Salar de Uyuni Pink Flamingos: Day 1

Salar de Uyuni Pink Flamingos: Day 1.
April 23.

I slept terribly last night.  Two nights in a row like that.  Am I stressed?  Weird… I joined 11 others and we rode a bus and drove through a little of Chile until a sign showed an arrow to the right and said ‘Bolivia.’  That was were we drove off the highway and onto a dirt road that was no better than a farm access road that we have on our land at home to get from field to field.  Then a ‘Bolivian Migracion’ building showed up in the dirty desert, totally alone with nothing else but dust from our dirt road.  We checked in and were in Bolivia.

There are six of us in each 4WD Toyota 4Runner.  There is also a super cute girl that reminds me of Fabiana from Brazil on the journey.  She is Roberta from Argentina, and because I was visiting with her when they were assigning vehicles, her and I ended up in the back seat of one of the Toyotas together with four others from Sweden.  She is my favourite today.  I have three days… That is as long as I can hold myself together.

I was feeling very sick in the Toyota on the drive so far.  The altitude seems to be really messing with me.  I have a headache, my heart beats very hard at times, my lungs hurt, I am extremely tired, and I was afraid that I might throw up at some point.  And, I am really tired on top of it all.  So, viewing Salar de Uyuni pink flamingos, geysers and lagoons has not been a blast so far.  I hope I condition soon. We had provided lunch, which was hot dogs and salad.  You would have to hold me down to get a hot dog into me.  So, I ate a lot of salad.  We are 4200m elevation, and everyone feels sick except Roberta who was in San Pedro for a month, so she is conditioned.

One of the Swedish girls stayed behind while the rest of us when to look at a lagoon of Salar de Uyuni pink flamingos, but Roberta and I just mostly tried to figure out what kind of animal shit was on the side of the water.  Beside the Salar de Uyuni pink flamingos, I was walking with Roberta and talking and I ran out of breath just walking and talking.  I had to stop to finish my story.  I have never experienced something like this before.  I feel like an 80 year old man. We came back to the hostel, played a card game as a group of 12 and had dinner.  We were in bed by 9pm.

*For more on Salar de Uyuni Pink Flamingos, click:

Day 2: Salar de Uyuni Atacama Desert
Day 3:  Salar de Uyuni Salt Flats