4 Days on Mars - Salt Flats Tour
We arrived in Tupiza to start our tour only to find out that the next day Bolivia was having a country wide Census. This ment that for the entire day everyone (local or tourist) was on house arrest. No one was allowed to leave their houses!! The streets were bare and the dogs were wandering around wondering what was going on! One of the workers at our hostel actually went out onto the streets that day and ended up spending the night in prison!!
Day 1 was a long drive on bumpy terrain. Gaining some altitude we saw bright orange canyons, 10 foot tall cacti and deep valleys.
Toyota Pride!
Ghost town- once was church
Day 2 we started with a swim in the hot springs! Warm volcanic water that is seeping out of the ground makes the perfect bath. With flamingos swimming in the warm water behind us made it feel like we were on another planet. We then made our way to volcanic gysers where a swath of land as large as a football field was furiously bubbling mud or high pressure steam. Managing our way around these bubbling pits of mud we held our noses from the smell of rotten eggs. Driving past volcanoes, some active some dormant we arrived at Lago Colorado. A lake full of flamingos and as red as spurting blood. If we didn´t already feel like we weren´t on earth we definitely did now! So many colours all so unnatural for a lake!
Hot springs
Flamingos!
Amy´s rock tower
Bubbling mud pit
Lago Colorado
¿¿¿Mars???
Day 3 began with a huge pile of rocks in the middle of no where! It´s like they fell from the sky. Surrounded by sand and more sand we arrived at an active smoking volcanoe and then at the first mini salt flat. Right through the middle of this flat were train tracks!
mini flats
Train tracks in the heat
Day 4 - Sunrise on the flats. Waking early today was " The Salt Flats Day." We drove out to an island on the flats covered in cacti to watch the sunrise. Pulling the truck up to the island felt like docking a boat. Then the view from the top of the island felt like we were surrounded by snow! Vast white emptiness was all the eye could see. After watching the sun rise we drove out into the middle of the flats. This was the land of the big and small, Chris also found himself to be very flexible in the atmosphere of this new planet! Just to the edge of the flats we stopped at the "train cemetery" Trains from the 1940´s all built in Brittan and France left for storage and their eventual death in the desert. A four hour drive back to Tupiza and our visit on Mars was over.
Sunrise on the island
Sassy as a cacti
 |
Bendy
Mini Chris
Mini Amy
Canadian flag on Mars
Train cemetery
