Hola from Chile! I´m really exhausted at the moment, didn´t actually mean to update my blog, but since I´m waiting for my new friend I met in my tour making me and him CDs from our pix, I thought I´d write. My friend will leave in two hours to Peru, just as everyone I´ve been meeting here so far, hi, then bye the next day! Don´t mean to sound cynical, but it´s actually really fun!! Some of which I´m so sure I´ll c again in the future, the world is small, u never know =)

So, just as everything from my three-day Salar tour from Bolivia to Chile is fresh in my mind, I´ll color it for you with the best of my abilities. I can´t really think of any other word to describe the trip than Magic!! I know this sounds cheesy, but yah, that was how I felt during the tour. Well to take a lil´ detour first, magic was preceded by darkness. I landed in Uyuni, a freezing desert town with no real settlement other than that concocted for tourism, at 8am on Saturday. The bus ride was really bumpy, nonetheless it was still a nice bus with heat, warm meals and even a TV. On the same day of my arrival, I came down with a stomach flu and basically had diarrhea for 24 hours (not continuously of coz but u know what i mean) and some fever. Struggled hard to get rid of it with all kinds of methods, spiritual, emotional, physical/metaphysical, u name it. I was signed up originally for the Salar tour on the next day, which I smartly postponed to the day after, and thanks to myself and the universe, my body was back up functionally at 90% efficiency by the time of the following morning. So that was a short but dark episode. Well, Uyuni was really cold, even in the hotel, not fun to be sick there.

So, the tour started around noon on Monday. Out of tens of agencies, I picked Tunupa Tours, which felt right. We had six people on our tours, which I´ll briefly introduce: Josef and wife (sorry forgot her name) from Spain, who are experienced mountaineers and South America travelers who basically served as our guide on this tour because we didn´t have one in practice (the driver just drove and that was it), Lena from Denmark who´s been traveling in Argentina since January and has changed her flight home twice already, Kristofer from Sweden, an engineer who just finished his six-month work in Santa Cruz (Bolivia) and is traveling in Bolivia, and Dylan, Amderstam boy doing three week in Peru and Bolivia who´s copying my pictures right now cuz´ apparently my camera takes better pictures than his. Ok, the first stop was the much anticipated Salar de Uyuni, which is basically the largest salt flat in the world and pretty much what drew me to the trip in the first place. Much to my disppointment, this was probably the least interesting of the tour. The salt flat was nothing but miles of flat white land with lil´ mounts of white cones that are often not even white because so many jeeps pass by them everyday. (I may not even show u my pix here cuz´ they are sooo bad). Second stop was the Isla de Pescadores, kinda interesting, a lil´ island of chunky cactuses in the middle of these white salt flats. We had lunch there in front of the island, and what was funny was that the entrance ticket of this Isla shows NOT the island itself, but the jeeps that line up in front of the Isla having lunch. The first day was relatively short and we landed in our first overnight stay in San Juan. The room was bare and we slept in our sleeping bags. Dinner was yummy tho, had BBQ chicken and fries. No showers of coz.

I can´t remember exactly all the different sights we saw on the second day, but everything we saw were just gorgeous, from funky mountains in a distance to desolate red lakes with flamingos to huge rocks on deserts etc... they were all so just beautiful. I wish I could describe them better in words but as I try to recall those images, I can´t seem to anymore, it´s like it was an experience and that was it. The third day is even more amazing, cuz´ the landscape really turned more and more unearthly when we approached Chile. Basically you would feel like you´re on Mars. Incredibly high altitudes, I think we almost hit 5,000 m at some points, crazy windchills, and just vasts and vasts of brown land with these exotic alien looking mountains that have lime green and pink colors in them, oh! and we saw Dali rocks (you know those rocks that Dali the painter painted). The geysers (volcanic springs?) that I saw this morning (3rd day) was totally my favourite. Hopefully my pictures will capture at least some of how it really appeared to me, so will share those shortly. Forgot to talk about my second night stay tho, gruelling cold I hated that part. The shack we stayed in used tin or aluminum as the roof in the hang-out eating area which basically conducts heat AWAY from anything, so me and some of the tour friends decided to dance (without music) after dinner to keep ourselves warm. The night sleep was ok, managed to catch a few hours as we had to wake up at 5am in order for the group to finish seeing all the sights and drop Dylan and I to take another bus to cross over to Chile. So I´m exhausted. San Pedro de Atacama seems really boring to me now, but I´ll rest here probably until the day after tomorrow before I take an overnight bus to Arica, the northern most city in Chile, where I can cross over to Peru. I hope to do some trekking near Arica (there´s a really nice national park there) after some good rest.

Tomorrow I´ll chill and maybe take a short half-day tour to see sunset on some valley nearby. Will write again very very soon. Yes, and the pictures.. let´s see how I can effectively share them. Ciao.