Our bus arrived in Uyuni at 8:00am and though we hadn't slept, we were upbeat about the day ahead. We grabbed our bags and began to head towards the Tunupa travel agency. I noticed that two girls who had gotten off our bus had the same envelope that we had with our tickets and sure enough, they were also in our group: Anne and Marley from the Netherlands. We finally found the tour agency and they told us to leave our bags there and go get some breakfast. We had two hours to kill until our tour left at 10:00am, so we stopped at a restaurant to get yogurt and coffee but more importantly to use their bathroom to change and brush our teeth.
We headed back to the agency, making sure that we were able to rent good sleeping bags for the trip ahead. Finally, everyone arrived and we piled into our jeep. The other people in our group of 6 were Ewan from the UK and Susie from Australia.
Our first stop was the train cemetery. This seemed like sort of a silly thing to stop and see but we took some pictures anyways. All the girls were promptly back at the car after 10 minutes, but Ewan wandered around for an additional 10 minutes and ended up getting lost, unable to determine which jeep was ours...clearly not a bright fellow.
Next we stopped int he city of Colchani which is where the salt from the nearby salt flats is brought so it can be refined. There was really nothing in the town to see. I thought we would learn about the refinery process but instead, the museum was full of giant salt animals...not that informative and basically just a big gift shop. We quickly moved on to the next thing.
We stopped at the beginning of the salt flats right outside of Colchani. Here you could find the locals scraping the salt into little pyramids. Apparently they do this to dry the salt, since the ground is all saturated with water. I felt bad climbing onto their pyramids but they didn't seem to mind.
The salt flats were formed by a 12,000km dried up lake. It takes hours to cross through them and it really looks like snow. We continued driving until we reached what is known as "Fish island". It is basically a land mass within the salt covered in cactus very similar to Saguaros. From there, we could get a great view of the massive salt flat surrounding us.
We also took some time to take some great salt flat perspective pictures. Our group was really fun and came up with some great ideas!
After our time on the salt flat, we headed to the hotel where we would be spending the night. I use the word "hotel" very loosely as it was just a 8 room place, but it was made entirely out of salt. Even the beds were made out of salt! I found this very interesting although it was annoying that the salt got into everything.
We settled in to warm up with some tea and cookies and wait for dinner. It was cold in this hotel but we knew that the real cold weather was coming the following day so we remained optimistic. One of the guides was nice enough to drive out and buy some beers for us since there was absolutely nothing around where we were staying, so we all played cards as we waited for dinner.
Dinner consisted of a vegetable soup, alpaca, quinoa and french fries. It was all pretty decent except for the alpaca which was so tough that you couldn't even chew it. We all passed on the alpaca and filled up on quinoa. The electricity in the hotel is turned off at 10:00pm, so everyone made sure to be in bed before that. I stayed up a little later (luckily I had my flashlight) to see how the hotel was in the dark. It was actually super creepy so I quickly headed back to bed which was luckily able to get warm in my sleeping bag and multiple blankets.
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