Salar de Uyuni Trip: Day 3

To some extent, day three was just more of the same, except prettier, perhaps. Hence the many photos. At the start of the day I was feeling a bit sick from the altitude again so David insisted I join him in chewing coca leaves again. It's also good for your digestion, he told me, since I had just finished breakfast... and it's good for working, good for staying awake, good for concentrating... in fact, he told me, it's good for todo. I think he had already been chewing his mouthful for some time. This time he offered me a little piece of what looked like a small stone to put in my mouth along with the leaves; a catalizador he told me. This time, instead of slowly building alertness as with a cup of coffee, my cheek went numb and I felt instantly really awake, but then the leaves in my mouth seemed to be "done" not long after. The catalizador didn't taste very nice; I suppose it was some sort of alkali, perhaps lime, and, from the back, Tina informed me that it makes your teeth go black and fall out. Certainly David's teeth were in a state. I thought I'd give the catalizador a miss in future.

Another mineral lake

Che

More flamingos in a thermal lake

Flamingos and Volcano

It was more mineral lakes, more volcanoes, and more flamingos. Soon we were requesting no more flamingos; we have enough photos of flamingos we insisted, but every time David told us that these ones would be more tame and we would get better photos; and he was right. Why he didn't just take us to the last really tame flamingos and forget the rest, I don't know.

David and Abi walking over minerals

Flamenco y Volcan

Hot lake

The wheels

More minerally mountains

Not much of a road

Surely this should be Dali's Desert?

After the flamingos in Laguna Colorada, we came to some much more distorted and interesting rock formations in the desert, than those in the Desierto de Dali the previous day. Here David introduced us to photos locos, which I think is a course they must do in guide school. All the guides know how to get the best shops of people doing silly things, but their favourite is to take photos with an unusual perspective, making it look like the object of the photo is much larger or smaller than it really is. I believe this all may have started with people holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and pinching the top of the Taj Mahal, but it probably goes back to the dawn of photography. The main attraction in this part of the desert is the Arbol de Piedra which David instructed us each in turn to pretend we were holding. He didn't make a very good job of mind so I didn't bother putting it up, but there are plenty more photos locos for the Salar itself. Normally I would have been embarrassed by such behaviour, but months of witnessing Chinese tourists has completely desensitised me to extreme posing.

Photos Locos no.2

El Arbol de Piedra

Boogeyman from Nightmare Before Xmas?

A wee walk by the lake

The previous day, we had passed several vicuñas, which are another of the four species of camelids living in Bolivia, where llamas and alpacas are the most common and only two to have been domesticated. Vicuña, by contrast, are wild and rare, David told us, and there is a program to protect them from extinction, so all hunting had been banned for some time. Of course we wanted photos of them, but David had been keen to stick to his timetable the previous day, and we had been unable to take any photos. So, this day, I was waiting for an opportunity and as soon as I spotted one I asked if we could stop and we all took photos. If I'd known how many we would see, I might not have bothered with that first one.

First vicuña caught on camera

Another mineral lake with....

... FLAMINGOS!

Yup , flamingos

There were some flamingos

More vicuñas

Ffff... flamingos

Flamingos!

Would you believe it - flamingos?

Explosive lake

How did they come up with the name?

My stomach had been giving me trouble all day, despite having made it for seven months in Asia with barely mild indigestion. Argentinians had warned us about the food in Bolivia, telling us we should be very careful, but I had thought the tour would be fine. Throughout the day, I discovered that everybody else also had a bit of a stomach upset. I suspected last night's chicken. But it could have been the humitos, who knows? After many many flamingos over several small Lagunas, we came to what David seemed to think was something of a climax: an active volcano, still smoking. It was quite nice, but not really much different from any of the other volcanoes we had seen; just a little wisp of smoke coming out of the top.

Vicuñas in front of mineral lake and volcano

Vicuña AND flamingos

Smoking Volcan Ollague

Abi helps with the driving

What's that reflected in Jo's sunglasses?

Oh, it's me and a smoking volcano

Joanne and volcano

New Nazca Lines?

Finally we reached our destination for the day: a salt hotel. Joanne had read something about a salt hotel being illegal, so we were a bit apprehensive about it, although it was very nice and it was also the first time on the trip that we could have hot water showers. There were a few other groups staying in the hotel and we noticed that, just like the previous day, and at lunch, everyone seemed to have nicer food than us, although they were all complaining about not getting enough water. Our food had been pretty awful and now it seemed we all had food-poisoning. To irritate us further, every time we had a meal, including breakfast, at least two litres of fizzy drinks were brought out. Why couldn't they forget about the fizzy drinks and just give us more water? Clearly people from the first world do not have as sweet a tooth as South Americans.

Salt bedroom

Salt Livingroom

written by

The Happy Couple on October 21, 2009 from Atulcha, Bolivia

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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