06/02/2012 - Bolivian Salt Flats Tour - Day 1 of 3

The company that we organized this tour with fucked us around a little bit this morning giving us a 4x4 worse than the one promised to us yesterday.
With a little bit of a debacle we didn't have any other choice than to he into the car and start the trip.
It was a tight squeeze in the back but agreeing to rotate around the car over the next few days it won't be all that bad.
The first thing we set out to see was a train graveyard, personally I was pretty stoked to take some surreal photos of the wrecks by using some photoshop techniques meanwhile everyone else thought it was a waste of time. We only stuck around for 15 minutes before heading to the salt flats where everything brightened up - the reflection of the sun on the flats made it hard to see without sunglasses.

We were given some opportunity to take some great photos using some props we brought along and of course I brought Boing for a bit of a photo shoot. Photos below.
Our driver who we will be spending the next 3 days with doesn't speak a word of English and everyone else in the car doesn't speak any Spanish, my Spanish is still very broken and I have no problems asking questions and understanding the answers but beyond that I am lost, still I was used as the translator for the group. Haha, let's see how this goes.
The salt flats were very impressive seeing many cloud formations form into storms in the distance with the sun directly overhead meaning I, along with many others got sun burnt.
We drove for several hours back through Uyuni and headed further south thinking that all the other tour groups would be doing the same thing but our driver seemed to take us on a more scenic route through a couple of flooded roads were at one point we got stuck and the car wouldn't start again, after the driver doing some work under the hood finally got the thing started and we went to see some rock formations during the overcast sunset.
We finished the day in a small and what seemed to be a mining town where we were shuffled into little rooms that seemed cosy enough but I had by far the worst bed. The couples had their own rooms meanwhile I shared with Samantha from England who filled the last spot in the car.
The make shift building we stayed in was better than we all expected along with the food for dinner where soon after we cracked into the rum and UNO that was all fun and games until heated but funny arguments broke out about the rules of the game, 'twas still fun though.