Buenas Tardes!

Hope all is well with everyone back home :)  The past few days have been very eventful!

Thursday afternoon I went to a facility that houses severally mentally disabled kids.  There are about 72 kids at the facility, and only a few of them were able to talk. We took a lot of them on walks, most were in wheelchairs, played with them, and helped feed them.  It was really hard to see, but the kids seemed to be really happy there.

On Friday I went to an orphanage called "Casa de Amor" with Joy and Kelly.  I got to feed one ADORABLE boy a banana and then held/walked around with a little boy named Christopher.  All the volunteers/workers there were really nice and welcoming.  At around three in the afternoon 14 of us packed up our backpacks and headed to the bus station to begin our adventure to the salt flats... and let me tell you, it was by God's grace that we made it there :).  So we get to the bus station and find out that because it is vacation season here, all the buses before five are sold out, which is a problem because all the buses to get from Oruo to Uyuni leave before nine.  The women at the bus station tells us that if we put a deposit down on our tickets from Oruo to Uyuni they can hold the bus to make sure we will make it.  So we do that, and all climb on the bus that will take us from Quillocollo to Oruo.  Everything is going great until the bus pulls to the side of the road.  After about 45 minutes the driver informs us that this bus is not authorized to go any farther and that we should all get off and try to find a Truffi back to Quillocollo.  Some of the passengers get up and talk to the driver and within about 15 minutes we are back on the road.  This is great, except that we end up in Oruo at 10:00, and our bus is long gone.  Two native Bolivians that we know came with us, and boy am I happy they did.  Claudia had gotten the phone number of the bus driver and asked him to wait for us at a rest stop.  We then found two taxis, who charged us 40 bolivianos (more then our bus ticket cost!) and headed to the rest stop.  We kept asking our driver to go faster, and eventually he turned up his music to tune us out.  We got to the bus stop at around 11:00 p.m., and the bus was there waiting for us!!  The bus ride was 7 hours long, FREEZING, and EXTREMELY bumpy.  It felt like someone was shaking the bus the entire way there, needless to say a lot of people couldn't sleep.  I, however, was next to a volunteer named Jennifer who was kind enough to share her blanket with me, and actually got some sleep!

We arrived in Oruo at around 4:00 A.M. and were told we had to get off the bus.  Claudia and Adrianna (the native bolivians) asked the driver if we could stay on and sleep till 7:00 because we had no where to go and it was FREEZING outside.  He grumpily agreed and we got a little extra shut eye.  At 7:00 we were greeted by a travel agent who was trying to get us to go with here tour company.  After she mentioned that she had a bathroom (we all hadn't gone for 17 hours... but who was counting :) )and a heater we were sold :)

The tour was AMAZING.  We were divided into groups of 7 and each group got a land crusier.  We visited a train graveyard first, which was very interesting.  We stopped on our way to the trains to take a picture with the llamas.  I enjoyed that :)  Then we headed to the salt hotel.  It was more like a house but it was really cool because the house, and all the furniture inside of it, were made out of salt. The tour provided lunch, and this is were we ate it.  For lunch we had Quinua, tomatoes, cucumbers, llama (I didn't have any of this), and oranges.  It was very tasty.  After lunch we headed for the Island of fish.  Our guide has no idea why it is called this because it is an island full of cactuses!   I have to go help make dinner, I'll try to write more later :)

Chau!