Bolivians love a good protest. You can´t always tell if there´s a specific cause - the main differentiator between a protest and the normal street scene is the ratio of cars to people. The noise, colour and general madness remain the same, but if the volume of people outweighs the volume of cars, you can conclude two things. Firstly, it´s a protest and secondly, you ain´t going anyway fast my friend.

This second conclusion is pretty self-evident, because if there isn´t a protest, you and pretty much everything else will be going fast. Your bus driver will be speeding up for corners, your jeep driver on the salt flats will be laughing in the face of a broken speedometer, the human zebras who help educate drivers in La Paz how to negotiate traffic signals will be running out the road for their lives, fast.

I say pretty much everything. Some things of course take a more mañana-based approach to speed. Like the 200km bus journey that took 10 hours where both Peruvian and Bolivian immigration felt it better to have 3 people monitoring the one guy stamping passports, rather than doing anything else. Or the 180km journey that took 6 hours because, well, you can´t go that fast on sand. Never mind the nicely paved road running parallel to the sand one, it´s more authentic this way. As ever, a land of contrasts.

We kicked off in La Paz, the highest capital city in the world at just under 4000m above sea level. First thing we found? The hostel doing a full sunday roast - this place might not be so bad after all. Suitably stuffed, we attacked the markets. Ignoring the llama fetuses was easy enough - we had a shopping list, because the salt flats were our next destination and that meant alpaca, and plenty of it. Having haggled for wooly socks, gloves, hats, pashminas (alright not strictly for the salt flats but hey), we then turned our attention to bags to put it all in. Our packs are starting to look slightly strained around the zips. Which doesn´t justify my fluro knitted over the shoulder bag you may see in photos is we ever find a connection fast enough to upload them, but I reckon it´ll be perfect for cycling. And besides, Claire veto´d my fluro llama socks, so I needed an outlet somewhere.

That safely acquired, we needed some more ruins. Tiwanaku was home to a civilisation that pre-dated the Incas. Indeed, our guides on both sides of the border were very adamant that the Incas didn´t actually invent anything, they merely refined what was already available via older races. Struck us that Maccu Picchu was quite the upgrade, but no need to pick holes. Tiwanaku is undeniably impressive nevertheless. Not in the same way as what we´d already seen - it´s very much still a work in progress archaeological dig, but variety is never a bad thing. And besides, the parts exposed in the trenches are still pretty surprising. Sun gates accurately tracked a calender very similar to ours and even when the Spanish tried to knock it all down, the best they could do was carve Christian symbols into the stonework - they couldn´t break it all. And 8m high solid stone statues always add something, regardless of how much damage they took whilst left in front of the national football stadium for 30 years (seriously).

Our next adventure was the bus from La Paz to Uyuni to start our tour of the salt flats. Simple enough, right? Not really. Those peasants we´re at it again. My Spanish isn´t good enough to establish what percentage of the bus not running was due to the angry pitch-fork wavers and how much was down to mechanical failure, which no one seemed keen to talk about, but I did gather we weren´t going anywhere fast. Until that is, Moses turned up. Yep, Moses from Todo Tourismo saved the day. And the night. And the next day in fact. He led the uninformed onto a bus that frankly we wouldn´t have considered without him, parting quite literally a sea of touts (ok, maybe that´s pushing the analogy a bit, but you get my drift) and on to Oruro, where he then found us a hotel at 2.30am and set about organising a private 40 seater coach for 5 of us the next day. Legend.

We still missed our tour of course, but that was ok, it gave me chance to negotiate a refund (yeah I´m not sure either) and us to hop on a cheaper trip, which saved us an 8 hour jeep, followed by a 10 hour train journey and wind up in Chile rather than the Argentinian border, obviously. It made sense, honest!

And so it was that we ventured out onto the salt flats. Genuinely unlike anything else you´ve seen (well, unless you´ve been to Utah or Northwest Argentina perhaps) and an amazing trip. Also of course an opportunity to try and take novelty photos with 2 inch high plastic dinosaurs attacking people a lot further away from the camera. And giant beer bottles. Etc. But it wasn´t all DIY fun, islands of cacti in the middle of well nothing really, hotels made entirely of salt. You´ll sadly have to wait for the photos but it was an amazing first day.

Day 2 saw the landscape alter completely - we were now heading for the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on earth; in fact in some areas, rainfall has never been recorded. Which nicely justified skipping a shower of course. We climbed from an already pretty high 3700m up to 5000m above sea level, which also meant it got cold. Very cold. And windy. Which meant doing away with my natty man scarf (a marf) and switching to alpaca. Lots of alpaca. Suddenly the socks and everything else, fluro or otherwise, which we´d ruined our daily budget with in La Paz, seemed very worthwhile. $2 very well spent.

The lakes though were (and know I´m over-using it) stunning. And full of flamingos. And lots of different colours. But it wasn´t necessarily these features that made them just about my favourite place in Bolivia. No it was the peace & quite. And the lack of smell. Just clean mountain air and no one relieving themselves in the street. Lovely.

Waking up still wearing almost all of the aforementioned wooly items, we set out on day 3 before dawn to catch sunrise over the geysers near the Chilean border. Which was nice, but far better was the way the sun caught the desert hills over the lake next to the hot pools we were taking our daily bath in as it came up. 30C in the water, about 30F outside. Made breakfast worth waiting for.

From there it was all downhill. Not in a bad way, far from it, but we descended two and half kilometres into Chile and San Pedro de Atacama. A surprisingly pleasant little village in well, pretty much nowhere, we ooh´d and aaah´d at the scenery. Obviously the mountains and desert were nice, but they had paved roads. With white lines and a sort of hard shoulder. And road signs. And drivers who´d heard of the break pedal. Amazing. In fact Chile seemed very civilised indeed - we´ll be back.

Because as you should have gathered from the last blog, we´re in Argentina now and drinking in all that has to offer. I´ll write more about Salta next time, when I´ll also be able to update you on our trip, hugging the Andes, down to Mendoza. No prizes for guessing what we plan to wash the beef down with there....