Oct. 19, 2016.  Salt Hotel, day one of tour, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia.

• Great first day.  Other tourists: two German couples, and a Chinese woman.  First stop: total waste of time at the Cementerio de Trenes: dozens of equivalent Toyota Land Cruisers with 6 tourists each, and dozens of stalls of the usual stuff for sale.  The trains themselves were a wash - just old, junky locomotives and cars, some on tracks, some in the sand.  Yawn.

• Next, a nice drive onto the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat (12,106 sq km), at an altitude of 3653m.  Pure white, the surface broken in hexagons, squares, pentagons in no particular order.  We stopped once for trick photos: a miniature Chan Chan (the Chinese woman) appears to be standing on my hand.  

• Chan Chan turned out to be a kick:  60 years old (I guessed late thirties), married, with two children and a grandchild.  Traveling alone, her itinerary including a week on Rapa Nui, Patagonia, those famous falls in Argentina whose name escapes me, and all over Peru and Bolivia.  And the best part: she can't speak a word of anything but Chinese.  She would try to say something, then gesticulate with her hands, then burst out laughing.  We loved her.

• Next stop: Isla Incahuasi, in the middle of the salar, covered in enormous Trichocereus cacti and surrounded by a flat white sea of salt tiles.  Again, dozens of Toyotas were there with us, really overrun with tourists, but still a beautiful site if you can forget the crowds.

• Finally, dinner and night at a salt hotel, where nearly everything is constructed of salt blocks.  Very clean and modern inside,  nicer than most hostels I've been staying at.  They put Chan Chan and me in the same room, which caused all sorts of merriment, although the staff was a bit shocked when they discovered we were not with our own spouses.