DEliTOUR: Bright side of the moon

We arrived in La Paz in the morning and, true to form, we outlandishly got on a bus straight to Oruro where we had the afternoon watching McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy's dodgy movie (in an ornate cinema on our own), before getting the night train to Uyuni. The train journey was filled with spectacular views of the Altiplano, wild rock formations and herds of alpaca. In Uyuni we repeated the tour agency runaround. Uyuni is a desert town of a few thousand that only seemingly exists to service the needs of young travellers going on multi day jeep rides to see the famous salt flats and the Atacama desert. That's why we were there and we learnt the lessons from our young drunken guide and paid 25% extra to go with Red Planet with their fluent English guide Oskar, who had rave reviews. Again all the tours are pretty much the same: three days, two night, all the tours stay in the same salt hotels, some tours have a driver/cook/guide, some an extra guide, some an extra cook: and all are in Toyota Land Cruisers with 6 tourists.

We had Michi and Franzesca from Switzerland, and Sanna and Teresa from Sweden. And, in Oskar, we had a real gem. Within two hours of setting out into the desert, driving at high speed across the broken rocks, Oskar told us about the recent death of 15 people when two jeeps had collided and how drivers were more careful now (!) and then we broke down. In the middle of a salty desert. With the most amazing infinite view all around, some peaks in the distance. But thankfully with no misunderstandings as Oskar made us at home. We relaxed, talked, took photos, enjoyed it like another sightseeing stop and realised that driving thousands of kms in the desert brings with it certain risks and the likelihood of mechanical malfunction.

We only stopped for an hour and by the end of the tour we had seen the salt flats, salt factory, salt piles, palm oases, rock dunes, "Dali Desert" of rock formations, the Atacama desert, and the incredible site of the tyre tracks of the jeeps looking like cosmic ploughing across the rocky landscape (I think they should stick to tracks as the wind will take centuries to blow away the tyre tracks, which are everywhere). And we saw the money shots. The red lake and the flamingos, the green lake and Oskar took us to stone cemetaries and more wonderful formations, and he was riveting throughout. We learnt more Spanish and more Bolivian history and even more about Bolivian current affairs - we had warned him we were going to get our money's worth!

Just before our visit Bolivia had had some civil unrest whereby the President, Evo Morales, a social reformer and former farmer, was trying to get a new constitution passed, which would have required a great deal of wealth redistribution, something not enamoured by the wealthy of the Santa Cruz region, in control of the country's mineral and gas resources. A stand off had developed where a militia army of farmers and peasants had blockaded Santa Cruz and shots had been fired. The whole state and some other areas had been off limits to tourists for a few weeks and the situation had not cleared though it had cooled. This meant that we couldn't go to see the big cat sanctuary in Santa Cruz as we had hoped. So, after returing in the evening to Uyuni, we shared a room with the swedes (very kind of them) and we got a few hours kip before the night train to the town of Villazon on the Argentinian border.