Salar de Uyuni

Here are some pictures from the 3 day trek across the Salar de Uyuni and into the High Andes in this white jeep. One driver, one cook and 6 sardines/tourists bounded across the mud tracks towards the Andean watershed. The flat white Salar (Dry Salt Lake) was the most comfortable piece of driving; over 100 km across the flats visting the Isla de Pescado in the middle (there were no fish incidentally, only cacti). The rest of the trip was more painful and eventually the shock absorbers gave up on the last day.

Nights in the high Andes can be passed shivering in your bed, harassing llamas or playing card games with your sardine-comrades, who you have got to know intimately by this point. We managed to aquire enough wine to make this enjoyable, even in villages in the high Andes. Although even in this remote area we were still forced to listen to some children playing the pan pipes over dinner. We were forced to pay them off.

At 4800m the atmosphere is too thin to chase flamingos around a lake, so my pictures of them do not warrent uploading. I am very fit now though. Back in Uyuni, the only food available is Pizza, so we escaped at 6am the next day on a bus that travels down a river bed towards the South. The journey took us into a long canyon of red sandstone, to the town of Tupiza.

Forgetting the horrors of off road jeep travel, we found some living transport in Tupiza. The host told us that this would be like riding a bike, but my horse kept trying to eat things; I have never had this problem on a bike. Occasionally it tried to bite Lou, or Lou´s horse, which I eventually learnt how to control. After 5 hours of this and trotting back into town, I found that horses have painful drawbacks too.