No one likes Uyuni. Everyone backpacking through South America stops there and they all have the same advice: get out as fast as you can. Iīm the exception.

    Iīve been intrigued by Uyuni since the first time I read about it in my guidebook. A small town at the crossroads of Bolivia and Chile, trapped between mountains, desert, and salt plain, full of traditional Bolivians with a few gringos hanging around the edges - can there be another place like this on earth? I found the whole place hopelessly exotic. My first impressions were silence and dust. Only a small portion of the main street is paved, meaning that there are constant dirt clouds blowing over the town. People here are quiet and stoic and very few can afford cars. Old women sit together in sidewalks and stores, but they donīt talk - they only stare silently into space. Uyuni feels like part of the wild west and it once was - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid passed through here over a century ago. Aside from electric lightbulbs and a handful of taxis, very little has changed since.

    Tourists come to Uyuni, but it isnīt a tourist town. Most visitors move between a handful of backpacker-oriented hotels, restaurants, and bars without giving the town a chance. Liz and I wanted to explore and we chose the perfect day to do it. When we arrived on Saturday afternoon, we promptly booked a room in the nicest hotel in town ($2.50 apiece) and spent the rest of the day sleeping and eating. I chugged down water, unbelievably relieved to know I could drink without throwing up. When we awoke on Sunday morning, the main street had disappeared under a forest of market stalls. I ate breakfast in my room, still rejoicing in the sunlight streaming through the windows and my newfound ability to drink water. People moved between the market stalls, pushing their purchases in flat-bottomed three-wheeled carts.

    When it was finally warm outside, Liz and I went to explore. Although a few vendors sold brightly-colored handbags and llama sweaters, this was not a tourist market. Most of the stalls sold practical things - produce, toiletries, pots, pans, and even stoves and ovens. Directly in front of our hotel was one of the marketīs most arresting sights. Country women in Bolivia still dress in the style the Spanish conquerers demanded: knee-length skirts, a thick pile of petticoats, a wool blanket draped over their shoulders, and another tied around their back for carrying groceries and babies. Each wore a bowler hat on top of their braided hair. Those who wore their hats tilted to the right were single, while those who wore their hats straight were married. Women dressed like this knelt among mountains of oranges, silently waiting for buyers. I wondered where the oranges grew in the desert and how far the women had to walk to get here. Their faces were deeply lined, but the babies on their backs proved that they were twenty years younger than they looked. When I stepped out of the hotel, my first sight was women dressed like this kneeling among mountains of oranges. Like the other vendors at the market, they didnīt hawk their wares. Instead they sat stoically, waiting for buyers to appear.

    The only noise in town came from the very end of the market, where there were gambling and foosball tables. I didnīt understand what was happening, but men dressed in white lab coats stood on tables in the center of the crowd, taking money and shaking boxes. On the sidewalks, traditionally dressed women with portable stoves made fried chicken and llama meat. The smell was delicious, but Liz and I were afraid to try market food the afternoon before our 9-hour bus ride to Sucre.

    Desperate to escape the loud gambling crowd, Liz and I turned down a side street and found ourselves in the dry goods market. The fat vendors in their petty coats were almost indistinguishable from their white sacks of flour, spices, and pasta. Another turn led us to the vegetable market. In a dry brown city like Uyuni, so much color seemed out of place.

    The market exhausted, Liz and I wandered away from the main street to the edge of town. A little kid yelled "Hello! one two three four five!" We rounded a corner and nearly walked into 3 traditionally dressed women, one with a basketball balanced perfectly on her index finger. She had a huge grin on her face and I thought of a playground basketball game Iīd seen when we drove into Uyuni. One pettycoat-wearing girl was playing against all the boys, and she looked radiant when she jumped for the ball.

    At 7 it was time for our bus to leave. Liz and I were nervous - weīd been promised a 9-hour bus ride, which meant weīd arrive in Sucre at 4 in the morning. We shouldnīt have worried. You usually get what you pay for, and weīd paid exactly $4 for a cross-country bus trip. There was no heating or toilet and the seats were tiny. Iīm short, but my knees scraped the back of the chair in front of me. During what turned out to be a 14-hour trip, we stopped only twice: once for a real toilet, and once because there was no one else in the street, so the driver said it would be okay to pee there. The road was awful, unpaved and full of ruts. Our bus rumbled and clattered as if the transmission would fall out at any second. Sleeping was impossible. Several times the bus scraped sheer rock walls as it tried to navigate hairpin turns in the dark. When this happened, a woman would emerge from the driverīs cubicle and shout "someone in the back help the driver!" Then a chorus would ensue: "back! back! left! youīre good! good good good! STOP! STOP NOW!" Liz slept peacefully. I stayed awake at my window seat, looking down the sides of the cliff.

    At 3:30 AM, we reached Potosi, a frigid city in the mountains. I donīt know why, but we styaed there until 6, driving in circles around a single city block for no discernable purpose. The unheated bus was freezing. After about 30 minutes, the driver tuned into the local salsa station and pumped up the volume as high as it would go. Great, I thought, really loud annoying music is exactly what this situation is missing.

    At 9 AM, after 14 hours, we finally reached Sucre. As soon as we arrived, I knew it would join New York, Paris, and Valparaiso is one of my all-time favorite cities in the world.

~Meredith