Salt and a battery...

The week's adventures have been dominated by a tour of the Salar de Uyuni - a huge Bolivian salt flat in the south, near the Chilean border. Expansive and white, the Salar is a pretty surreal place to spend time. The sun reflects off the surface, making the air above shimmer and the cacti-covered mountains look as though they're floating on nothing. Yep, very beautiful - a bit hallucinogenic and altogether very cool. Many a photograph taken using the weird perspective that comes with the vast white plains. "Okay Woody you stand there and I'll make it look like I'm jumping off your head". The place is over run by tourists and the convoy of jeeps that take them from site to site, and everyone is doing pretty much the same thing. We're no different. We were part of the convoy that enjoys and destroys these natural phenomena simultaneously. It's a strange feeling, resenting the abundance of tourists but being totally hypocritcal because we're there, so we're part of the dirty tourist machine. The salt flats would be almost impossible to see on our own, and the tour companies have no control over what their drivers are doing. They cane it over the hills, scarring the landscape and dumping litter and waste where they like. We stopped once at a lookout to a volcano. The orange rock formations were incredible, like huge waves - maybe something to do with the wind. It was an amazing looking place, especially with the salt-capped volcano smoking in the background. But it looked like everyone who had passed through there had used it as a toilet - as our driver, Gavino, had also encouraged us to do. The place was pure reekin' o' pish, and there was used toilet roll blowing around like filthy streamers. Maybe most tourists don't question it - "driver says I should pee here, so i should prob'ly just pee here then". That said, we were amazed by the sweeping scenery of the tour - flamingo filled lagunas, sand dunes straight from the Sahara and the expanse of empty land as far as the eye could see was mind blowing. Well worth it.... in the end.

Gavino, as it turns out, was a bit of a moron. On the first day we didn't get why he kept rushing us on from place to place. "Ok, five or seven minutes here, take a photograph and we go". All became clear and the real adventure began on the second day. We think our jeep had been a bit dodgy on the first day, and the next it broke down between one laguna and another in the middle of the desert. "Yeah Gavino, just rev the engine - that'll fix everything..." The toothless wonder managed to limp the jeep on to our second destination, but sadly it died after four hours of evening maintenance. By 'maintenance' I mean that Gavino would rev the engine, turn it off, count to three, turn it on, rev the engine, repeat until fade. We were outside. The lack of streetlights and the empty land surrounding us made the sky so clear. We could see a million stars and I think some satellites floating past - and one shooting star. Gavino stuck his silly little head around the corner, admitting that the jeep was dead. The battery warning light had been on all day, no power for going up hills, and now we were stranded.

...and it was here that Gavino concocted his masterplan, a fullproof scheme, a work of genius that used the full capacity of his three braincells. Separate our group of six and put us in six separate jeeps to our destinations - me and Woody to Chile, and the rest back up to the town of Uyuni. Brilliant. "Gavino, just when I thought you couldn't be any dumber, you go and do something like this...........and totally redeem yourself!" But Gavino didn't redeem himself. Completely forgetting that we'd paid a not-inconsiderable amount of money to do the tour together and that we still had one more day to go, he was treating us like inconvenient cargo and he was being a dick. We explained to him that we couldn't be separated - we had no extra Bolivian cash, no idea where we were going, no trust in our driver, and no way of getting back in contact with each other if something happened (like a breakdown - prob'ly never happen). Smart and quick thinking as ever, Gavino twiddled his moustache and surpassed himself with a display of intelligence only seen once before when Judith Keppel won 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. We would be taking the jeep that doesn't work, driving to some unknown crossroad at four in the morning, meeting a jeep that doesn't know we're meeting it, collecting an engine piece that may or may not exist, finishing the tour and making it to San Pedro de Atacama just in time for tea. Again, brilliant.

So, with no other options we awoke at four to try out Gavino's Super Duper Flawless Mega Plan. No sign of Gavino. Asleep in the jeep...

"Oh, yes, you can go in separate jeeps to Chile, and..."

"No, no, Gavino - remember we told you we can't do that for reasons of safety? Remember last night when the jeep wouldn't start and you told us to separate and we told you we couldn't. Remember?"

"Oh, Ok, I'll take you to the crossroads."

We hadn't been on the move for two minutes when he stopped in the middle of the road and flagged down two other jeeps...

"Oh, yes, you can go in separate jeeps to Chile, and..."

"No, no, Gavino - remember two minutes ago when we told you we couldn't separate? That still holds true. You may think that since it was a whole two minutes ago, and being further out in the desert in the pitch black middle of the night that we'd be more likely to separate, but actually the opposite is true. Isn't that weird? We're just strange like that..."

That's difficult to say in Spanish. Three hours later "Ok, I'll take you to the crossroads". Gavino spun his web of lies, saying this and that and basically he was too scared to call the company and ask for help. That would be the company's fault. Obviously they should support their drivers, not make them fearful, but Gavino did so much lying and misdirection that the sympathy we felt for him initially, evaporated. We were waiting on the shore of Laguna Colorada. As places to be frustrated and annoyed go, it must be one of the greatest. All the volcanic minerals in the earth have turned the water a rusty red colour and it was a beautiful place to wait. We found a lot of dead flamingos, and one flamingo egg. And our jeep never turned up. In fact no jeeps turned up. Oh, fucking quel surprise Gavino! Back at the ranch, Gavino did the smartest thing he'd done in the whole trip. He abandoned us all. He just left. There we are, stranded in a four house village in the middle of the desert, no food, no nothing. To this day we have no idea what happened to our driver. We had no explanation. We keep expecting him to turn up driving one of our buses, a toothless smile and an evil laugh as he drives off a cliff side. Prob'ly never happen.

The tiny village had no telephone, but it did have a radio - like a trucker's radio "ten-four rubber ducky over and out" kind of radio. It was located in a deserted hospital building above the village. Very much like a horror film we trooped up the hill, unlocked the door and went in to the silent building. It looks like it was abandoned in the eighties, but spookily it had the only running water in the village. The beds were pristine, the toilets flushed, and there was some food in the kitchen, but nobody was there. We found some shipping documents from 1986, some prescriptions, a cabinet full of drugs, a laboratory, loads of rock samples from the lake, and a machine that Blofeld could very well use to blow up the world. Dead strange, but we also found the radio. One of the villagers hooked it up to a car battery and started to try and reach Uyuni. It appears that you do this by shouting "Uyuni Uyuni Uyuni" into the microphone until someone in Uyuni picks up. Then you tell them to run down to the tour company and get them to send another jeep because there are four flippin' gringos in the village and they won't stop playing 'Yahtzy'...

Luckily we had some great company while we waited an extra night and a day for our transport. Dutch Luna and Swedish Johan were hilarious and two very good people to waste time with. Thrown together by Gavino and his special brain, we had good fun sneaking around the secret hospital and throwing stones at flamingos (to make them fly - they're so boring when they just stand still. But flamingos - amazing). And playing 'Yahtzy'. Johan - "I'ma gonna be a good player - I'ma gonna getta 'Yahtzy!'"

By hook and by crook we made it to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, only to find out that this desert oasis is the most expensive place we've been. Chileans seem like lovely people, but Miami prices for a hostel - so we took a nightbus south to Santiago, another south to Osorno and the crossed the Andes into Argentina. Bariloche, to be a little more precise. Flippin' lovely it is as well. Woody's had about six cups of coffee and the only thing to stop the caffeine shakes is the exquisite local chocolate - some of the best in the world. Seriously, it's like being kissed by Jesus. She's making me my tea. I love it here....