The biggest salt flats in the world!

The south of Bolivia is most known for the salt flats near Uyuni. They get less than 300mm of water per year now, but over a milennia ago, the depression between mountain ranges was Lake Tunupa. After a long series of drying and flooding, alternate layers of clay and salt have been deposited in an area up to 12,500 sq km. The salt flats are slowly expanding as more salt and clay are deposited by the rivers coming down from the mountan ranges around it. Drilling reveals at least 120m of salt and clay, with suggestions that there were 11 major flood/drying cycles, and its thought that the salt could go down as far as 500m.

Even more flamingos!

At this point, our exact itinerary for the four days blends together in my mind, so I can't guarantee that these pictures are in the proper order. Looking back, I still can't believe that places like this exist. Such amazing mixes of colors and patterns.

We saw a few groups of bikers biking on incredibly tough 'roads' in the middle of the day at altitude. Wow.

Volcanoes, salt and flamingos Bolivian style

Instead of starting our tour in Uyuni and ending in Uyuni, we started our tour in Tupiza with La Torre Tours. Our group consisted of our guide, Vicente, cook, Augustina, and a lovely couple, Alex and Sas, from Switzerland/Austria. They were multi-lingual and would rotate the language they were talking in every couple sentences. So cool. So jealous. We loaded up our land cruiser around 8am, and we were off!

One of our first views climbing away from Tupiza

Movin' on to a place a bit less Chile.

After we got back, we spent a few days hanging out in Puerto Natales again. We may have eaten pizza two nights in a row. How Chilean. I know. There was also a lot of sleeping involved and NOT wearing my hiking boots.

Hanging out

Hello friends,

This will be my life for the next couple weeks. I decided it's finally time to refresh on the proper way to speak a language, so I'm taking some classes and also volunteering at a hospital here. With babies. 

Sucre is a really gorgeous city that's a lot warmer than La Paz. And lower altitude. We have had awesome thunder storms both nights I have been here so far. It's a chill city that apparently has some dinosaur footprints I can go visit in my time off! 

I'd love to take this time to catch you all up on my blog, but I've yet to find a internet connection that can handle loading pictures. So you're out of luck. Instead I'll be doing homework and practicing verb conjugations. Sorry guys. 

The Q - Part 2

Day 6: Seron to Dickson
We thought we had a super long day ahead of us (which my feet were not looking forward to), but it turns out there's a typo on the map they give out at the park entrance. A typo that means we had about two hours less walking to do. Hooray!!

Gotta love those reflection pics.

Torres del Paine - The Q

The bus to take us into the park left at 730am on the 26th. We were still packing at 1am the night before. As I looked around at all the food and clothes we were going to be carrying around with us, I wasn't even sure it would all fit in our bags. What the crap did we just decide to do. But by 2am it was all packed and neither of our bags weighed much more that 35lbs. So that wasn't so bad.

730am at the bus stop and feeling great