Monday, July 27, 2015

7/24/15: Salar de Uyuni, Day 2

We got up to leave at 6 am – way too early, in my opinion. On the bright side, the sunrise was incredible – all kinds of colors over the horizon. Wow. This day was mainly full of visits to lagoons – gorgeous waters, and many of them with a unique sort of twist! The colors, the flamingos, all made for incredibly picturesque views.

The Arbol de Piedra, which was one of our main stops, was also awesome! They were basically a huge pile of large rocks, one of which had been made to look like a tree.

By the time that we left, it was getting really cold (mainly from the wind). A little bit before we arrived at our next accommodation for the night, the car had a major mishap. The steering rod – I’m not sure the actual name, but the rod that allows you to control the direction of the wheels – detached from the bottom of the car on the right side. Our driver had to run to the hotel (thankfully within sight) and borrow another vehicle to bring us there. He went back to try to fix it while we ate a snack and dinner and just hung out.

I think the two Brazilians wanted to repeat last night, but this new group that we came with was not up for drinking, since many of them were experiencing some problems adjusting to the altitude. It was also a lot colder in this hotel than the one before (along with no water even in the bathrooms?!), which made a lot of them go to sleep early. There was a Portuguese girl who had a really, really terrible lisp-sounding accent when speaking Spanish, and I couldn’t tell if her lisp was natural or if it came from Portuguese, which is spoken with that sound a lot. It annoyed me, almost as much as the other Portuguese guy bothering me about why Daniel and I aren’t dating, or relying on a million stereotypes to describe everyone he sees. Oh well.


Our driver came back and shared the news with us about the car situation – they called Uyuni for a replacement car, but there had been no contact for a while and we were going to operate on the assumption that we would have no car the next day. We would borrow the car from another group (and have to leave at 4am rather than the original 5) and then split up the group later, when they would need that car again. Well, the alternative, which was to stay at the hotel for another full day, would have been worse. 

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