This entry will cover all of Bolivia.....

Getting to Bolivia from Peru was in itself quite an experience... apparently the bolivians are notorious strikers, and so Rachel (tour leader) was not surprised when they were striking on our day of travel. As they had been blocking the roads our bus was still in Bolivia, when it needed to be in Peru, so we had to wait for 6 hours in the bus station for it to get back!! When it finally arrived the bus driver locked himself out of the cabin, so we had to wait even longer...!

We had to cross the peru/bolivia border which was quite scary, as the countries are not best friends. Then once on the bolivian side it turned out the strikes had begun again, and we would need to take a 4hour trip on a dirt road instead of 2hours on a paved one! Then we ended up where the strikers were and had to turn off all the lights on the bus to be less conspicious - scary enough- then they decided they would only let the bus through if we let strikers on, so we all had to hold onto our stuff for dear life and got very scared about these mysterious strikers (in the end they all sat with the driver!). driving through a ploughed field our bus needed to make a u-turn and got stuck in a ditch, with traffic coming from both directions honking at us, all in the pitch black! once out of the ditch we had to drive over the roadblocks which were basically big piles of rubble and sounded like they were ruining the wheels! in the end we made it to La Paz though, and we all survived!

La Paz was a cool, vibrant city, but the roads were terrifying! They had people dressed up as zebras to educate the locals about how to cross roads properly! While in La Paz we saw the famous llama fetuses of the witches markets, did some shopping and generally mooched about. Then it was on to Uyuni for the salt flats, which involved a very uncomfortable train journey!

This was the highlight of our time in Bolivia. Its basically a dried out lake that has left behind salt upto 150m deep. We drove across it on 4x4s and stayed in a hotel made of salt! We also saw flamingos who live on the only bit of water left, and an island with HUGE cactuses, very bizarre! All this is still at 4000+ metres so we were all getting a bit fed up of altitude by then! See our photos on flickr for some cool salt!

Then we had a 7hour bus journey from Uyuni to Potosi, which was a very rickety bus at high speeds over very narrow mountain roads! Today some of the group went down a working mine, so there´s not all that much concern for safety here! A few of us decided not to go down as the people who work there only live 10years and we figured theres probably a reason for that! Potosi is a funny town that used to be very wealthy, at one time the silver from here was used in coins all over the world and underwrote the spanish economy, but its now rather run down with a scattering of colonial buildings. Then we visited Sucre which was a pretty town where all buildings are painted white, we had a good night out at a cool bar and watched a big party for the start of university (not just students, the whole town celebrates!) That´s pretty much it for Bolivia, next on to Brazil, which we were all grateful for because as nice as Bolivia was they have no idea of the concept of customer service, i.e. changing the price of meals after you´ve eaten, and telling us we cant eat because the grass is too humid.... weird!