Sand, Salt and Flamingos!

Well hello again, after all a day!

So, San Pedro De Atacama ... the driest desert in the WORLD!! And what did we do ... we rode bikes! Yes, that´s right everyone ANNA rented and rode a bike for the entire afternoon! Where did we ride bikes you may be asking yourself ... to the moon! Well, Valle de la luna (Valley of the Moon).  I know there are some of you who have suspected for some time, that I´m from a different world, but I really hadn´t been to the moon before this! It was AWESOME!! We hiked up a to the ´view points´and WOW!! a moon like desert!!


At this point we had also booked our 3/4 day trip to Salar de Uyuni (the Bolivian Salt Flats) and they would be picking us up from our campsite at 8am.  Speaking of campsites ... we had the privilege of entering a campsite slum earlier today! We´re not joking when we say a campsite slum ... basically, someone had opened up the backyard, for lack of a better term, to house what felt like 100 tents in an area a quarter of the size of a football field! Not enough room to put pegs in the tent and people smoking over tents ... not to mention where would we cook?! (not that we had a working stove) So, Steph set off to find a different campsite and in a half an hour, came back with 2 MUCH better options (this is the point where we picked up our bags and walked our of the campsite slum).

8am the next morning and we were away to the border.  Some of you may not know this, but Steph (being the America) seems to need visas for half the countries and Bolivia was one of those countries.  So, while everyone else was happily having their passports stamped, she had to write her name on a sheet of paper and watched as her passport was put in a drawer (not to worry, it was handed back to her when we left in the 4x4´s ... without a stamp that is ... turns out she had to pay the $135 when we got to Uyuni on the 3rd day of our trip).

That aside, they nicely gave us breakfast with REAL cheese and TEA! We were thrown into 4x4 groups and off to see the pink flamingos!! And did we ever see them!! Honestly, over the 3 days we saw hundreds of them!! And they were awesome! We saw them eating and sleeping and flying and bullying each other!

Next up on animal watch, were the llamas! And to distinguish the llamas (and who owns then), they all have bright colored ribbony things on their ears!

We´ve also seen vicunas (a combination of a llama and a deer ish) and a chinchilla!

This was interspersed with seeing lagunas, geysers, volcanos, and of course the salt flats! All were very impressive (Anna has now seen geysers), but the salt flats were AMAZING!! They were full of water, due to the rain we´d been having, but wow! They seemed to go on forever!!

Now, we had been warned about bad companies, which leave you with little food and bad food and not great accommodation, along with drunken drivers, so we made sure to look into it carefully! In saying that, our company was great! The food was excellent and there was plenty of it, accommodation was nice (we were told to bring our sleeping bags) and our driver was super cool!! Cordilla Traveler if anyone is to go (and we´d suggest going ... definitely a highlight of our trip so far!)

Oh! But bewarned ... the altitude is not nice!! (well, at least not the first day) Also, if you´re going to travel back to San Pedro from Uyuni ... it´s a long day with a very early start!

Well, off to our next country (Peru) and then on to Ecuador! I just hope the buses aren´t TOO bad!