We are home now, which was a story unto itself, which I will share in a few days. I promised to finish the salt flats trip story once the laptop was repaired, so I need to complete that promise with this post. We left off by tucking into bed in the salt flat hotel. Days 2 and 3 of the tour consisted of spine breaking off road travel across Altiplano desert between rock formations and lagoons of salt water. The drive was hard on both the passengers and the vehicle alike and I can't possibly imagine being the driver who does that trip twice per week.
The second day started off at 5:30 am where we piled into the Land Cruiser and headed off into the mountains and across rocky stretches of flat desert like areas. The scenery is fantastic all along the way with constant views like the following:
The last picture is of what they referred to as a "dormant" volcano. It seemed rather odd to us that there was a plume of smoke coming out of the top left of it but we were assured that it always does that.
Day 2 was also special because it was Jordan's 9th birthday and had several unique things happen to make it extra special. The first was that we saw our first wild vicuna as in the picture above. They are basically the wild cousin of the llama and wander around these remote parts like camels do in the Sahara. The second unique thing was that while we were passing through a large desert stretch at around 13500 feet above sea level, we got a flat tire on the Land Cruiser.
The only real concerning part of the flat tire was that our driver liked to take alternate routes from the other tour drivers (we hadn't seen another vehicle for a while), and the spare tire had less tread on it than the one that went flat. We got up and going again and continued on our way to a series of lagoons where flamingos and alpaca were wandering around looking all National Geographic.
We greatly appreciated their signage requiring the flamingos to stay on the ground so we could take pictures of them.
We ended day two with the Ken, Andres and the kids going for a swim in the hot springs while Melody sat down for a while and I wandered about. While wandering, a large bunch of alpacas came around the corner of the mountain and gave me a unique opportunity to get up close and personal.
Day two ended by returning to our hostel for the night to find our room full of young German gentlemen. After working out the mixup (and removing the Germans), we had supper where we celebrated Jordan's birthday with a toast, and then by Ken sharing the last bag of Doritos with her.
We all slept very soundly after a very long day.
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