Salar de Uyuni

I've been away on vacation and just now am back to the city so I can blog. This past weekend I went to Salar de Uyuni after our PC conference and had a blast! The tour was a three day tour of Salar de Uyuni and the surrounding area. We visited several lakes up in the mountains with flamingos and seagulls, a natural hot spring, saw a few geysers, and an area with really neat rock formations. I want to recommend taking ANDREA TOURS as your tour company b/c our guide, Walter, and our cook, Eli (Walter's wife) were perfect hosts to us. For $100USD we got transportation, all our meals, and housing for three days. Our land cruiser broke down only once due to a flat tire, and our meals were super tasty. I'll put the company's contact info on here next week. I had a great train ride from Uyuni to Oruro for only 52 Bs (about $7.50USD) and then hopped on a bus (20 Bs = about $3USD) from Oruro to Cochabamba. If i could travel on a train to get everywhere in Bolivia I would, b/c on my way to Uyuni, I took a bus and of course, it got stuck in the mud, not once, not twice, but THREE times!!!! We were lucky enough to have a working crew that was working on the road with bulldozers pull us out every time. So, if you wanna go to Uyuni without frustrations, TAKE THE TRAIN!

Onto the fun stuff!!!!

This picture is of Ross and I sitting on a salt mound in Salar de Uyuni which is a HUGE salt flat that spans across a huge amount of the department of Potosi. The salt flat used to be a huge lake that has dried up, but produces an incredible amount of salt through the waters that come through the very bottoms of the lake. (i can't remember exactly what our guide told us, but i think this is what he told us)

This is Ross licking the wall of our hostel! The entire hostel is made of salt blocks that came from Salar de Uyuni. Surprisingly, the hostel stayed fairly warm through the night. I forgot to take a picture of our "floor" at the hostel b/c it was pretty crazy. It felt like walking through sand, b/c the floor wasn't even a floor, it was the ground covered in salt! ha!

Hi! It's me with the flamingos! It was super cold up there in the mountains out of the water, I can't imagine how cold it was in the water! Does anyone know if flamingos have special feet and legs to withstand the frigid temperatures of the water? It was amazing to see them so near the mountains and so far away from the ocean. We saw seagulls, too which was odd b/c we weren't near the Chilean coast or any large body of water except the lakes.

This was the group that we travelled with and Walter, our guide. It was a really good group. One couple was from France, and the other from Switzerland. They were super friendly and very easy going. I was glad to share the experience with them and Ross, too! hehe.

I go to work tomorrow and don't look forward to cancelling my regular schedule. B/c it means cancelling my individual tutorials with the kids. I'm having to do this so that I'll have time to work on my close of service reports and documents for Peace Corps and the orphanage. Luckily, the reports i have to write up for Peace Corps overlap a lot with the reports I'm doing for the orphanage. The documents will hopefully help the next volunteer that works at the orphanage whether the volunteer be a PC volunteer or a volunteer through the orphanage's own volunteer program.