Even though I hate tours, I decided to book one to the Salar de Uyani, Bolivia's famous salt flats. A tour is preferable because in order to visit the Salar you need a heavy-duty jeep and intense navigational knowledge. Besides, I only need to be told once that it is not uncommon for locals to enter the Salar, get lost, and never be found again to hand over my bolivianos to a guide.
Two days was my ideal tour length (one day was too short; three days bumped up against my flight to Paraguay). The tour operators I first encountered told me it was impossible to do two days due to recent rainfall and that I could only book a one-day or a three-day tour.
Well... I am not a girl who easily takes "no" for an answer, so I continued on from tour shop to tour shop until I met a man who said that two-day tour would not be a problem. The plan was that I would board an 8pm bus in La Paz, arrive at 7am the next morning in Uyani and the tour guide would pick me up at the bus station for the tour.
Fast forward to 7:30 pm that night. I am at the bus station gate and go to hand the bus operator my ticket when he passes me a phone. A phone call? For me? Oh yes, it's the tour operator I booked with. He says that a two-day tour is impossible; he can only do one day or three days.
I could have killed him.
At this point, it's 30 minutes before my bus leaves, and I am fresh out of options. So I agree to the one day tour, but I am not happy about it. The bus was underbooked, so I grumpily laid out as best I could across two seats, placed the sleeping bag under my head as a buffer against the bumpy road, threw an Alpaca blanket over me and did my best to sleep for the next 11 hours.
We reached Uyani at pretty much the same time as daylight. The bus driver pulls to a stop, and it might have been my terrible Spanish, but I think he tells us that we can't leave the bus until our tour operators come to get us. Suddenly, I feel less like a consumer of a tour and mor e like a prisoner of war.
My tour operator finally comes and calls my name. And like I've won the lottery , I gather up all of my things and hustle out of the bus. The morning is hazy; it is frigid outside; and the streets look so bare that if I would have had to guess, I would have said no one had lived in that town for 20 years. I look to my "guide" and instead of walking me to the tour office, he hastily gives me walking directions.
I walk these five blocks alone, pack on my back, my down jacket zipped all the way up, feeling like the main character in a post-apocalyptic novel. And I can't help but think to myself...yeah...i'm going to need to get my money back once I return to La Paz.
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