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A few days ago we finally drove out of Argentina for the last time (I have SO many Arg. stamps in my passport, I will have to get new pages when I get home.)  We drove through the corner of Chile for about 140 km and then finally into Bolivia….let me tell you, the border is incredibly remote and rough…dirt roads immediately (and so far exclusively!)

We climbed slow and hard all day and the altitude was really a killer.  I had a terrible headache and was feeling really sick.  We went over 16500 feet high…ouch!  We slept in a place called Refugio at that altitude and  I was on dinner and breakfast duty…suffering for sure.  I took half a Diamox and that seemed to help.  They keep telling us to drink LOTS of water.

The next day we all felt much better just by going down  10,000 feet.   We drove through the most amazing scenery…we saw green, white, red, and blue salt lakes, geysers, fumaroles , etc.  They keep saying it looks like the moon.  We stopped for lunch along a creek that had flamingos…cool.  In the afternoon, we hit a roadblock set up ona bridge.  Some miners were striking by trying to draw attention to their plight.  There were trucks that had been there a couple of days so our leaders went up and told them they had a passenger with chest pains and had to get through to the hospital…guess who had to play the sick one????  They put an oxygen tank and mask on me…they really only picked me because I happened to be sitting in the seat next to the front door.  Well the strikers just shrugged and didn´t care at all.  The blocked road was only one hour from our destination.

So we went to Plan B.  We backed up and turned off the dirt road and just headed across the desert.   We had special guide with us because Bolivian High Altiplano has just dirt tracks, no actual roads.  He would tell our drivers which tracks to take.  We drove over the most beautiful deserts that kept changing.  Sometimes there were absolutely NO plants or grass of any sort and other times there was just scrub grass.  The mountains in the distance were stunning and kept changing too.   We got stuck in dry riverbeds and soft dirt a couple of times and we all had to get out and dig and push, etc.  It was fun because we knew we would get out.  It ended up taking us about 7 hours to get to Uyuni, our destination.  It was dark but once we could see city lights in the distance, we were happy.  It was a very long afternoon but absolutely a fantastic journey!

We arrived at a very nice hotel in Uyuni with a great pizza restaurant attached.  A very nice change from empanadas.

Today we went in Toyota Landcruisers out to the Uyuni de Salar…the world´s biggest salt flats….that is putting it mildly!  They are over 12,000 square kilometers.  It took us 2 hours to get out to an island near the center…driving straight across the salt.   The island was made of ancient coral and covered in giant ancient cactus…like 900 years old!  We took crazy pictures out on the salt because with endless white, the perspective does strange things when you line up the camera to have something close and then people far away to make it look like you are standing on a beer can, for instance.  People spent hours fooling around with it.  The salt flats were very interesting and beautiful….and special for sure!

Hanging in the town of Uyuni tonight…driving up to Potosi tomorrow…hopefully no more roadblocks but I guess that is not uncommon here in Bolivia.

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