We actually made it to the Salar (and out of the Salar as well). We took an overnight bus to Tupiza (apparently in the dry season all the buses run at night), during which I did not sleep (80s hits at full volume on a bouncy dirt road are not conducive to sleep), and Slyvia from Grano de Oro tours met us at the bus station at 4am and let us sleep in an extra room at the travel agency and let Lori use her shower. We met the three French girls who would also be in our tour, Yolan, Ginola, and Marie. Ginola and Marie have been friends since birth and mainly spoke French, but Yolan made an effort to speak English and also include us in conversation. We offered to speak mainly Spanish, but they said their English was better than their Spanish.
The tour was 4 days. Uyuni, the normal end of the tour, was still blocked by a roadblock, but Sylvia assured us that we could get back to Tupiza, we would just have to pay the driver extra for gas. However, almost immediately Sebastian, our driver, told us we might not get to see the Salar because it was (1) blocked and (2) we did not have enough gas to get back to Tupiza. Awesome. However, we still followed the normal tour route of seeing multi-colored lakes populated by flamingos, hotsprings, and geyers. It was a really pretty landscape, but our concern about seeing the Salar stuck a black cloud over our trip. (Will post photos later).
I also developed some traveler stomach problems, probably caused by eating chicken from a street vendor in Tarija. However, I packed enough immodium and pepto to keep it under control, and it went away after a couple days. Eating breakfast was generally a bad idea, I learned.
Sebastian was generally rude and not very sympathetic to his client´s concerns and also did not really make an effort to answer our questions (e.g., Ginola: is it very dry here? Sebastian: there is a very small percentage of salt). On the evening of the second day he informed us that there was no gas in Uyuni due to the blockade so we could not get back to Tupiza, nor did we have enough to get back if we turned around immediately, and he was going to drop us off 5K outside the blockade and we could walk into Uyuni, and he didn´t care what happened to us and his job was just to get us to Uyuni and he was single so he could survive on coca in his jeep for a month. Being stuck in a blockaded city was not really what either Lori nor I wanted to do, and I was also really concerned about Lori walking 5K across the cold desert. So we hatched a plan to go with another tour company that had its stuff together to take us to Ororo or La Paz, which are outside the department of Potosi and not subject to the blockades. The blockades were part of the department of Potosi´s plan to get the central government to give a cement factory on disputed land to the department of Potosi instead of Ororo. I´m glad that in the US we solve these sort of inter-state disputes with the Supreme Court instead of massive unrest.
Anyway, we also found out about jeeps that could take us to Ororo from Uyuni or to Chile from Uyuni, the second being a very expensive option since we would have to pay a $100 reciprocity tax at the border and then figure out how to get to Paraguay from there and forfeit plane tickets we had already bought in Bolivia. So it didn´t seem like we would be stuck in Uyuni, but we were pretty made at the tour company for lying to us about whether we could get back to Tupiza.
Our plan to go along with another tour company failed when none of the other companies stayed at our hostel the 3rd night. However, we found out that they had reached an agreement with the central government just in time, and there were no more blockades! Nobody really believed the news at first, not even Sebastian, but we heard it from 3 separate people, and as Sebastian pointed out, not all of them would probably lie the same. So the last day of the trip we went out to the Salar to watch the sun rise, went to an island in the Salar with giant Saguaro cacti, visited the first salt hotel (ours was also made out of salt, but not on the Salar), and watched the French girls take a zillion pictures of themselves. Sebastian was very nice because it was tip day, but that didn´t help him as far as tips went. We did tip our cook a lot, since she was a very nice lady who made very good food in the middle of nowhere. The Salar was pretty awesome, kind of how I always imagined Antartica. Mountains rising out of a flat salt plane.
Uyuni was like a ghost town when we entered, but became more and more active as the day went on. We saw people dancing in the streets and there were parades and everyone seemed really relieved that the blockade was over. We were some of the first tourists in about 4 days, so a lot of people were happy to see us.
We got a bus out of Uyuni after a last dinner with our French friends, and then got to Tupiza at 3:30am. We slept in a hostel for about 5 hours, then walked around Tupiza and went horseback riding with our 13 year old guide, Henry. Both Lori and I were glad we had taken horseback riding lessons as kids, since Henry gave us absolutely no instruction and our horses were liable to start running (they kept trying to get in front of each other). The landscape was a lot like the American southwest, and I was surprised how many of the plants were the same as in Arizona. Mesquite trees, Saguaro cactus, creosote bushes, organ pipe cacti, cholla cacti. They plants were pretty much the same, despite being so far apart.
Last night we took a bus back to Tarija, where we will hang out until our flight to Santa Cruz in the evening. Then tomorrow we will fly to Paraguay. We are both pretty excited to stay with Lori´s friends in a real house. Hopefully I will be able to upload pictures there.
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