The last night of our three day tour was spent in Hotel Sal, or the Salt Hotel, a building made completely from salt. We’re talking completely. The walls were constructed from blocks of salt - like a big salt igloo - the floors were made up of salt rocks and pebbles, the tables and stools were made of chunks of salt… Even the bed frames and the bedside table in our room were made of salt. It was pretty amazing.

As soon as we got to Hotel Sal, Beth and I made a mad dash for the showers. When we emerged we found tea and snacks waiting for us at a salt table with five salt stools. The crew all sat down to relax, drink Coca Tea, eat cookies, and chat. Beth and I finally learned the rules of the incredibly complicated cricket from Brendan, and Beth and I did our best to explain the incredibly complicated rules of baseball.

Before sundown, we all settled down into another game of “Asshole”, which we played, and played, and played all night. Until the lights went out. But even lack of electricity didn’t stop us - we lit candles and continued playing. We were interrupted by a pretty good soup, chicken, and veggie dinner, and took turns buying bottles of Kohlberg, a really tasty, fruity red wine grown at roughly 6000 feet in Bolivia (despite the German name).

Not long after the lights went out, one of the women who worked at the hotel came over to the table and asked us to pay for the night. We all looked at each other, and told her that our tour was all inclusive and to go talk to Matias, our guide, who would be able to clear it up. She left, and returned with Matias, who informed us that we need to pay for the night.

Beth and I, usually quick to respond to a scam, were thrown into high gear immediately with the added lubrication of the wine. I fumbled with my Spanish, explaining that we were told back in San Pedro that everything was included as Beth rifled through her wallet and produced all our receipts with this guarantee prominently displayed. Matias said that he understood, but that the first driver didn’t give him the necessary paperwork for the hotel.

“Este no es nuestra problema,” I responded… That’s not our problem. After that, I decided I should shut up, and let the native Spanish speaker do the talking.

Katia continued voicing her thoughts, and took on the additional task of translating for us. We didn’t want to make Matias, a 23 year old student, cover the costs, but we were feeling rather certain that we wouldn’t get our money back from Pamela tours if we paid. And as much as we liked Matias, we still weren’t sure that this wasn’t a scam. While Beth continued to peruse the receipts in a lawyer-like fashion, she noticed a specific line about Hotel Sal being included. We decided we wanted to talk to the hotel owner.

An amiable older man came out and Katia showed him the receipts. He said he understood that it should be included, but that he received no paperwork or money from Pamela Tours, and our receipts wouldn’t work. Exasperated, we decided to pay - on the condition that we got a receipt from Hotel Sal that said explicitly, “we received no money from Pamela Tours,” and that we paid in dollars (we didn’t want to deal with any trickstery exchange rates) - and just deal with it the next day in Uyuni.

We went back to playing our game, which was a good thing, because there was a big overthrow of power, and women became President and Vice President. Which is where we left things.

The next morning we awoke to the sound of the beeping of the alarm clock and the wild whipping around of wind over the roof at 5:15. Matias came to tell us that we would be leaving a little later, since the wind was so bad, so we got up and ate breakfast at the hotel instead of on the Salt Flats. As we were loading up the car, we saw the first bright reds and oranges light up the sky from the rising sun.

We raced out to the salt flats shortly thereafter, to catch the sunrise over the white horizon. Because we had waited for the wind to die down, Matias was really whizzing down the roads to get there on time. We made it out to the middle of the salt and waited as the sun slowly peaked over the horizon line.

The landscape was really amazing. The salt flats stretch 4000 square miles across a plain, and all of that is pure 100% white. There’s little chance of some earth coming up to brown up the place, since the salt goes down a shocking 50 feet deep. We felt lucky to be there during the dry season. During the rainy season, parts of the plains fill up with water, which is apparently a pretty spectacular thing to see. But this way, we saw the white in all its glory, in some places cracked like dry desert earth from the lack of water.

We bummed around here for a while, taking in the views and snapping pictures of the bizarre landscape before taking off for Fish Island (so named because during the rainy season it looks like a fish rising out of the water in the middle of the plains).

The island appeared in the distant landscape, and as we got closer we saw that it was covered with huge cactuses. We got out and were told that we had an hour to roam around, so we all started climbing to the top. As we did, we passed cactuses that ranged from 4 feet to maybe 20 feet that shot up and twisted in all different shapes and sizes. Considering that these cactuses grow at a rate of one centimeter a year, most of them were pretty old. The oldest one on the island was estimated at 1200 years old.

We watched the sun continue to rise higher in the sky. On the island, we ran into a Belgian family who had also been staying at the Sal Hotel the night before on our way, and stopped to take pictures for one another. They were also traveling around the world for the year, and only had about a month left.

 Between the four of them, they spoke a total of seven languages! The son, who was 11, spoke five, and I assume his younger 8-year-old sister wasn’t far behind. This made me feel pretty fantastic about my inability to tackle one other measly language. (You can check out their website at http://www.familyaroundtheworld.be/ .) This is the four of them on a cliff on Fish Island. In the foreground you can see the 1200 year old cactus, a little “light” on the top with age.

We made it to the top and sat up there for a while, taking pictures and enjoying the view of the salt flats all around us before making our way down. We strolled down slowly, taking a few small detours, before heading back to an awaiting Matias.

When we got there, the sun had risen high enough in the sky to really make the white salt gleam. All the other tour groups were running around and setting up pictures. We ran out and began doing the same, taking pictures at different distances to look like we were holding miniature versions of each other. We set up one where Marcus and Brendan were holding all the tiny girls in their hands. This is an eerie one of me eating an even-smaller-than-usual Beth (we laugh every time we look at it).

From here we went to the Salt Museum, the old “Hotel Sal” before this one was condemned due to sanitation issues (yummy). We also went to a small market place where we saw tons of small and big salt sculptures all made of salt. In the back were life-size salt sculptures of llamas and other large animals.

At the tip of the Salt Flats was an area where they actually mine the salt for human consumption. We came across tons of trucks and big piles of salt lined up for acres across the plains. Huge dump trucks were being filled to the rim with salt by men and women with huge shovels, while others were scraping the top layer of salt to gather the particles into piles they shoveled. They only work on the top layer because the salt turns to near rock underneath during the dry season, Matias told us.

From there, we went to a small ghost town type of city called Colchani where they refined the mined salt. A few women walked around and chatted, but other than that, it was pretty empty. We assumed everyone was out mining the salt.

(Beth: As we were leaving the small ghost town, caravan of police officers rolled passed us.  One stopped us and talked to Matias.  We understood him saying foreigners or tourists.  As we left, Matias explained that they were Narcotics Officers.  This town was a major point for trafficking cocaine.  (I can see why, since it would blend in pretty well.)  Matias also said that the reason they were driving slowly was because they had high-tech equipment from the United States that scanned our car for drugs.  (What?!)  I can’t imagine how this supposedly works…  Maybe it’s a myth to scare people?)

We reached our final destination, Uyuni, around mid-day, and were brought to a small building in the middle of nowhere for lunch. We walked in to what seemed like someone’s house, with a bed pushed against one of the walls, a desk against another, and our table set up in the middle. We ate mashed potatoes and llama steak before setting off to deal with Pamela Tours, a task we were all dreading.

We arrived at the office and were greeted by a cheery bunch who asked us how everything went. Katia took the lead, saying that everything went fine except for the mix-up with the hotel. After explaining the situation, the man in charge immediately said, “No problema!”, and went in the back to reimburse us in dollars. We all looked at each other stunned… it was that easy. No scam after all!

We had one last stop, the train graveyard just outside of town. We walked around for a while climbing on the trains, some of which were over a hundred years old, and looked at all the rusted and abandoned parts strewn on the ground. When we were finished, we all piled back in and were brought to the bus station, where Marcus, Beth, and I wanted to buy tickets that night for La Paz. We thought that perhaps we would stay the night in Uyuni, but after seeing the desolate place, we decided to high-tail it to the capitol. Here, we said goodbye to Matias, after giving him the wad of cash we had received in repayment for the Sal Hotel debacle as a tip.

Because the bus office was closed, we all went to a cafe in town to grab some warm drinks and a bit more food (the llama steak wasn’t a hit with everyone, though I liked it and had three pieces). Katia and Brendan were taking a one day tour all the way back to San Pedro so that they could set off on the rest of their two week vacation. As a parting gift, they paid for our drinks, saying that they still had a salary and were were just poor travelers. We thanked them, and hugged them goodbye, telling them that they’d have a futon to crash on if they ever wanted to come to NYC.

Marcus, Beth, and I bought our bus tickets and went to sit in a computer lab trying to upload all our Bolivian Safari pictures (a task that would take over a week to complete) while waiting for our bus. At 7:30, we boarded our “luxury” bus for $20 to La Paz, a 10-hour overnight journey.