Sunrise, Salt Flats and Silly Photos

4:30am is not generally a nice time of night. Even approaching it from earlier in the evening, it tends to be a time for exhaustion to raise its ugly head, but when it's a time to awaken, it is just plain horrible. Still, spurred on by the prospect of sunrise on the world's biggest salt flats, we managed to get up and loaded onto the vehicles and headed out into the darkness. Again I was glad of Carlos' experience in the job, as the route we took was totally unmarked and frequently seemed to involve random turns off the track we'd been following. It was over an hour's transit through the dark before we took up station on the salt flats, dug out our cameras, wrapped up as warm as we could manage and watched the slow arrival of dawn. Again, we appeared to have beaten the competition to the punch, as numerous other vehicles roared past us as the light gradually crept onto the eastern horizon. Suffice to say that the sunrise was gorgeous, and I won't try and describe it - you can make your own minds up when the photos are eventually online.

Once we'd taken ou fill of sunrise pictures, we packed back into the Land Cruisers and carried on to the Isla Incahuasi, where we climbed up to the mirador to take in the view across the salt flats whilst the drivers got breakfast ready. Breakfast in this case turned out to contain pancakes, which had presumably been cooked back at our accommodation, and after a couple of these and some hot chocolate, I was ready to take more photos, in this case concentrating on the kind of "comedy" perspective pictures for which the salt flats are brilliant (e.g. people apparently falling into a glass of orange juice, or a bunch of us apparently marching into a Pringles tube). After that, we had another brief photo stop out in the middle of the flats, and another at the only salt hotel still operating on the Salar (and that one has been asked to close for environmental reasons), before we hit solid ground again on our way into Uyuni.

Back on solid ground turned out to mean a souvenir-shopping stop as soon as we hit the town of Colchani - I haven't yet worked out what, if anything, I want to get from here in Bolivia, and I hardly had any local currency at this point anyway, so no purchases for Pat, but Lauren in our jeep decided to buy a wollie hat with little "llama ears" on the top. It kind of suits her, but I wouldn't be seen dead wearing one! After this, the jeeps split for a bit, with Emilio's crew having lunch in Colchani and the rest of us heading on to one of Uyuni's slightly weirder attractions, the Train Cemetery. This consists basically of a whole bunch of rusting, collapsing old steam locomotives and rolling stock, taken onto a branch line outside the city and basically left there to collapse. The old Engineering student in me found this kind of sad, and I was sorried enough about scratches and tetanus etc (despite having the jab) that I didn't really feel like scrambling around on the old rust-buckets and getting my photo taken, which was the principal activity there.

After our dead trains, we headed into Uyuni city centre, where Carlos pointed us in the direction of markets, ATMs etc whilst he got our lunch cooked up. In the company's offices, but there you go. I was overjoyed, having heard rumours the ATM was out of order, to find the thing working, and also to be able to check my e-mails quickly (for someone like me, 3 days away from my mails feels like a loooong time!). We then had a final filling lunch before bidding farewell to Estrella del Sur, and checking in to our various accommodations - I, along with the majority of the group, was in the HI in town, which was reasonably well-priced (45 Bs, about 4 pounds fifity, for a single room) and not too far to walk back to the bus offices, given I had already decided there was no real reason to spend more than a night in Uyuni itself (from what I've seen, just about the only reaction most other Bolivians have to mentioning the town of Uyuni is to mention quite how cold it is - that's it, that's apparently all it's famous for in its own country). Unfortunately, one of the other things Uyuni is known for internationally is its dryness, which equates to the hostel enforcing a "one shower per night, maximum seven minutes per shower" rule, with an attendant lady with the keys controlling access to the shower-rooms! Still, this was enough to get the dust and stench of the trail off me, and after having a shave as well I felt slightly more human when I met up with the others again in the evening to go for dinner. As luck would have it, our first choice place was closed, but we found another one, and had a nice meal before collapsing as one might expect of a group that had been up since 4:30am...