Paulie and I are currently resting back in civilisation in our quaint little 1 bedroom apartment after an exhuasting 10 hr overnight bus ride from the town of Uyuni (quite a desolate place and was only notable for it´s airport and train cemetery) to La Paz which is the 2nd capital of Bolivia. According to the safety pamphlet, the total distance between the two towns is only 560Km, so here I was thinking it won´t be as long as our previous overnight ride but as we soon discovered, our ride was over uncovered roads!
The first 3 hours of the ride before the bus hit sealed roads was something similar to flying when the pilot says put your seat belts on due to turbulence! Lucky I had charged my Iphone at the bus depot so was able to listen to a few trance sets, imagining the dimly lit green lights of the bus shaking were like lasers in a club, else I would´ve had a massive headache :) The rest of the trip was fine though I was constantly being woken up by people going to the toilet at the back of the bus. We felt sorry for a Belguim couple since one of them got carsick and they asked if they could swap with us right at the front. I hope our generosity is paid back later in the trip!
So what have we been doing for the past 3 days, you might ask? Well we have trekked across the driest desert on earth - San Pedro de Atacama, with our spanish-only speaking tour guide/driver Fabio and saw spectacular natural scenery all unscathed, and without the use of the satellite phone I insisted on having as part of the tour.
There were giant volcanos towering over numerous coloured lagoons, stone rocks that were the inspiration for Savaldor Dali, geysers that bubbled up smelly gas (which of course I blamed on Paulie), and the Salar de Uyuni which is the blinding white salt flats that strech for miles in the distance and make you lose your sense of direction. We even managed to go swimming twice, once in a lagoon that was unique for the fact it had a higher salt concentration that the Dead Sea (so we couldn´t sink no matter how hard we tried) and could stand in the water upright, and another at a thermal hot spring.
We saw so many lagoons that they all start to blur together however it was seeing the flamingos (that weren`t statues in front of someone´s garden or golf course) that impressed us. Considering we were in a desert and there wasn´t much wildlife around, the sheer number at the lagoons were such a sight that both Paulie and I were a little trigger happy with our cameras taking up close shots/videos of these birds (so much so, we`ll probably have to cull a few to have enough storage space for the rest of our trip).
The next chapter of our journey is on to Copacabana, (not the one in the Barry Manalow song) but the Bolivian town where we head into Lake Titicaca, and then onto Cusco where the real trekking begins. All I can say is that I´m lucky to have Paulie as a travel partner and hopefully she won´t leave me on the side of the mountain :)
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