Escrito en tranvia

Right now I'm on a train from Oruro to Villazon, Bolivia. We're heading into the last leg of the trip- returning now to Salta to get the truck and then heading west into the Chile for about 5 days before making our way back east. A ton has happened in the past 2 and a half weeks and it feels like we left on this trip 2 months ago.  I'll pick up where I left off last time.

We arrived in Uyuni after that tortuous bus ride and searched out a hotel with some space. Bolivia is about as third world as you can get in most of it, so our hotel had no heat or hot water, and it's located at about 10000ft in a desert so nights get a little chilly. First thing we did was outfit ourselves head to toe in winter alpaca clothes, for a total of about $15 US dollars.  That night we went to a bar called Extreme Fun Bar which was actually extremely fun. They had some pretty crazy drinks and very crude names/ways of serving them.   

The next day we headed out on a tour of the famous Bolivian salt flats. A local guy picked us up in a Land Cruiser and first drove us to an old train cemetary where there were tons of old broken down locomotives laying in the middle of the desert. Then we drove to where they had a small village of salt packaging houses, which were also made out of salt.  We discovered some of the coolest hats ever in a store back in Uyuni, and in this village there were plenty more of them so each of us got some (8 between 4 of us).  We continued on and saw a salt hotel (building, beds, etc made of salt) that is now a museum, and then drove about 45 minutes more across the salt flats to the center (I think our guide said the flats we were on were about 11500 square kilometers, but I have no way of checking that on this train so I could be way off) where there is a spot of actual earth called Fish Island.  There we had lunch and took some perspective pictures and played cards for a bit before returning to Uyuni. After a tasty 2 course dinner that cost us $1.45, we took a bus to Bolivia's capital city of La Paz, using it as a transfer hub to continue directly to Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca.  That and more stories to come.

Things I want to say but don't know how to include in the post:
- We are way too big for Bolivia. We hit our heads an average of 2.5 times per day. I hold the record high with 6 times in one day.
- As we have now traveled a large amount in Bolivia, weve discovered that there is almost no comfortable way of transporting yourself around the country.
- Bolivian authorities are not nice. I have a long story to support that claim, if I can manage to fit a reasonably sized version of it in a post, I'll do it. 
- Bathrooms are not often sanitary here and there is rarely hot water. We have gone a few days at a time without showering or comfortably relieving ourselves to this point. With my long hair (which is actually pretty curly) and not showering for 5 days at one point, it turned to kind of loose dread locks.
- I finished The Sound and the Fury. Tough read, but enjoyable. I also crushed the Davinci Code in like 3 days, that book was incredible. I tried to start The Road to Jerusalem, book 1 from the Crusades Trilogy, but after 45 pages of incredibly dry text and a warning from my friend that it doesn't change too much I abandoned that. I think tomorrow I'm gonna start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

That's all I can think of for now. There's wifi in our hostel in Salta so I'll have this and hopefully another post up within the next day. Later