The night bus to Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni was my next destination, in the southwest Bolivian altiplano. I found the township of Uyuni to be a strange, almost eery place, and extremely quiet. The main street is wide and long, with few people or cars. It felt as though nothing had happened there for hundreds of years; the place had an expectant feeling, an air of anticipation. In the evening, the sun spilled pink all across the sky. The roads and pavement shone white. Everything white and pink like a bag of marshmallows. It was a spectacular scene.

The road from La Paz to Uyuni was long and uncomfortable. I read 'The City of Thieves' by David Benioff until my eyes couldn't stay open. However the road was very rough and the jerkiness of the bus wouldn't allow me the luxury of sleep. I had twelve hours to close my eyes and think.

A few hours earlier at the bus station, Brooke and I had bought an elderly beggar woman a packet of crackers, the main reason being that I didn't particularly want to give any more money. I had bought myself a packet of the same crackers, which I now nibbled on in the bus. I realised they tasted terrible, and subsequently felt extremely guilty for not giving her a couple of bolivianos with which she could have bought a plate of tasty rice or papas rellenas on the street with.

I was thinking about food because I had forgotten to eat dinner before getting on the bus and now my tummy was grumbling . The only food I had with me was that terrible packet of biscuits, which I couldn't bring myself to eat, despite my hunger. So I placed myself in Benioff's novel - wartorn, World War II Russia, closed off and starved by the Germans, and I imagined that I had been eating biscuits made from the saw-dust swept up from the floors of the steelworks, and that I had been eating this way for the last four months, and that this was the first real cracker I had tasted since before the war. Suddenly, it actually tasted quite good, and I ate half the packet.

I found myself drifting in and out of sleep. At one point, I wiped the condensation from the window and saw what I thought was a large town settled on the side of the mountain, its city lights twinkling brightly. After some time of gazing dreamily at this mountainside city, I suddenly realised that it was not in fact a city, but a dark sky full of stars. I must have been dreaming of La Paz. The windows fogged over again and the stars began to look like specks of white chalk on a blackboard sky.

When I next woke, I looked out the window again and thought I could see drifts of snow on the ground. I wasn't entirely sure if it was snow, or salt. It was very cold, and I shivered most of the night, despite wearing a thick woollen poncho, a beanie and two pairs of woollen socks. I slept for a short time I think, and I didn't wake up again until the sky had lightened and we had arrived at Uyuni.