Mi Querida Sudamerica

 El Salar de Uyuni is the most underrated natural phenomenon that I know of. Unbelievable.  It was totally worth risking my life to get there.  We took a jeep-like vehicle with the 4 of us, two Norwegians, and a middle-aged Frenchman.  We first stopped just before the salt flat to  see the “salt factories.”  Its not your typical factory, its just some adobe houses (some houses are made out of bricks of salt) with ovens where the local people burn the only plant that grows in the area to dry the salt.  They grind it, package it, and that’s it. Bolivia gets all its salt that way.  We finally get going to the Salar and our driver lets us sit on the roof of the jeep.  This season there is about two inches of water in some places which reflects the sky and the mountains like a giant mirror.  We stopped a couple times to frolic around (at this point we had taken off our shoes so we could walk through the watery places), then we were off to the hotel de sal, which is a hotel completely made of salt.  We had our lunch, bull and quinoa, outside the hotel with a table and chairs made of salt.  To go inside the hotel we had to buy something because there were angry cholitas (Indian women) yelling at us “tienes que consumir” (you have to comsume).  All they sold inside was beer and chocolate so we bought some Pacena and took our moneys worth of photos. On the way back we were drinking pacena on the roof of the jeep singing folk songs and admiring the view of the second largest mountain in the world reflected in the water.  One of the best days of my life.
We had some time to hang out in the plaza the rest of the day so we hung out at a pizzeria/pub full of tourists, and had some potocino, the local beer.  (I felt pretty cool because I had to translate for some Australians that wanted me to “tell the chap that we want our third pizza to go.”)
We went off the hotel to go to bed early since we had a never-ending bus ride to La Paz beginning at 8 am.
{Some side notes:  1)tons of people travel completely alone, mainly men, these people intrigue me I want to know their story. 2) There are no tourists from the US, I’m astounded, someone asked,me if I was from Brazil because usually people from Brazil speak Spanish but have some difficulties. 3) I hate tourists from England, they never speak Spanish and they don’t even pronounce the names of the cities correctly. On top of that, the accent is annoying and they always complain. There was one English guy sitting behind me on the bus to Uyuni and he felt the need to narrate everything, it was like I had Bear from Man vs. Wild sitting behind me.}