Salar de Uyuni

We have made it to La Paz (remember, not the official capital) after a 4-day tour of the largest salt flat in the world called Salar de Uyuni in western Bolivia. Salt flat really just means a huge flat land in the middle of really high mountains covered all in salt. I could make up some scientific sounding explanation about how it came to exist but I am not too sure because our guide was - to say the least - not exactly chatty and would not impart too much information on any of the sights that we saw. So here is what we saw: the salt flat, which is an endless, blinding white plain (about an eighth of the size of Hungary - quite an eerie and otherworldly scenery, I must say, especially at sunrise when apart from me and Andrea there were no living beings in sight for miles and miles; some cool geyser at almost 5000 meter (yes, higher than the Mont Blanc, if I remember correctly); a bunch of lakes, including one that is red due to some special algae; and loads of flamingos that are pink because of these same algae. It was a beautiful and very unusual scenery, but the trip was (again) a bit of a rough and ready affair, especially due to the freezing temperatures (one night it was about 25 below zero), the burning sun during the day and the shitty 4WD that the unbelievably disorganized Bolivian tour operators chose to give our group. They do not seem to have the whole tourism thing quite down yet, but at least when they screw you over it is only by a couple of dollars...

The big advantage of these trips is that you realize how without the comforts of civilization you really are at the mercy of the elements, and your start appreciating those same comforts much more. I mean, I have not p*ssed in a bush as many times in the previous 15 years as I have done in the past four days...but, I am proud to say that we were not the biggest whiners, although you do get a lot of comfort out of a good ten-minute collective whining session when your fingers and toes are so frozen that you cannot move them. Looking back, all that suffering in those hardcore pioneer camps that I attended in the mid-1980s thanks to my primary school Russian teacher, do not seem to have been in vain: it is hard to shock me with lack of comfort. And to give credit to my dear father as well: it might be that the couple of family rowing trips organized by him (with varying degrees of success), also helped to train me for future self-inflicted trials and tribulations.

Our group consisted of pretty cool, easygoing people, so there were no problems there. I will not bore anyone with a detailed account of the horrendous bus trips that we have to subject ourselves to to get from one place to another: suffice it to say, that they involve a lot of intimate physical contact with people you would not necessarily choose to spend time with in the same room; a lot of freezing; and a lot of worrying about surviving without a fatal car accident due to road conditions. So far, so good though. No real complaints.