Our drivers had given us 2 choices for day 3 of our tour: either the usual route visiting a bunch of lakes and the much-photographed Árbol de Piedra (basically a rock that is supposedly shaped like a munted tree), or a more “hands on” route featuring a bunch of interestingly shaped rocks where we could do a bit of walking and climbing. We all agreed that the second option sounded more appealing after 2 days of mostly sitting. This choice did not disappoint. We spent an excellent morning clambering over all sorts of structures without any safety equipment in a way that my mum and various tourism safety committees back home would strongly disapprove of (dpn't worry mum! No one got hurt!). The drivers were super helpful with showing us good hand and footholds in the rocks, while yelling “Chinchilla! Chinchilla!” as encouragement after we kept spotting furry little chinchillas scampering amongst the rocks. Modesta hung out in the car, as the climbs were “much too easy” for her.
Rock shaped like a camel!
Rock shaped supposedly like the World Cup
There were lots of hoof and paw prints in this half-cave thingy, including some suspiciously large feline-looking ones
Quinoa!
Going up!
Eep upskirt shot! Admittedly I only wore this skirt because I ran out of other pants and these tights had a weird non-fitting crotch that needed to be hidden
Made it!
Strange shapes in a rock overhang
There was this weird-as lake in the middle of heaps of rocks in an otherwise totally dry area. So strange, so cool!
Aww check out the Mona Lisa smile on this llama. I bet it knows a secret that you don't know.
Aww wee tiny llama. It looks so soft, I just want to give it cuddles
On top of another thing I climbed which I perhaps shouldn't have
This looks like a promotional shot for some shitty nu-metal album or something
O hai there, more flamingoes. Fancy seeing you guys here
Throughout the morning, I had faced my fear of heights, but I was insufficiently prepared to face my fear of old chicken. When Modesta presented us with chicken for lunch, my pre-weakened digestive system (which had been feeling on-and-off ever since the food poisoning episode in Salta) was extremely skeptical. Wtf was this chicken doing for 3 days in a hot vehicle?! Or was this fresh chicken that she had somehow managed to wrangle in the desert?! Helmut claimed that it was some of the flamingos we saw yesterday. I ate it anyway. It was yum and I did not die in a salmonella poo explosion. The afternoon saw us race onwards to and beyond Uyuni, as Helmut was scared that the salt hostel near the salt flats would be full if we got there too late. We still found time to stop at the train graveyard outside Uyuni and have a decent look through the rusted corpses of the retired trains. For some reason, this area was swarming with flies, and the rest of the drive to our accommodation halfway between Uyuni and the salt flats was spent waging a valiant battle against the insectoid horde that had invaded our car.
Choo Choo!
Don't ask me what a Crous is, I have no idea
Rusty...
It turned out that Helmut’s fears were unfounded, as the only people that got to the hostel before us were the other half of our group in the other car. When they said “salt hostel”, they weren’t kidding. The buildings and the furniture inside the building were all made from blocks of salt. This is fucking crazy and we questioned its long-term viability (salt + water = hmmmm….), and our skepticism was proven not to be unfounded when someone lifted up the tablecloth on the dining table to reveal that a huge chunk of it had dissolved off! Insane stuff. We had previously been warned that the accommodation was going to be very basic, with no running water or electricity. This was a huge lie: we got private rooms instead of having to dorm, the power was plentiful, the toilets flushed, and the kitchen even had an over much to the delight of Modesta, who proceeded to cook up a vege lasagne for dinner with the help of the French+Spanish couple from the other car. The rest of us played a crazy card game known as the “travelling Israeli card game” which the German+Spanish couple learned from a bunch of travelling Israelis. We were interrupted by the arrival of a group that unfortunately had within its ranks a super loud, super rude, super American-accented man who proceeded to yell at his poor wife about how boring his day on the salt flats was (wtf this is one of the greatest natural wonders of the world!), how insufficient the accommodation was (see my notes above about how awesome it was), why their group wasn’t being served dinner as early as ours was (we had arrived a good hour before them), etc. He then insisted on talking to us during dinner about whether there were any rivers he could go fishing in for the rest of the trip (he was doing the tour in the opposite order to us), and condescendingly replied “you’d be surprised” when we told him that the tiny rivers we came across were barely a foot deep and not likely to house the one special Amazonian fish species he was looking for (not to mention that we were in the altiplano, 4000m above the bloody Amazon). Thankfully, Helmut, bless him, procured some wine for us to have with dinner, which helped take the edge off this douchebag’s rantings, and we went to our salty beds tipsy (one feels the intoxication much faster at high altitude) nice and early in preparation for our 5AM departure time in the morning.
Everything ere is edible, even the Jeremy in the doorway. But that is called "cannibalism" and is frowned upon in most societies.
Even the bed was made of salt
Bonus Jesus for extra XP: Check out this epic Jesus bus we came across in the middle of nowhere!
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