The Coolest Birthday ever

Possibly final set of pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45516081@N00/ (see why below)

I´ve spent the last five days sitting in 4x4s and buses, traveling across various . At least it lasts for 5 years!Bolivian deserts. The landscape here is spectacular!
The Salar de Uyuni tour took three days to travel from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile to Uyuni in Bolivia. Three days in a 4x4 wasn´t too bad, although the third day I was starting to go nuts listening to the one tape our driver brought along for the ride. This wasn´t the first time I wished I´d brought my iPod, and it wont be the last. The first day we saw beautiful lakes, mostly made of Borax - a naturally occuring substance out here that they use for laundry detergent. We spent the night in a Refugio on the Laguna Colorada. It was spectacular! It was truly one of the most beautiful places I´ve ever been. There were flamingos sleeping on top of the lake. I don´t know what they do at night because it gets about -20 degrees Celsius and they have no body fat. In addition, I´d always thought they were a tropical bird...
The next morning I woke up to -10 degree weather. I can honestly say this was the ¨coolest¨ birthday I´ve ever had! I turned 23 in the middle of a freezing Bolivian desert, that makes for a pretty good story in retrospect. The second day of the tour consisted of more lakes, more rocks, lunch in an awesome desert with giant rocks that looked like lion heads, and then we ended the afternoon on the Salar de Uyuni. We spent that night in a Salt hotel on the fringe of the Salar. Everything was made of salt; the walls, the floors, the tables and chairs, the supports for the beds. It was pretty spectacular! We watched the sunset over the salar, so beautiful.
The third and final day consisted of a trip directly out to the middle of the salt lake. It´s 1200 square kilometers, and 25 meters deep. This is a serious f´ing salt lake, the biggest in the world. It looked like snow, and even sounded like it when you´d walk around on it (crunch crunch) but it didn´t taste like snow. We got to stop and take weird perspective shots in the middle of the salar, where people can look way smaller because they are 10 meters behind you. I´ve never seen anything like that in my life, so incredible. That was a wonderful way to end the tour, definitely climactic at the end.
When we got into Uyuni I had a big hassle getting my Bolivian Visa. As I mentioned earlier, I had to pay $100 US to enter the country. But I couldn´t get the visa for a while because there was a problem with the cash machine in Uyuni. I couldnt´get out money for a few hours, so they were holding my passport at the migration office. It was the makings for a nightmare, I was so afraid someone would steal my passport and I´d be stranded in the middle of nowhere, Bolivia.
I finally got out 725 Bolivianos and exchanged them for american dollars, but then had to make multiple trips between the currency exchange office and the migration office, because the guys at migration weren´t satisfied with the condition of my US dollars (TINY little rips). Finally I was able to get my Visa and spend a nice evening in Uyuni, which is kind of a shitty little town but I liked the people and got good vibes from it. What a day; the only birthday present I got was a having to pay the Bolivian government $100 because they don´t like Americans.

I´m now in Sucre, the highest capital in the world (or so says my guidebook). I really like it here, it´s a city with all the basics that you could need, but it´s not overwhelming, it´s even smaller than Salta. The only problem is I realized my camera has gone missing. I dont know if I lost it on the bus, or it got stolen at some point in the bus terminal, or what. All I know is that my pictures that I have taken up to date were with my camera in the pouch. This means all I have are what I´ve posted on Flickr, as well as a few of Uyuni from a friend of mine. I´ve added these to my picture page, but these may be the last I´ll be able to post because I don´t have enough $$ to buy another digital camera :-( I´m trying to be optimistic though and think of this as an opportunity to really live through my experience and not get too caught up with taking pictures to the point where I miss my trip... but I haven´t fully been able to wrap myself around that way of thinking yet. I´m too materialistic dammit, I want my pictures!! At the very least, I´m glad it was just my camera and not my passport or all my belongings, this could have been much worse...