I
was up at 7 (think my body is used to the early mornings again) and had a
shower. It is an interesting experience as you walk outside to another building
to find the shower and trying to get the right temperature was also fun. It's
either boiling or ice cold so had fun dancing around and trying to shower.
I
then grabbed my laptop and updated some pictures and a few stories for my blog
while chatting to some people that I met last night. I then went into town to
book my solar de Uyuni tour before heading back to the hostel for more chats
and internet fix.
I
met Cheryl and Rowan for lunch before joining my tour to Valle de le luna. The
normal route of the tour is to start at Valle de la luna but as we got there it
was so busy so our guide decided to change the order and we started at coyote
rock and from there made our way to death Valley. It's called death Valley
because the guy who named it wanted to call it marde Valle (Mars valley) but
his Spanish was bad so he called it muerde (death). Another theory for the name
is that when the Spanish came here they killed the locals in the valley. Here
we walked around a little and enjoyed the rock formations.
From
there we made our way to Valle de le Luna. It got this name due to the terrain
resembling that of the moon. This student card is still helping. Saved me some
money in Salta and also for Park entrance! It's not so expensive but it does
add up.
In
the rocks there are large salt crystals and the white that you see is the salt
that's been picked up by the rain and left behind when it evaporates. We walked
through the cave ducking and bending around all the salt rocks before making
our way to an old salt mine. Here they used to mine the salt and add it to the
sulphur from the volcanoes around to make sulphuric acid to sell to the copper
mines. This is no longer a viable process so the mine has shut down.
It's
called moon Valley because the ground is so white with salt, the landscape
looks like the moon and the salt crystals reflect the moon light. After the
mine we went to tres marías which is formed by wind erosion with the top being
mud and rock but the bottom being salt crystals which is much harder.
From
here we climbed a little hill to enjoy the sunset. Unfortunately it wasn't as
great as hoped as the clouds were to low but as we turned around the colours on
the mountain behind us were pinks and oranges. We then made our way back to
town to find some dinner.
I
met up with Cheryl and Rowan again and walked around looking for a cheap place
as we were all running out of pesos and didn't want to draw more. Eventually we
went to Inti Sol where I had lunch the day before and had a cheap and tasty set
menu.
After
we said our farewells (until Sucre) I went back to the hostel where I found
someone to buy some Bolivianos from before playing some cards (game called shit
head) with Jan, Rebecca and Geert. I had to be up at 4 to go watch the sunrise
from the geysers (3rd largest in world) so got to bed at about 12 only to
finally fall asleep at 2.