July 1st: Potosi - Uyuni

Today´s a travelling day, again. We´ve bought tickets on the noon bus to Uyuni. We´ll spend 6 hours in the bus, so I´ll use some time to write out a blog entry or two. The scenery is brilliant and leads us through dusty cowboy canyon-like landscapes to mountains where lamas graze along cactuses, to big desert plains.  When we get back on the bus from a quick pitstop about halfway, I can´t get the netbook started again. Rats, that´s the the electronic heart of our trip, our blog post provider, our banking tool, our photo storage! It must be a fluke, the bus must be too shaky to allow for writing. I´ll try to get the netbook going again in Uyuni.

We arrive in Uyuni after an amazing desert sunset, then check into a cheap hotel. Uyuni is a desert town, hot in the sun, cold in the shadows, and freezing at night. It´s got little charm and is organized in square blocks, much like a classic North-American town. The whole town lives off the salar (salt plain) and its tourists, it´s really just a start-off point. All we need to do is book the Salar tour, tomorrow we´ll be off for 3 days into the wilderness. Once we have the hotel with woarm water sorted, we walk down the main strip to find a decent Salar tour agency. We go with Oasis Tours, an agency that charges a bit more, but with a tour that follows a (bit) different parcours from the classic one. Oasis Tours comes highly recommended by our guide, and we like the presentation in the agency, so we book with them. Only 1 person has confirmed on tomorrow´s departure, so with a bit of luck we´ll be fewer than 6, which is the maximum amount in a tour jeep. That would give us a bit more leg space. We´ll see what happens.

A pizza will hit the spot before we go out camping tomorrow. I have the Uyuni pizza in a local restaurant: lama meat strips and corn. Pretty good stuff and not too expensive. In fact, the whole of Bolivia is cheap by European standards. We´re well within budget these first 3 weeks. During dinner I run the windows 7 repair routine on the netbook: The computer suggests to check the hard disk for errors, an operation that may take over an hour. When we finish dinner, it hasn´t finished running, so I let it run overnight. Hopefully our computer will work again after the repair routine, tomorrow we´ll know more. I change into my Longjohns and a longsleeve T-shirt, then dive under the bed sheets. These longjohns are tight and feel like a male ballerina outfit, but I´ll be very warm. It promises to freeze tonight, and even here there´s no heating in the room (what´s up with that, Bolivia??), so comfort easily wins over fashion.