We started our trip in a small town called Tupiza (which even had its own pizza place called Two Pizza!) with a company called Valle Hermosa and I'm so happy we found that company. We set out as two jeeps, 9 people, and we were so lucky that they were all young and fun! The hostel we had stayed in in Tupiza had a group setting out and they were two old boring couples. Phew! on our first day we drove through some amazing landscape, circling around mountains, spotting llamas and even an ostrich!! Our first night we stayed in a tiny village made of mud. And with one small solar panal on the roof of our room we only had enough energy to light the one lightblub in our room for a few hours.
We woke the next morning at four and since our light bulb was dead we got ready in the dark and set off again. Our first stop was a ghost town, abandoned when disease broke out. They say the devil lives there now. It was a very creepy place but the cold got to me and I had to jump back into the jeep and wait for the others! As the sun rose we were again navigating around monsterous hills and climbing up to the snow. Our jeep got suck in a frozen river and the other had to pull us out! Day two continued onto our jeep passing huge rocks that had been spat our of volcanoes thousands of years ago and were now landed all around us, we entered the National Park and passed the Dali landscape (a nickname given to the landscape which influenced the painters style), we had a pre-lunch relaxation in the hot springs, we passed lagoons of bright blue, of green and of pink and white, we covered our mouths from the egg smelling, bubbling geysers and we watched gorgeous flamingos relax as the sun went down. And more llamas! Our second night had a better supply of electricty but we had no running water AKA flushing our toilets with a bucket of water. Fun!
On day three we got the luxury of waking up at 5:30 and our first stop brought the old geology nerd out of me. We stopped to look at a rock tree (rock that looks like a tree!), but we were surrounded by lots of surreal looking rocks formed through wind erosion. Our second, but not the last, experience of jeep failure happened when our jeep wouldn't start and as other tours arrived at the rock tree they seemed to find our jeep a better photographic opportunity than the gorgeous landscape we were surrounded by! After we got going again, things didn't last long. We struggled up a large sandy hill and as we neared the top the truck just gave up. The men worked on it for about an hour while I sat in the heat of the other jeep. After successfully fixing...whatever was wrong... we headed for more gorgeous lagoons that were finged with ice, watched more flamingos, peered up at a smoking volcano, crossed railway tracks that disappeared into the nothing, and throw in a flat tyre for good measure, our final destination was an amazing salt hostel on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni. Everything was made of salt, beds, tables, bar, walls, lighting fixture etc. It was unreal. And even though it felt like we were surrounded by ice we were nice and toasty. Here we enjoyed some whiskey and played cards till they turned the lights out at 10:30 and we had to find our way to our rooms in the dark.
Day Four was Salt Flats day, the thing I'd been looking forward to most when daydreaming about South America from my bedroom in Ireland, but after the previous three days and all we saw I was a bit sceptical of if they could impress me. But I didn't need to worry. As we drove away from normal land the sun rose and we got the full impact of being surrounded by nothing but white. The mountains which edged the huge salt field seemed to float because of the mirage. Our first stop was a large island in the middle of the flats, where we had breakfast in the freeeeezing cold and then got to climb the island which was covered in cacti. After the gorgeous views from the top of the island we drove farther into the white nothingness and it was time for the funny photos. They are a lot harder to capture than they look. Had great fun trying. There were lots of holes in the salt with rivers underneath and our guide plunged his hand into a particularlly big hole and pulled out gorgeous pink, white and black salt crystals.
The place was amazing. The whole four days were just amazing. It's kind of hard to put it all into words but I tried. I even found it impossible to get it down in my own diary. The photos tell a better story.
