100F water). When we got back to town we had all sorts of plans to complain about the service and get some sort of a refund. However, our story was trumped, big time. One of the other jeeps had a driver who had been drinking, and managed to roll the jeep. Nobody was seriously hurt, thank god, but one guy was bleeding. Needless to say, they got a refund. That actually wasn´t the only case I heard of drunk drivers, either. I´m glad our major mishap was a potentially explosive tire.