Getting to Uyuni

With Corpus Cristie on Thursday, we had the day off from work and I also requested Friday off. So Wednesday afternoon, Kelly (a volunteer with a different program) and I headed to the bus station. We hoped to get the 2:00pm bus, but there were road blocks to the town of Oruro and to La Paz so buses were not leaving. So we waiting in the station and by the time 3:00pm rolled around, buses were leaving again. We hopped on and hoped that we could get a connections in Oruro.

The ride was uneventful. We ate an entire bag of "Grape Nut O" cereal and pinapple flavored jell-o. We got to Oruro around 8:00pm and bought our next ticket to the town of Uyuni. We had a half an hour to wait and to watch the chaos in the station. It appeared that about 5 people were moving their entire houses that night so there were huge boxes, bags, and appliances being loaded onto the tops of buses and underneath. We spotted two other girls who were traveling and talked to them for a bit. They were from Poland. When we finally loaded our bus, we had to ask someone to switch seats so that we could sit together and with the help of some wonderful Quechua ladies (with colorful blinkets, bags of bread, and babies), we were successful and settled into our last row seats. We slept most of the night (a man next to us even shared his blinket) and when we awoke, the inside of the windows had frozen over and we were very cold. Arriving in Uyuni at about 4:00am, we were informed that we could stay on the bus and sleep a bit since we didn´t have a hostel or anything to go to. It was chilly, but once we layered on more clothes and got out our sleeping bags (thanks host mom!) we managed to get a few more hours of sleep. At 7:30am we gathered our things and headed out in the the cold.... and man was it COLD! We had on hats, gloves, fleece socks, jackets, and more and we were still freezing. And of course, nothing was open that early so we couldn´t warm up with some tea or anything. We found a sliver of sun that had begun to rise over the buildings and sat to people watch.

Surprise surprise, this was a festival day! Of course. Everyone was out in the streets setting up stalls of clothes, food, CDs, and electronics for the celebration of Corpus Cristie. The very kind people even came and chatted with us a bit (giving Kelly tips on how to warm up her feet). The few hours seemed to pass pretty quickly and we headed to the street of tour companies to set up our tour of the Uyuni Salt Flats, volcanoes, giesers, lagoons, and more!

After some searching we found exactly what we wanted and a great price... and it turned out the Polish girls from earlier were on the tour too. We grabbed a delicious egg breakfast and then loaded our gear into the 4x4 Jeep with Nicole (from Australia), Jowita & Mariola (from Poland), Allon & Chris (from England), and our guide/driver Obet. It was cozy, but not uncomfortable.

Then we were off for our three day tour of the area.... more to come later this week!