Salty Dogs

50 Cent did a show in Tel Aviv and they bartered him down to 40. Ba-dah-bump. It's no secret that Israelis can barter like nobody's business. We met four young Israelis in Uyuni, Bolivia and they got us a 3-day Jeep tour of southern Bolivia's salt flats and other freaky geographical features for 60 bucks US. They also liked the 50 Cent joke. Our guide didn't speak English, and almost fell asleep at the wheel the first day. However, he was named Cristobal, the patron saint of transportation, so it all worked out.

So me, Mike, Cristobal, Elik, Saul, Uri and Gali piled into a Jeep and rolled out of the dusty town, half expecting to see the back of a movie set as we drove off. Uyuni looks like the Wild West (cue tumbleweed and showdown whistle). Almost immediately we were awed by huge herds of llamas, white, black, and brown. It soon became obvious why we were in a 4x4 as we bumped along a barren dirt path, our innards a-jigglin'. Desert stretched from the road on both sides, framed by mountains, framed by blue sky. We lunched in what seemed to be a ghost town and had play shoot-outs on the road where the only traffic consisted of a little boy and his sister sharing the smallest tricycle ever made.

One morning, we had a dip in thermal springs. The air was cool all around and the water was hot and rich in minerals and foreign cooties. An Irish dude sang the whole time. We continued on to the geysers. It's the closest we may get to outerspace. Ultra-surreal. There were several geysers shooting steam high into the air. The air was a moving mist and the land was lumpy with hills and depressions brewing boiling bubbling muck, some copper, some greyish brown. I kept picturing the opening scene of Macbeth... "Double, double, toil and trouble."

The rest of the time we spent checking out flamingo-filled AND llama-lined lagoons of various colours. My favourite was the pink. Mike's was the green. What would yours be?

The last day we hit the salt flats. 2000 square kms of blinding sunny salt. Is Dr. Squint in the house? The salt reacted strangely with our Canadian body chemistry and we shrunk down to miniscule proportions for a while. It had the opposite effect on the islands of giant cacti.

36 hours in the Jeep, 11 hours on the train, 9 hours on the bus, 1 hour on foot and 15 minutes of terror when the bus left without Mike who was off buying the nastiest, greasiest beef-egg sandwich I ever ate... now we're in Argentina.

Peace, Kristen and Mike