Howdy, Mr Jelf here!

After leaving Rio on the 1st we eventually arrived at our final destination of La Paz, Bolivia, (the highest city in the world). We had been on buses for about 75hours! It really wasnt the best 4 days weve had since being away, although it had to be done and this was the cheapest way! We arrived at our hostel around 11am, checked in, got our priorities right and immediatley found ourselves at the pool table...

Over to JB for the golf adventure.......I got chatting to this Irish guy over a game of pool, he metnioned he was playing golf in the afternoon...mmmm "Golf you say".......
30mins later, off in a taxi, 4 of us, to La Paz Golf Club, the highest Golf course on the planet. To give you an idea how nice it was, its $35'000 for life membership and one of the terms of playing is you `must´ have a caddie. "O ok then if I must......"
Got our clubs, Got our caddies, Got all our bad shots out of the way on the driving range, time to play. I`ll be honest all four of us were pretty poor, altitude is my choice of excuse.... we only ended up playing 15holes due to light, but they were easily the tidiest 15holes i`ve ever played, such a nice course, the pics dont do it justice. It was seriously big time though strutting the course with old Gonzalo carrying me clubs, washing em´,getting me a drink, recommending a club to use....pretty cool. One of the holes called Moon Valley, is in top 100 in the world, par 3, over the valley, hit the green, or your in trouble. C stepped up an put his right in the middle of the dance-floor(green-golfing term) theres a good pic C took of it- He was way way better than his first experience in NZ. Despite playing like a yeti I did manage to beat the other 3 and we all got a certificate at the end to say we`d played the highest course, Happy Days.

Back over to C-man.

The next couple of days were mainly spent in bed, both affected by the altitude, being over 3000m above sea level takes a while to get used to, id put it down to the altitude, 4 days travelling and lack of sleep. Barnesie was bed ridden for 2 days, I was practically the same although I tried to make it out a couple of times, the first night I had some food and a few beers, but decided it was a very bad idea the next day, and spent it attempting to sleep! Finally on the 3rd day in La Paz we made it out of the hostel, and decided to book a trip to the Salar de Uyuni for the following day. That afternoon we had a walk around the town, but again the altitude makes pretty much any task a lot harder, walking minor hills leaves you nakered, or maybe we´ve just aged alot in Bolivia!!! We managed to purchase a couple of Bolivian hats though which are shown off nicely in the pictures!!

Feeling a lot better the following day we were off for another bus ride, this time just the 12 hours! We had been warned how cold Uyuni was in the night, and found out first hand that evening, we left at 7pm and in the early hours of the night I tried to wipe the condensation to see why we were stopped, only to find out it was actuallly frozen so no chance of seeing! Luckily the bus had blankets provided so that helped...massivley! We arrived on schedule at 7am and it was still freezing, time for an extra hoody and the wooley hat to go on, the lady met us and took us to her office which was fairly warm compared to outside, although she did keep standing in the doorway with the door open, saying in spanish "its really cold"....well we know that love maybe if you stepped either in or out of the door and kept it shut it might help, slowly other people started arriving, soon there were 5 of us who were all hungry, the tour didnt start for another 2 hours so off we went in search of food, nothing looked as though it was open and then we found the little Bolivian lady serving, tea, coffee and some kind of pancake type of food, happy days! We took a look around the town and then headed back to the shop.

We had decided to only do the day trip as some people had said this was all that was really needed. We set off in the jeep, me, Jack, 2 Korean´s, and 3 Argy´s, O and Pablo our spanish speaking guide/driver/cook! Very talented guy! We headed for the Uyuni Train graveyard first, basically loads of old trains that you could climb on and take pictures! We then headed for the Salar de Uyuni, this is the highest salt flats in the world, at 3667m above sea level, and the area is 12000kmsq......HUGE!! They really were quite spectacular, and because the whole area is white, there is no depth perception, so you can take really cool pictures and videos, pictures will be on the blog, and we´ll try to upload one of the videos to give you an idea! We took a tour around the Hotel de Sal, a hotel entirely made out of salt, pretty impressive, everything from the beds to the walls! We then carried on to another "island" as that is what it would have been years ago. We stopped and had lunch here, some Lama steak along with some kind of rice type food, pretty good food seeing as it was prepared out on the Salar by the driver! This island was full of cactus´and you could climb up to the top (of the island!) to get some good pictures of the salar, as usual we managed to get some "different" photos from everyone else! We then met up with the guys that we were chatting to back at the office for the tour, they were all doing a 3 day trip so were in a different jeep but the first days are the same, we managed to get some more videos making use of the environment and then it was off back to Uyuni. We initially were going to stay one night and get a bus back the following evening, but decided to catch a bus straight back to La Paz. It was a quality tour, especially as we had never seen anyhting like this before. So were back in La Paz now and will be in Bolivia for a week or so more, there will be one more blog before we leave here so make sure you keep on checking back.....bound to be a thriller as usual!

Hope all is well back home,

Take care

Muchos Love

Cjelf and Barnes

xxx

p.s Jacks included a photo for Morningstar....guess which one!