Uyuni or the moon?

After a gruelling 10 hour bus ride from  La Paz, the last 3 hours of which was on a dirt track literally, we arrived in the tourist makeshift town of Uyuni. I was mainly concerned that I was losing brain cells from my brain rattling in my skull, and that's not an exaggeration.

The aim was to stay the night before embarking on a salt flat tour, yes we said we wouldnt do a bloody tour again, but it's the only way to see it. However due to protests etc the following day, tours were cancelled. So not wanting to stay in Uyuni a minute more than we had to, we got straight on the mission of finding space on a tour that day.

What we hadn't really realised, was that over the 3 days 2 nights, you travel 1000 km, that's a lot of driving when you consider there aint no roads, so it's a slow and very bumpy ride. There was quite a bit of stale mate over the next 3 days with our fellow 4 passengers of who was getting the cramped back seats. There was a lot of moaning, fake car sickness and illness going on in order to avoid it. Not from us I might add.

The landscape was amaZing. You could have been on the moon or mars, it's so freakish and bland. I couldnt get over how quiet it was, it was literally lifeless, no bird song or even human noise pollution. Nothing. and the stars were out of this world. Total freezing pitchblackness and no clouds this high up. There were mountains but only on the horizon, so you literally had a dome planetarium cramed with stars I've never seen. Trouble was you only lasted 2 or 3 minuetes before the dry ice cold threatened to drill to your bones. I've never been so cold or worn that much to bed, it wasn't windy or bitter, it literally did just freeze your lungs on inhalation.

Now I don't think we picked the best company although we did get it cheap. Our driver didn't speak let alone Spanish, he had a terrible stutter and obviously tried to avoid talking all together. The food was pretty rank, so I had to ration my one packet of crisps and milky way (mars bar to you). All the other groups seemed to get fruit salad and wine while one example menu of ours was stake bread with dry spaghetti and pure onion sauce, no drink or pudding, yuk. I had a spaghetti sandwich which was foul. Oh and the first night was spent in a salt hostel, with no hot water and one toilet for 30 people which someone had kindly pebble dashed by the time I came to use it. By the end of the first night I had to put plasters on my finger tips because they were cracking open from touching the salt! Why would you want a hostel made out of it! 

All in all, we were with some cool people, well it could have been a whole lot worse. And the scenery was like nothing I've ever seen, completely arid landscape surrounded by greeny grey mountains with huge lakes coloured vivid red in the centre, with baby pink flamingos feeding on it, not to mention the guisers we walked through at 5 am which were amazing. Looking back at the pictures, it comes across really well, so take a look (via gregs blog when he sorts it)

We returned to Uyuni at 5 on the 3rd day, and after 8 hours of driving, a bus journey was out of the question so we found a hostel for a well needed hot shower and warm nights sleep, which we got after an amazing gourmet pizza where we bumped into friends from Lima, Pete and Leigh.