The first thing we saw exiting our jeep was this stand selling salt souvenirs
This little town, was really little. It comprised of a few dwellings a place where they used a giant oven to do some kind of salt processing and a salt museum that you can see in this picture.
Sita sitting on a salt bench in front of the museum. Surprisingly this museum had free admittance.
Inside the slat museum we found many salt sculptures.
Have you ever ridden a salt alpaca before? I have.
Speaking of alpacas there was this cute little one right outside the museum. It's purpose there was unknown. After having seen the way the natives of Peru interacted with alpacas on a trip there two years earlier and seeing almost all of the foreign tourists being scared or reserved about touching these animals, I had made up my mind that the next alpaca I saw I would pet. So here I am.
This was an unexpected 45 minutes of our tour. After driving for 3 days in the strangest of geologies and climates, we finally had a flat tire about two minutes from the town of Uyuni. Right in front of the sign welcoming us to Uyuni.
This seemed to be the area where the locals dumped their trash. It was quite a disgusting sight after having enjoyed so much beautiful nature.
I think we were all ready to enter town and buy something to eat after having three days of driver prepared meals. However, unlike many other times, our driver didn't offer us the option of skipping the final advertised part of the tour. We drove straight through the town, witnessing several places selling fresh food and continued on to the "Train Graveyard" where we were served lunch.
Here are all of the people in our tour group excluding Sita and the driver.
No explanation was ever offered for why this train graveyard exists, or why it is a featured part of the tour. But you know me, I'm not the type to not enjoy something, just because I don't know it's history. "Hmm, I wonder what this is."
"Hey check it out, I found something that moves."
These wheels were actually quite heavy, but once you got them going on the track then you could stay atop them like those circus acts where they walk atop barrels.
This train must've gotten into an accident.
At last, Uyuni, a town you may not be particularly impressed with if you had any freshly made food in the last three days. If you were coming to enjoy this town, however, you'd probably want to come on the very day we did, or around that time. It was carnival time.
One of the buildings in the main square.
Every kid had some kind of way to get others wet, either a squirt gun or water balloons.
The main street. With empty stands, we couldn't understand why these stands were here at the time, but as you'll see in a later picture they were filled along with this street in a couple hours.
More kids with water guns.
The vendors were catering to the carnival goers, selling the equivalent of "silly string". It was interesting to find natives in traditional dress selling Chinese-made cans of compressed pollution. These cans offered fun for the kids for a short time, but after already seeing what this town does with it's trash, it's hard to call it anything but pollution.
Most of the women were in traditional dress as this woman is.
More fun with water. Some kids had rain coats on.
This has to be one of the funniest things I saw the hole time I was there. I had to take a picture of it to share with all my fellow Simpons fans. For those who don't watch The Simpsons, the character drawn here is the town drunkard on the show.
There were several instances of communist or socialist graffiti.
Walking down one of the side streets from the main street we heard all of this commotion and beating of drums. We found a procession going on and went to join it.
It was just so odd to see all these people dressed in these Irish inspired costumes. I had no idea of the significance of their costumes, but I was fairly certain that there was not much Irish heritage to be found in Uyuni or all of Bolivia for that matter. So this was just bizarre, but fun, none the less.
The stands and streets were starting to fill.
This group of people paraded through the main streets dancing in circles and then progressing forward slowly while dancing in rows. The kids had no mercy on this merry parade as they bombarded them with every thing imaginable, water, silly string and even some projectiles.
Even the littlest amongst them got in on the fun.
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