Long way to go

Wow, Bolivia. It´s definitely different from Argentina and Chile, which seem a lot more developed. I love it though...this country feels like the South America I pictured as a child.

I just came back from three days in the salt flats and Atacama desert near Uyuni. The salt flats were absolutely surreal...white white white as far as you could see, but in the sections that retained some rain water, it was a giant mirror. And when you looked closer, all kinds of shades of blue and beige and pink. All the brochures for the place describe it as "hallucinogenic" and I can see why. It just doesn´t look like any place on earth. My eyes and camera had difficulty adjusting to just how bright everything was, but wow, I can´t wait to post pictures...in probably a month. I did a pretty good job of not getting sunburned, except for my lips; the next day they were so swollen I looked like I had a bad collagen lip job.

The day after the salt flats was basically spent driving around the desert in a 4x4, stopping every hour or two to look at a volcano, a lagoon, a rock formation, etc. Lots more pictures, definitely a fun day. I´m enjoying the tour a lot; everyone is pretty cool and under 35, which is nice. It´s also a nice change of pace to let someone else make all the arrangements about how and when to get where and where to sleep, though the way the tour is structured it gives you a lot of free time, so you don´t have to always be around people.

Yesterday, though, I was really glad I was on the tour; I would not have wanted to deal with how sick I was from the altitude by myself. I got out of bed at 5am feeling very sick, almost like food poisoning. After seeing some geysers and swimming in a hot springs at 4900 meters altitude, I started vomiting, a lot. I spent the rest of the day laying in the back of a jeep that traversed the bumpiest roads ever, feeling so dehydrated but not able to keep down water until sometime in the late afternoon. I also had a fever, excruciating headache, and the runs. My tour guide helped me get through the day, and then brought me and a few other people who were reacting badly to the altitude back to Uyuni, the town we started from three days ago. There I got a good night´s sleep, some pills for altitude sickness, and am now feeling better, ready to catch a train to Potosi.