DAY 28: UYUNI

Today we are heading to  Uyuni, our first stop on our journey through the salt flats!

The whole group met at 9am to take a bus to Uyuni and after 30 mins of us waiting  the bus was nowhere to be found! Our guide blamed it, as always, on the "Bolivian time" and gave an explanation about how the drivers in Bolivia start getting paid at 9am when they pick us so they show up to work late because they don't get paid for the driving time before 9am! 

By 9:35 he realized that maybe something was wrong and he decided to finally give them a call... After 35 mins! (If it was me I would have called 5 mins after 9am... even if it was Bolivian time!!)

Long story short... Driver couldn't get to the hotel because of a flood caused by a broken pipe so we walked 2 blocks or so and waited in the cold for the bus that never arrived! After waiting for about 20 mins on the streets the bus driver showed up and said we needed to walk to the bus... So there we went backpacks and all on a 10 mins walk to the bus! Finally, an hour and a half after the departure time we were all on the bus and on our way to Uyuni!

Our bus ride was interesting! The driver stopped the bus and let some family members in (they stayed in the front) and then after paying a "peaje" (street toll) he decided to park the bus and go get himself a sandwich.... Interesting.

After a couple of hours in the bus we needed a 2nd pee stop and when our guide asked to stop he pretty much refused to stop for the potty break! The guide explained that we still had an hour to go and 3 more after we switched cars and we needed to stop. Unwillingly the bus driver stopped a couple of minutes later, took a look at the four shacks that were on the side of the road and him and his niece said "the bathrooms are closed you can't get out" and he closed the bus door! He didn't even look! I was already angry by the previous conversation of him not wanting to stop and since our guide didn't do anything I stood up and said to my guide that these people were useless (and so was he for not saying anything) and told the bus driver I was getting off!

I walked straight to where a lady was and asked her if they had bathrooms and of course they did! The driver just didn't want to stop because he wanted to hurry up to drop us off! So annoying! 

Uyuni has been having a strike for 10 days so we were not be able to go through the main entrance of the town because it was blocked. G, being awesome, had arranged a transfer to smuggle us by off-roading in 4x4s for 2 hours surrounding the city and getting us into town through the dump (where we actually saw a guy taking a real dump... Yuk! Haha)

After a VERY bumpy ride we finally arrived in Uyuni! The place is a ghost town!!! The streets are empty and it feels as if it is a place in the wild Wild West! Half (or more) of the buildings in town are not finished and we hardly saw any people until we went out for lunch and reached the square where some people were protesting.

The protest was about the town wanting to build a bus station to attract more tourists, they had some loud fireworks but not dangerous at all! We walked around town and called it a day... We went back to the hotel to rest before the salt flats!