Jessie Goes….

We arrived last night to Uyuni, a cute little one horse town, basically there to offer gringos pringles, bottled water, cuban rum and the like.    We are taking the most common tour down here, a 4 day jeep trek into the altiplano, hitting the regions highlights.   Its a lot of driving, but if you are one for roadtrips, and aren´t that worried about really roughing it, than this is for you.  It is not for everyone.  

 The Uyuni Salt Pans are located just a few miles outside of town, and its actually pretty hard to describe the look of it.   Blinding, blinding, vast whiteness.   Words and pictures can´t do it justice, which is why its worth visiting with your own peepers, despite the lack of any comforts of home. 

The salt flats are located about 12k feet above sea level in the south western corner of Bolivia.    It is an area which was once connected to the ocean ages ago, and then after the creation of the Andes mountains, became a lake.  Huge amounts of years later, the water evaporated and all that was left was a vast plane of salt.  4,085 sq miles of salt, to be exact.  

 We are visiting in the tail end of the wet season.  Though people will tell you to come in winter (May-Sept), I completely disagree.   The tiny bit of water that lies on the vast flatness of salt creates the worlds largest mirror.   It is a little bit of unreality in a very unreal situation.   The photos, as many of you might have seen, are incredible. 

Unfortunately, our accomodations that night, in a small pueblo called Allotta, were, in my experience the worst I had ever experienced.   They stank.  They were dark, moldy, concrete floors which remained damp, and a bathroom/outhouse that is basically unspeakable.   However, we did survive.  The four of us quickly exited our caves and spent the entire evening playing made up games, pictionary, celebrity and anything else we could play with only a pen and paper.   We also drank an entire bottle of rum.  Yep, the four of us.  So much for listening to the travel docs suggestion to keep drinking to a minimum at high altitudes.  He apparently had never been in this town.

All in all, a lot of fun in dank cave hostel.  Thank you travel companion gods. 

There are four of us now, Mark, myself, Hannah, and Aaron, our guide.  We are on our way down to the Uyuni area to see the salt flats, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Bolivia in the first place.    To get there, from La Paz, is a full day of travel.   First, a 3 hour bus ride to Oruro (try saying that a few times fast), then a train ride to Uyuni.   

In order to have to most authentic experience possible, the bus broke down promptly about 1 hour into our destination, and our bags and our bus companions got to hang out Bolivian roadside style, waiting for our new bus coming from, you guessed it, exactly where we had left from an hour before.

The net effect of our busride is that instead of making to Oruro with an 2 hours to spare, we had about 1.4 minutes.    The busdriver was kind enough to drop us of right at the train station, but I´m pretty sure this was a first ever undertaking of bus to train connection.  The bus got stuck momentarily on a side street getting to the station, and we ended up taking out a couple of branches from every tree on the block.  Huge scratches down the left side bus windows!

The train was a big step up from the bus, and had a bathroom.  A huge plus for a seven hour train ride.  The big highlight of the train, I suppose, is this bathroom.    Train bathrooms, if they are reasonably clean, can be pretty cool, considering you are going to the loo with great scenery passing right beside you. Its way better than the newspaper.   This train bath was particularly (unusually) clean, and didn´t smell at all….a rarity anywhere.      Why?  Because the plumbing didn´t exist.  Yep right onto the tracks….you can see them if you choose to take a look down the toilet.     First time for everything, peeing on train tracks.

Getting to Bolivia isn´t actually all that hard. We had a big scare that our backpacks might not make it because they were insisting at the gate that we couldn´t bring them on, while we watched half a plane full of people drag on bags 34 times their size. Finally, because the woman finally thought through the fact that taking them now, and trying to send them on through to La Paz was not at all likely to happen, we got a break. She agreed to gate check them. And fortunately when we arrived in Miami they were there, safe n sound. And, the La Paz flight had no problem with them coming aboard.

The Miami- La Paz portion of the flight was an interesting group of people. 21 youngsters from Montana were on with us. They had the look of fresh faced religious zealotry, and clearly had a)never been on a flight before today, b)never been out of Montana before today, and c)had no idea what they were in for. Their leader, a nice enough guy, also had no idea, and it was considered a stunning success when they all filled out their customs forms. I was thoroughly amused by them (Mark and I were sitting in the middle of the group). Mark was not thrilled. But, to give him credit, the weirdest of the group was sitting right beside him. Anyhow, their missionary goals I hope had a good purpose, and I really hope they get as much from this process as they plan to give, and open their minds to something other than red type politics and cornfedness. Sorry, I can´t help it. They oozed complete worldly un-education. Lets hope that saying is true, that Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

Anyhow, enough of that. Easy peasy flight, minus the one armed guy behind me with the sick kid getting up every 10 minutes to run to the loo. Poor things. But it didn´t make for a good sleep. I was still in a great mood getting off the plane, looking for my coca tea. The ´getting out of the airport process´here took all of 3 minutes. And things, all things, are ridiculously cheap.

We are staying at the Hostel Rosario, which is more of a Hostel cum hotel..individual rooms, but the whole lounge, internet cafe (free!) and right at the top of the witches market, with the dead baby lama fetuses. Our little room was spick and span, but sparse. Still very nice. We immediately passed out for a 4 hour nap (it was still only 7 am).

So far the rest of our day was filled up with wandering around the compact center of the city. Its very photogenic. (minus the dead llamas). And really, given the vast wealth difference between us and them, we were left completely alone. By the way..it was like 90 degrees in the sun. We heard 40 at night 65 during the day. Total crap. If you are coming here, bring stuff for all seasons. The weather channel also said it was going to rain, but their are only the slightest of puffy clouds on the horizon. So either, the weather service here is really bad, or we just experienced the warmest day La Paz has ever had.

We are going out for dinner and drinks tonight. Maybe just ´drink´. I´m pretty lightheaded. We are hanging out in the city most of tomorrow too, so if this turns out to be a bad plan, and drink becomes drinks it won´t be the end of the world.