A salty tour: salar de Uyuni

On Wednesday we left on our 'salt flat tour'. It's more like a tour of South Western Bolivia, since you only spend one afternoon on the actual salt flats. Plenty of time by the way, we got a bit bored. We did a 3 day tour ending in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.
On the first day the first stop was a train graveyard to see the trains used when Bolivia sad exporting its minerals before it realized that was stupid and it would make more money processing themselves. After everyone finished taking photos we then went to a small town on the edge of the salt flat to see how they process salt and have lunch. Them it was through the salt flat to 'Inca Wasy Island', a lump of soil in the middle of the salt flat. We walked over the island, where a lot of cacti grow, and then had time for 'funny pictures on the salt flats'. We were pretty uninspired, and hence got bored pretty quick. After all who hasn't taken photos that alter size perception. After this we went to our hostal for the night, which was mostly made of salt, including the bed and tables and chairs. It was actually a lot better than I was expecting, we had a private room with a toilet, but there was only one shower and it trickled.

Inca Wasy

The next day we stopped at a train track again to take some photos. This seems to be a popular thing to do. Then we drove for a long time. This is when the feeling of suffocating started. A combination of the other people in our car not liking wind, and sometimes dusty roads, meant we spend the majority of our time feeling too hot inside the car. Which makes you less appreciative of the view by the way. We stopped to look at a streaming volcano and the volcano field around it. We drove on a bit further and had lunch. We then drove to a large lagoon that smelt like prawns and had a lot of flamingoes but they flew away pretty quickly. From here we crossed either the highest or the second highest desert to get to some rock formation or something and then drove a lot more to Laguna Colorado, which has red water from the algae. Guess what, we drove some more, and went to some geysers, which were pretty cool and very smelly. Then we drove a lot more and got to the hostal. This one was more basic but still fine; dorms only, no running water, dodgey drop toilets (that were nuclear by the morning), no shower, and literally 1 piece of meat and mashed potatoes for dinner. There is a hot spring nearby so we swam in there before bed, getting out was painfully cold. And the sunset over the nearby lagoon was quite pretty. The company provided sleeping bags, but we didn't need them, we were always peeling layers of blankets off. This day our guide started to be a bit more antsy. He didn't answer questions if he was planning to say something about that topic later, like hours later. He also got a bit snappy when someone asked something he had said the day before, 'let's not repeat ourselves guys, okay'. It was hard not to notice that the guide from another group, but from the same company, was explaining a lot more about the area and also important information like what time dinner was! And our (larger) group was sitting by listening in because our guide had already given us our information, but not included some stuff. He seemed like he was putting in the least amount of effort possible.

Geysers

This morning, after breakfast (pancakes, surprisingly), we went straight to the Dali desert. Named after Salvador Dali's painting not the other way around. The Internet itinerary for Red Planet Expeditions, the one we went with, had that we would go into a volcano crater this morning, but we didn't. The last stop was the green lagoon, which was not very green because the wind stirring up the copper in the water makes it green, but there was no wind. So, we were unceremoniously dumped at the border to wait for our bus to San Pedro and here we are in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The tour was quite interesting but neither us would say it was one of the highlights of our trip, I think in the rainy season when the salt flat had a layer of water on it and becomes like a mirror it would be a lot more impressive.
We have booked a couple of tours here but it seems much the same as what we just came through in Bolivia so we think we might leave this slightly horrid tourist trap a bit early. I just hate the way everyone does things simply because it's what everyone else does.

Bonus round of our terrible perception photos

That's all for now, just filling in time.