Salt, dead trains and blood red lagoons

Bolivia is not only a country of extremes, it's also a weird and surrealistic place at times ! It has night busses that stop at 3am in the middle of the desert to pick up women and children, music TV channels that play the same video clip 4 times in a row, other shows that discuss the utility of traffic lights (very hot topic in La Paz!), soft drinks that taste like liquid bubble gum, hotel ladies that try to steal your underwear while they're in the laundry (with mine, that was WEIRD for sure!), and most of all the most bizarre landscapes you would ever come across.Like I said before, Bolivia is a place that gets into your system. Certainly if you get on the 14h night bus from La Paz to Uyuni, and you get out as all the locals get on at 3am, looking at a full scale lit star night, wondering where the hell you are. You take a deep breath and try to wake up : the 3700m altitude already makes it hard to breath, and the bus ride makes it even worse. 70 people in a bus of 50, with niños sleeping in the aisle, and all you smell is dead chicken, and al you breath is dust. A nine year old hangs half over your lap, since he's already too big to sleep in the aisle. That's Bolivia. But Bolivia is also waking up with a blowing sun on your face, and starting your travel life all over again with a nice electric hot shower (they look like a prototype of the electric chair and as safe as Bolivians make them, but they're HOT!) and a filling desayuno americano. Uyuni is a good place to do that, wondering why and how they ever built this town in literaly the middle of nowhere. Well, to start, Uyuni was a mining town for a very long time, and also a very important railway center on the way to Argentina and Chile. Yes, they have trains on 3700m, in the middle of the desert ! Bolivia has no sea (the Chileans 'stole' it from them 130 years ago - well, the Bolivians were so stupid as well to 'lose' it, the president was too busy celebrating carnaval before sending out the troops), so all they got going for them in the 19th century were train tracks, and they have loads of them ! Just outside Uyuni, you can go see for yourself how the Industrial Revolution reached the Altiplano : tons of steel have come to die there on the biggest train graveyard in the world. Old steam trains slowly rust away under utter blue skies, quite a sight. There is a small monument as well (Bolivians love those), screaming out the injustice of modern times : ' No a la aviacion ! '. If that ever would have saved the steam train. Getting the taste of this Bolivian surrealism, we got ourselves on a 4 day tour through some of the most bizarre places I have ever seen. First day, driving through desert, hiding away from the bitter cold in a random desert town with electricity for 2 hours, eating the most delicous vegetable soup and playing cards with refound travel mate Kurt and Dutchman Bram, until the shut down generator left us with only darkness. Second day, more red desert (I felt I was on one of those explorer thingies NASA put on Mars), gazing at hot geysers and bubbling mud, with steam coming out of the ground that smelled of rotten eggs. Not to go near though, because earlier on an Israeli girl fell in and burned off one of her legs in the 200º boiling mud. The same day, more bizarre beautiful, when our guide drove us to Laguna Verde (well, it was rather turquoise than green), on the back drop of a huge black volcano, half covered in beige sand... Red sand on the groud, white foam on the shore, blue skies, it kept on getting better and better. The next stop was Laguna Colorada, a blood red lagoon (due to plankton activity), home to thousands of pink flamingos... Yeah right, pink flamingos in the desert at 4000m ! Wow. Next day, more desolation driving through red desert, along Mount Dooms on both sides, before arriving at a place right out of a Salvador Dali painting... Rocks that seemed to come out of the ground, in the most bizarre forms and shapes. I was so disorientated and daydreaming that I stumbled over one of them and cut my finger. Quite a reality check ! At night, sleeping in the desert town of San Juan, where we visited the local museum (how to kill a llama in prehistoric times) and experienced a wicked (literally!) sunset over one of a few remaining Inca burial grounds, where the mummies were staring us in the face from in their Alien egg-shaped chullpas... Talking about scary !Fourth and last day, we got up at 3.30am and drove two hours to what proved to be the highlight of this trip : the Uyuni salt flats. We caught the sunrise over the endless white, the sky burned... I'd say a paradise for any photographer or Pink Floyd getting inspiration for a new CD cover. Shadows play around, mirages of white lagunes in the far, mountains that seem to float in the blue sky, a complete 2 dimensional world lacking any depth perspective... Another wow ! And in the middle of the madness, an island full of cactusses, some reaching 12m heigh, growing on fossilised algae. Weird ! A hike to the top gave me a moment or two : at first, the overwhelming white silence was eerie and blinding, but then idyllic. Needless to say we were all blown away by this endless beauty, but not for too long. We got to Culchani, the 'salt' town, where everybody lives of the salt trade : people still work up the sand by hand, getting it on 50 year old trucks (new ones would rust away anyway), selling the white cristals off at 20 centavos (2 eurocent) per kilo... There is enough salt left for another 1000 years, but nobody will ever get rich off it. It's sad to see how a beautiful and such 'rich' country as Bolivia can be so underdeveloped, exploited and poor.As I write this, tensions are getting high again about the sale of Bolivian gas, and from which port it should be exported. Last October, huge scale riots erupted when the government wanted to sell the gas through all time enemy Chile, and now again, it seems that the campesinos and the all powerful union COB are in for another round of strikes and blocades. So facing being stuck here, I am hasting my way to Brazil before the end of the month, visiting on my way the mining town of Potosi and Sucre, the colonial pearl of Bolivia so they say. More news to follow from there !