Salar de Uyuni

So, we just made it back from a four day tour of the Salar de Uyuni, this area in southwest Bolivia, and it was beautiful. We passed the town of San Vicente on the first day, the “supposed” town where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in a final shootout (depending on which story you believe) The next three days were filled with colorful mountains, a turquoise lake (due to the aresenic in the water), and red lake with flamingos (which I have only seen live in Las Vegas, so seeing them in the wild was quite cool), a couple volcanos, geisers, TONS of llamas and vicuñas, and of course, the actual salar itself. The salar is something like 12,000 sq. kilometers, and it is just sparkling. If you go during wet season (which we did not) there is a small layer or water covering it that reflects the sky, the mountains, everything. For us, the dry season, is was just a hard white sparkling layer of salt that gave you a freaky weird perception problem. We took all sorts of photos that look pretty funny, but unfortunately, the lady at this internet place says that I can´t use the CD with my photos now, so this one isn´t actually my picture–I just put it here to give you a good idea of what stuff looked like.

The llamas everywhere were so cute! They were these furry little buggers, and half of them had jewelry on since locals used the earrings and necklaces as markers to indicate which were their animals. So cute!

So, it looks like we are catching a midnight train to Oruro tonight with Abi and Luke, two Australians we met on the tour. From there, we are hopefully going to catch a quick bus back to La Paz where we will spend a few days and MAYBE climb a 6,000 meter mountain (almost 20,000 feet) Should be interesting!