Bolivia: Uyuni pt.1 The lagoons

Woke up crazy early today, dang it is cold this early. Well, Nathy made some breakfast while we waited for our ride. We took one of those 3 days, 2 nights guided tour of the salt desert. The plan was to cross the border over to Bolivia trough the desert of Uyuni.

Note: I was a little confused on how desert was spelled while writing this. Is it spelled “Dessert” or “Desert”? And I found this simple formula online. It goes like this: “Dessert is twice as good as the desert” (Submitted by Jackie, heh). What a great example to apply! Anyway, back to the story.

Our ride came early enough and off we went to the border in the middle of nowhere. At the border we had to change from a van to a 4x4. After doing all the paperwork between borders, it was breakfast time. After the breakfast we met our new driver and other people that were going to share the jeep with me and Nathy. We had a French couple, Charise and Zara, and well the driver whose name was Akilino. The route is quite popular for tourists that want some adventure so there were several other jeeps from other companies.

Well, Akilino secured our backpacks on top of the jeep and off we went. One of our first stops was to a lake (don’t remember the names of all those multiple lakes we visited). The lakes had names like the green lake, red lake, smelly lake, yeah, I kid you not, smelly lake.

Here we were at around 5000 m. Above sea level!

In the afternoon we arrived at the shelter were we were going to spend the night at. We were given a room with 8 beds made out of concrete with a thin mattress on top. At the shelter there was a gang of “Cholitas” making dinner for us. All of them wore a hat. Don’t know what they hid under those hats, but it must have been something valuable. While we were eating, rumors went by that they could have a secret heating device or they were hiding a big brain!  haha! Well, it could only be as simple as just a fancy hat J

 After dinner there was one more thing we had to do. That was to see another lake full of flamingos, Check out the pictures!

We got back to the shelter before nightfall to eat a hot meal. The sun was already disappearing in the horizon and the temperature was dropping pretty fast. After dinner we all started to feel the cold bite of the desert. Think the temperature dropped to around -14 degrees. That was not good, since I had not been able to get rid of this cold of mine. Yesterday I was feeling fine but today I’ve been spitting green goo all over the desert, yuck…. Anyway, I had to put on two t-shirts, two sweaters two pair of pants and grandmas poncho to keep warm. Later on, after drinking some booze with some other guys that were on another jeep, but making the same tour, we decided to go outside to watch the stars. Man, it is another thing to watch the stars in the desert. They looked almost as if you could reach out and grab them. Ah, one other thing I forgot to mention is that we were really high up, meaning that we were around 4000 meters above sea level. That also meant that the air was really thin and everything you did (like walking) made you totally breathless. That was a crazy experience, I had felt it before in Ecuador, but here it was ridiculous. I walked maybe a couple of paces and it felt as if I had been running for hours.   

Next up…

I feel like hell…