COOKING AND BRAAAAPING AROUND THE WORLD: First day of Uyuni Salt Flat

DAY-193-194

5/13-14/2012

We were both very slow moving to say the least, packing up all of our gear and I locked up my bike in the court yard stored all of my gear in their luggage storage. We had decided we would head to the Salt Flats which is a 12hr bus ride, we decided on the night bus. Our bus was at 7pm we walked around and got dinner and snacks. We got on the bus, I watched a few movies on the lap top and Mike was asleep within minutes. We arrived the next morning 2.5hrs earlier than expected, we got there around 4:30am. We didn’t want to pay for a hostel so we found a nice park bench and wrapped up in our sleeping bags for a little shut eye. We were woken by a lady sweeping around our benches I heard Mike ask her for a cup of coffee she was not impressed I just laughed. We walked around getting attacked by tour companies, we decided on one and went and got some food and coffee. Our tour left at 9:30am, our land cruiser took us to pick up 4 others to join our group. There was us, a couple from Portland Oregon although she was from Holland originally and two girls from Germany.

Our first stop was a train graveyard which was awesome with amazing back drop of desert/ mountains crazy. We took some funny pictures, mike kept trying to pick up old train parts I just laughed and took pictures of him. They took us to a few small stops and towns on the way out to the flats. Once we finally hit the flats there was a lot of water at times to get through I was glad that my bike was not riding through these rivers and small lakes of salt water. We stopped for lunch and to have fun with pictures, because of the landscape you can take some hilarious pictures.

We continued on and at one point our guide was lost in the middle of a huge shallow lake of salt water with no reference points. He finally found his way out but as soon as we hit dry land we got out for pics and we all notice we had a flat tire. He went to change the tire and snapped the tire iron trying to loosen the lug nuts. We waited for another vehicle to help us out and were back on the road again. We made it to a small shack where we would stay the night with a nice mountain/ hill in the back so we all decided to hike up it and watch the sunset. We had amazing views of the salt flats from up top with the sun setting we hiked back down for food and sleep. Spent the night playing cards and getting to know each other. Oh yeah the shack was made up of all salt, the beds, chairs, tables, walls everything made from salt brick it was awesome.