There were about 20 tourists and we were divided into 4 jeeps; 2 jeeps, one guide. Soon we noticed that we were the unlucky ones with our guide, Evert (?). He did speak English but he was not at all interested in his job, I had the feeling from the first moment that he couldn't wait to get rid of us. The other group had a nice guide who actually spend time with the group, voluntarily, even at dinners and such when Evert was nowhere to be found. Actually, Evert was never there when we needed him and we had to hear the itinerary from the other table usually. Great.
Also, since we were divided into two jeeps, we were supposed to always stop together so the guide could tell the stuff also to the people in the other car. This hardly ever happened and the people in the other car were guided by the driver who spoke no English...not exactly fair now, was it?
Anyway, now that I started off with complaining, I'll continue with the merrier part. Our nice group consisted of a great Slovak couple: Viki and Andrej, Sarah from Canada and in the other car were three Chinese guys living in Brazil and a group of friends: Lee from Australia, Nick and Kristin from the States. The other people from the other two jeeps we didn't get to know so much unfortunately.
We started our tour with a short ride and then a stop to a train graveyard: an area full of rusty trains, locomotives from the richer times of Uyuni. Apparently the thing here was to climb on those train wrecks and take pictures, millions of pictures.
Pictures, that's what the whole tour was all about, we soon figured. Driving from one spot to another and taking pictures, with hundreds of other tourists: first of you on train carcasses, then of you and Dakar Rally salt statue, then of you and a hotel made of salt, of you and your friends on the salt flat making funny poses with weird perspectives, then of you on an "island" with some cactae (there we could also walk a little!) and then of you and the sunset on the salt flats. After all this picture taking and posing we made it to our first night's accommodation in a basic hotel that was made of salt, at least partly. We got a spacey private room with a bathroom and were happy with it! And the dinner was nice, we got to slowly know also the other great part of our group from the other jeep.
Evert's way of handling the morning wasn't exactly spot on. We were supposed to have breakfast at 7.00 am but since the other group was about 30-60 min ahead of us, we had to sit down to a table with no utensils (or used ones) and a plate of cold scrambled eggs. The other group had apparently taken whatever they were missing from our table. When I asked Evert for knives and forks to eat eggs with, he brought me a knife. I asked again for a fork, explaining that eating eggs with a knife only is difficult and I got a response of sighing and eye rolling, like I was being difficult. Of course everyone else was missing these too so Chris went after Evert to the kitchen for some more utensils. Everts response: "You have already". Ehm, nope. Same strange behaviour would continue when asking for milk powder or more hot water or anything really. Frustrating.
After the eventually successfull breakfast we hopped in the car and drove all day with short breaks for more picture taking and lunch. It was really a long day with a lot of sitting in a car but at least the views were nice, very similar to Iceland with colorful mountains and weird rock formations, volcanoes and in the end of the day, geysirs! Walking in the geysir area was an experience. The geysirs and bubbling mudholes we had seen before but in Iceland they were fenced off. In Bolivia no fences were needed. At some point we came to a pretty wet looking pothole the guide goes: "Wow, this is a new one, it wasn't here last week!". What now!? After that I went back in the car, I didn't feel too safe walking next to bubbling 300 celcius mud when the ground could break anytime :D
Our second night's hotel was very very basic which generally I wouldn't mind but with food poisoning that hit half of the group, two toilets for 20-30 people and no running water, whatsoever, it was somewhat inconvenient. Chris fell asleep immediately on arrival, he was feverish and suffering from stomach ache. A Hungarian girl puked in front of the main door and the toilets were pretty nasty after half an hour from arrival. The guides blamed the altitude (we were at 4400 m) but we knew better: we had just come dowm from over 6000 meters :D Also, our driver was sick. I really doupted the altitude explanation.
Those who were able still enjoyed dinner and headed to the thermal pool afterwards, others went to suffer in their beds. Evert was nowhere to be seen since we arrived and the next time I saw him was in the morning when he was shouting: "Let's go, vamos, hurry up". We of course had no idea about the schedule of the day so hurrying us wasn't exactly fair. I was so annoyed with Evert.
Not all was bad on the tour eventhough one might get this perception from this blog post (sorry :D ) I enjoyed the time with our group and we saw beautiful landscapes, lakes with flamingoes, and the salt flats which I hadn't seen before. We were missing a bit more action, better guide and of course the food poisoning didn't exactly help but there were as I said, things we liked too.
On the third day after visiting a "Green lake" (that wasn't green at all :) ) We were dropped of at the border of Chile with Chris, Sarah, Lee, Nick and Kristin where we found a bus that took us to San Pedro de Atacama. Good bye Bolivia, it was a pleasure!
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