After a few days of hanging around in Uyuni we finally got our chance to head off on our 3 day trip into the Southwest of Bolivia. We met our fellow trip conpanions, 2 Columbians and 2 Austrians. We all jumped into our home for 3 days (a jeep) and off we went.

First stop was an old train graveyard in the desert, just lots of rusting trains left after the old station closed down sometime ago. Very odd and weird but they fixed swings to some of the trains so that was fun for little Emily.

Then we drove for a few hours into the Salar De Uyuni, the world`s largest Salt Flats comprised of an area of 4086m.sq. The height of the land raises no more than 1 metre over the entire area, and it contains 50% to 70% of the worlds resource of Lithium. Due to the flatness and featureless nature of this place, it is used to calibrate the altimeters of the worlds satellites (interesting fact eh!)

We arrived in the wet season so rather than it being a vast expanse of salt, we were treated to a large mirror like vision, with of a few inches of water over the salt.

It was an amazing sight that photos do not do justice, you cannot work out the horizon as the sky and land mirror each other and create mirages. However a massive bar of Toblerone fell from the sky and Emily did well to catch it.

After this strange moment we visited the salt hotel (yep it is entirely made of salt) and had a nice dinner. Then we headed off into the desert for our first nights stay, which was in a family house where the mother spent hours making our dinner.

What was noticable was what she had to work with. This was a relatively well off family but all she had was a cooker, no workspace at all. So she spent many hours sitting on the concrete floor making a 2 course meal for 6 people from raw materials. Makes our lovely kitchens at home look rather over the top!

We finished our meal at 11pm with a bottle of Bolivian wine (Dave is slowly becoming a wine drinker rather than beer!) and we all fell into bed after an exciting and tiring day.