Wow, what a week! We left Sucre Tuesday morning (the 18th) on a bus bound for Uyuni, which is a small city up on the Altiplano. This means the bus ride included many winding mountain roads as we headed up into the Andes. We passed through Potosi on the way, a small mining city in an Andean valley. A new highway is in the process of being build between Potosi and Uyuni - the parts that have already been paved and finished were great! However, much of the road is still under construction, which left us, in a bus, on rocky/sandy switchback roads into a mountain valley. Eeek!

Uyuni was a small city, seemingly in the middle of nowhere! Much desert, dust, and small shrubbery. It was fairly warm during the day but man, was it freezing at night!!! All of the hostels we've been visiting have no heat and questionable insulation so we were nicely bundled going to bed that night!
Wednesday morning we were picked up in front of our hostel at 10am by Jose (our driver and guide) and Margarita (our cook) in a nice, white Lexus SUV and headed out on our adventure. Our first stop was at an old train graveyard just outside the city - old train engines and cars have been parked out there and left to rust. It was beautiful and eerie. We then headed towards the Salar (salt flats) and visited a salt processing area for a quick tour before arriving at the Salar. Arriving at the salt flats was what I imagine it would be like to arrive on the moon - the landscape was wildly different from anything you could imagine. On one hand, the white, white ground reminded us of a frozen lake, but then random islands would appear on the horizon and they were covered with cacti! We had lunch and a mini hike on one of these islands - Isla Incahuasi. I've never seen cacti like this before!

Driving around the Salar started our feeling of being the only people out there. We could drive for miles without seeing another truck. Jose took us out into the middle of the salt flat for some fun pictures and then we headed towards San Juan, where we would stay the night at a salt hotel. It was great - all the walls were salt blocks, the ground was loose salt and even our beds were made of salt (with a soft mattress on top!). We had a great dinner here and headed for an early bedtime - Jose wanted to be the first on the road in the morning so we were to leave at 5am! Before bed, Mark and I headed out into the freezing cold night and saw some brilliant southern hemisphere stars. We were so out in the middle of nowhere the milky way was fantastic!

So we were up and rolling at 5am and watching the sun rise over the mountains about an hour later. It was FREEZING up on the Andean plain and we saw no other cars for most of the day. Our first stop of the morning was the Laguna Chiar Kkota, a beautiful small lagoon with snow capped mountains in the background and a small grouping of flamingos in the middle! So excited to see flamingos in the wild! They were pretty far away from the shore and really paid no attention to us so we headed on.

Our next stop was the Laguna Hedionda where we saw an ecolodge and flamingo sanctuary. This lagoon was much bigger and was home to over a thousand flamingos. We watched as a small group of white flamingos landed quite close to us - they're hilarious to watch both walking and swimming! We had a nice breakfast near the shore of the lagoon and then continued on our way.

We visited a spot called "Arbol de Piedra", an area of giant rocks (one shaped like a tree) seemingly randomly placed in the middle of a desert valley. And our last stop before lunch was the Laguna Colorada - a sight that will take your breath away. Jose had wanted us up and out early to keep us ahead of any other cars, but also he was timing out our arrival to this lagoon. We were there around noon and the placement of the sun in the sky meant that the sun reflected perfectly off the plankton growing in the lake to give the water a gorgeous red colour. It was amazing to be walking around this lagoon, surrounded by flamingos and mountains and be perfectly alone.

We arrived at our modest hostel, had lunch, and then headed back out with Jose to see more of the area. We visited some geysers on our way to see the Laguna Verde. Again, Jose timed this out perfectly - at the time of day we arrived there, he said the sun and wind combined to give the lagoon a perfect green colour. It was gorgeous. And set against a backdrop of a perfect snow-capped volcano (which, on the other side was the Chilean border!).

On the way back to the hostel, we stopped at a hotspring and got out our bathing suits! We had about an hour before the sun would slip behind the mountains and the air would get too cold. So there the four of us sat, in a hot spring pool, surrounded by mountains and nature and no one else. Incredible.

Another great dinner by Margarita and a another great sleep and we started our journey to Tupiza. The 3rd of 4 days of our tour involved a lot of driving. We had a great lunch on the side of a mountain with an amazing view of the valleys below. We climbed part of the mountain for some exercise and a great view. We stopped after lunch at Pueblo Fantasmos - an old ghost of a mining town. The ruined buildings on the side of a mountain were amazing - it was a great surprise of a town. Almost more majestic than Machu PIcchu, again, because we were the only ones there. We had our last night of the tour in a small farming village in the middle of nowhere.

Our last day of driving towards Tupiza was gorgeous. The Bolivian landscape changes so often - we drove through mountains (either rocky or sandy or covered in shrubs), desert plains, green valleys and many, many llama farms. The last hour of driving down the side of a mountain was a bit terrifying (very glad to have been navigating those switchback roads in a 4x4 truck and not a bus!) but arriving in Tupiza sure was something else. We came back down out of the frosty altiplano and into this small city tucked into a mountain valley. Tupiza is surrounded by red, red rocky mountains. It is warm and full of tropical trees and is absolutely gorgeous. Jose found us a super cheap hostel and him and Margarita headed off, back to Uyuni.

We have been just having a relaxed couple of nights in Tupiza, although we did take a 3 hour horseback ride into the surrounding canyons today. It was an incredible experience, feels like being in the old west!