On arriving in La Paz it took us a little while to direct our taxi driver to the correct road "Calle Aroma", in which we knew there were a few decent hostels, amidst the craziness of Carnival that continued on around us. We finally arrived in the right street to soon realise the hostels were a bit out of our price range so we wandered round the corner to find a cheaper place, although it was a bit dingy. After offloading our bags we headed out in hunt of a good meal, a restaurant we had liked the sound of in the Lonely Planet. We dodged the mayhem going on in the streets and still couldnt find it but a security guy told us of a another good but cheap place only a few metres away. We both had steak and chips which was massive and did the job, whilst Ash had a fresh juice and I stuck to water. This was to be Ashs worst decision as at 2am the following morning the sickness and diarrhoea started again!! Unfortunately he spent the next 24 hours in bed (luckily for him we had a TV with BBC news and a few film channels in the room). In the meantime I managed to get him some more tablets from the pharmacy and stocked him up with biscuits and gatorade of many differing flavours. On my hunt for the gatorade I soon learnt Bolivians only do what they dont want to do. Many shops were closed and others just refused to let me in!! Oh well, welcome to Bolivia!

After a day in bed Ash looked and felt much better so we decided to escape from the mayhem of balloons, foam spray and general mayhem in the streets to Ururo where we knew we could get the train down to Uyuni where we could do that salt flats tour. Our hopes were soon shattered after we realised the Carnival was still in full swing once we arrived and the train station was closed. Oh well, we would have to wait until 8am the following day until the station was open again to buy our tickets and hope and pray the train was stil running. In the meantime we checked into a nicer hostel with a TV again, enjoyed pizza for tea and watched a film in bed before a good nights sleep.

We both woke up around 7am ready for our trip to the train station to buy our tickets for the train that left that evening. The trains only ran 4 times per week and we were getting short on time so we really did need to get this train. As we approached the station at 10 to 8 we realised this was going to be harder than we first thought. There were at least 50 people all waiting around for the station to open, some with queuing tickets (like you get at the dairy counter) some without. Thankfully we met a lovely couple from London, Chris and Corina, who we got chatting too which passed the time abit quicker as the station really didnt look like it was opening anytime soon. Next thing a guy starts giving out more queue tickets but everyone is so desperate to get one, a riot nearly breaks loose with people pushing, shoving, shouting, swearing, the lot!! Carina ot one in the 70s I managed to get ticket 94A and 95A. Great. It looked like we wouldnt be getting a ticket as we had learnt only 20 ejectivo tickets were left for that day.

Eventually the station actually opened to even more chaos with the electronic number system failing, more random queues, bribes, more shouting and pushing and utter pandamonium. Not to mention they had run out of numbers so started again at 1B which caused even more confusion. Luckily Carina managed to find a tikcet in the 60s so we noth queued up what looked like tickets for today and the guyd queued up in what was the train for the following day. By pure miracle Corina managed to but 4 tickets for us all, for that day, leaving at 3.30pm. After 3 hours of carnage we were finally getting where we wanted to go. Hurray, no more Bolivian bus rides for us!