Day 32

Friday 3rd December 2010

The Jeeps arrived at 10:30 and the group split into 4's. We were put with 'the other couple' who are Andrew and Kerry. We climbed into the off white Jeep and headed for our first stop of the day 'The Train Cemetery'.

It is just outside Uyuni and is connected to it by the old train tracks. The town served in the past as a distribution hub for the trains carrying minerals en route to Pacific Ocean ports. The rail lines were built by British engineers arriving near the end of the 19th century and formed a sizeable community in Uyuni.  The trains were mostly used by the mining companies but in the 1940s, the mining industry collapsed, partly because of mineral depletion. Many trains were abandoned, producing the train cemetery. There are proposals to build a museum from the cemetery.

Its also the place that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their maker! Apparently they had heard about the wealth of gold coming out of Uyuni and came down on horseback to hold up a train that was transporting gold. They arrived and held up the train in a heist totalling $46 million (in today’s money). Being greedy little blighters they went to a nearby saloon and hatched a plan to do the same thing again. Unbeknownst to them there were English speaking people in the bar who informed the police, date, time, the job lot. So when they held the train up and got to the cabin where the gold was being stored, they were met by Police who shot and injured both of them. It is believed that they escaped to the nearby mountains but died through infection and dehydration.

The guns they used were custom built and one of them is still missing. The US government have a reward for the gun which is $2 million . Cool hey??

Its a pretty cool place and another example of being able to get up close and personal in stark contrast to what it would be like back in the UK. Imagine being able to live out some childhood fantasies like climbing on top of trains and riding underneath them!!

The girls we we're with have been travelling for a while and have taken to doing 'the robot' at any site we arrive at, which was funny at first. Here's Suzi joining in before the tedium set in!

Next stop was a little town who live off the salt flats old school style. They showed us how they dry and treat the salt and in the next room was a woman on her knees hand packing the salt into 1kg bags. She was heat sealing the bags with a naked flame attached to gas bottle! She gets 10 Bolivianos ( £1 ) for every 50 kilos. We could have had a lifetimes supply of salt for about a fiver but we had nowhere to put it.

We left there and pretty soon afterwards we arrived at the salt flats or 'Salar de Uyuni'. We were happily taking a few shots amongst the 'mined' piles of salt when we were called back to the Jeep.

We set off in the direction we had come from and ended up back in the town we had just left. One of the Jeeps had broken down and everyman and his dog was trying to fix it.

What I couldn’t work out was why we had been brought back too, there was 6 stranded people in the red Jeep and now 4 onlookers in ours, so nobody could go anywhere (this was the first of our problems with Pablo our driver, but more of that later). They called for another Jeep which would take an hour to arrive, great!

Then a third of our Jeeps (this time without passengers) turned up and the young kid who was driving discovered that the driver of the red Jeep had hit the 'kill switch' stopping the Jeep from starting, what a Muppet. This was reset and the Jeep came back to life.

We jumped back in and headed about an hour into the salt flats, because of the complete lack of anything there is nothing to provide scale, so you can take pictures that mess with the mind.

The Salt Flats are the world's largest at 10,582 square kilometers (4,086 sq mi). They are located in southwest Bolivia near the crest of the Andes and are 3,656 meters (11,995 ft) above sea level. They were formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes. 

and seeing as we are only coming here once I decided to get starker's



HI MUM!!

We also did a bit of jumping around, everyone else seemed to be doing it so we joined in!

We spent a good few hours messing about, the pictures are so difficult to line up and get right and as the sun began to fade we had a little smooch (eeeewwwwwww!)

Back aboard the Jeeps we headed to one of the many Salt Hotels out here, the Salt Flats attract tourists from around the world and as it is located far from the cities, a number of hotels have been built in the area. Due to lack of conventional construction materials, many of them are almost entirely (walls, roof, furniture) built with salt blocks cut from the salt. Check it out, this was the 'Honeymoon Suite'

We all met up for tea and a few games of pool, I was undefeated on the night and was very gracious in victory, as you would expect.

"Yes!!! have some of that you Kiwi"

The electricity only lasted until 22:00 so we all had to be wrapped up in bed by then, which we were glad of to be honest, today was amazing and exhausting!!