Sallllt(take 2), Volcanoes, Mountains, Deserts, and Lagoons. Southern wildlands to Uyuni, Bolivia

So we started our three day adventure on Monday and ended on wednesday of this week. The first day detailed, hotsprings, desert scape admist mountains and volcanoes, and some cool coloured lagoons. All amazing, all breathtakingly beautiful and all sights filled me full of wonder. We had three jeeps full of people in our caravan: a wonderful french family, a bunch of people my age from around the world in the other, and our own newly formed band of friends that I mentioned in my previous post. That night a few people had a rough time adjusting to the elevation change of 2400m (San Pedro de Atacama also the driest desert on earth) to about 3650m. While they wretched and slept it off, the rest of us played card games and dice....intergrating everyoneś slightly different rules was very confusing at first, but we worked it out. A few of us had attempted to walk to this seemingly close by red lagoon that afternoon, but it was foolingly far away. Marielle and I had turned back 1/4 the way with the winds so harsh and strong, while a few more only made it 1/2 way then turning back, and the others made it and regretted it as soon as they returned to our little shelter nestled in the mountains- reporting terrible headaches.

 It was a good thing we turned back, the next morning we were driven there first thing haha. The red lagoon was massive and full of flamingos!! Very gorgeous! Michael from England, a very sharp witted individual, stood next to me and said, " Do you know why the lagoon is red?"...the algae I thought, but I let him go on, "The flamingos fight to the death, spilling loads of blood into the lagoon giving it itś colour."---haha makes sense I said, and then the blood tinges their white feathers pink right? "ohhhh completely!" he replied. I think our theory is pretty sound. We continued on to visit more lagoons and rock formations. All of us exclaiming throughout the day how wonderful it is to travel and appreciating the fact we are not working- yup life is pretty grand. We convinced our drivers after a long painful process to drive us to the Salt flats for sunrise the next day, so we had to drive an extra 1.5 hrs to Uyuni from the small town we were supposed to be staying....I got informed whilst I was showering that we were leaving in a few minutes for the rest of the drive!-haha but we got our way! That night the load of us sat down for a tasty meal before turning in early for the early start the next day.

The last morning, we awoke and drove just in time to await oh so patiently for the sun to come up. It was just lighting up the sky when we arrived in the middle of the vast expanse that is known as Salar de Uyuni. I plugged into my music and had Jonsi-Go Do playing while I pranced and danced around to keep warm-pretty wonderful moment. I shared another song (Ben Howard-Only Love) with some of the guys I stood cuddled around to keep warm with, they liked it so much they continued to sing even after it was done playing. The sunrise was much appreciated with the beauty and warmth it gave us. Once it was up high enough we began the photo shoot or prospective stance pictures- we had a ball doing them, some of the poses were a bit hard to hold though while the person taking the pictures got it just right! We then joined at the international flagged salt building where some locals invited some of the group to have a match of football(soccer)....surprisingly the boys won against the locals but they were certainly breathing more difficult than the Bolivians (due to the altitude). We visited the local market and the train cemetery shortly afterwards-where we climbed all over the wreckage, and swung in the swing they had fashioned on it! That summed up the Jeep tour fairly well, we were then left for our own devices in Uyuni. Stay tuned folks!