Day 43

7am start, so not too early, although breakfast was a disaster. As usual it was bread and Jam, but my friend Sarah has coeliac disease, which means she can't eat gluten (no bread) and so the hotel was supposed to prepare her an omelette, but forgot. So Rodrigo was not happy at all, argued with them and eventually she got her omelette (literally as we were leaving)
First stop was Incahausi, which is an island in the middle of the salt flats, all the rock is hardened coral, because it used to be under the sea, and it was full of cacti, and I mean full. It's a pretty awe-inspiring sight, this bizarre little island surrounded by salt, and definitely worth a visit (just not when the locals are doing their yearly llama sacrifice, because I doubt that's pretty)
Next we drove for ages into the white until we got to a suitably flat bit in order to take some hilarious salt flat photos. They're actually incredibly difficult to take, because you have to position the camera exactly right, and mort cameras can only focus on either the thing near or far, meaning one of them is blurry and your photo is sub-par. I really wanted a photo of me high-fiving a Dinosaur, but none of them turned out any good :(
There's also tiny me sitting on some sunglasses, but you can see a strip of salt in between me and the glasses, rendering that photo a disaster as well.
Then a travesty happened, our crazy driver Leandro had f***ed up our gear stick, so we had to wait for an hour for a new car to continue our travels in. We passed the time by walkie-talking to the other cars and playing 20 questions (although it was more like 40 questions)
Finally Luis arrived with our new car, and we set off to lunch, which consisted of pasta and tomato sauce, although the shop charged 40 bolivianos for a twix, and I was not at all impressed.
Next stop was a volcano, then a lagoon with flamingoes (or so we thought) as we were cursing along the desert, Leandro goes over a bump and the axle snaps on the car. So we have to wait for ages whilst they attempt to fix it, Dan gave up and wandered off into the mountains, which meant we had to wait for bloody ages while he galavanted about in the desert.
By this point we were running severely late, and so we just stopped on the road to view a lil puff of smoke rising from the volcano before heading to the next hotel. This one wasn't made of salt, but was unbelievably f***ing cold. Dinner was soup and really nice chicken, but my bed was by the wall and so I was next to the seeping chill all night :(
We did have a pretty awesome game of s***head, and imagined we were at the happy ending of a movie when we were driving into the sunset, and the view was still spectacular, so all in all a pretty good day.