J: on the bus ride to Uyuni we made friends with another German couple; Niko & Lisi, they had a similar plan to us so we went to see about booking a trip for the following day, we also met another German couple; Marcus & Catrin who also wanted to do the same trip but starting that morning, so we all negotiated a good price as a car full and immediately set off. This trip was a 3 day trip across the Salar De Uyuni, it started with a visit to the train cemetery, there were so many abandoned trains just left in the desert to slowly rust away. I found it odd that there was no better use for all of it as scrap metal, but it was a fun place to stop at and we climbed over and through the train engines. Then it was off to the worlds largest salt flat, and obviously this thing was huge! It's over 12 thousand square kilometres and only the mountains in the distance defined a stamp to the endless expanses of salt. When we first stopped for some pictures I just had to taste it to check.... It was defiantly salt!

S: we headed to the Island Of Fish, that had no fish on it but instead cactuses over a 1000 years old. They were huge and the view from the top over the salt flats was amazing. The salt flats were out of this world beautiful, we sat having lunch just looking around. We were really lucky we had a very cautious driver although he didn't like going past about 30km/hr. So everything was a little slow going. We made it to the salt hotel we were staying in. It was made completely of salt including the bed stand, tables, chairs and the walls. So after two nights on buses I really wanted a shower but we decided that we should just go do the trip anyway lol. It was well worth giving up a shower for a few hours but we did finally have a shower in the salt hotel but thankfully the shower walls weren't made of salt. I'm sure people sat closer once we were clean lol. We all headed to bed pretty early to catch up on sleep. We had to an early start and the first stop was at the Laguna Canapa which had flamingos named "James's flamingos" and they apparently are rare to see.

J: we went up a dormant volcano and saw some impressive lakes along the way, they were different colours from red/green/blue/brown & white depending on the minerals &/or algae in the water. This whole Salar is part of the Dakar desert car race and up at 4000 meters high we passed a couple of guys on mountain bikes, they had full panniers on and our driver told us (through Niko translating) that they will bike the whole route, impressive stuff as the terrain is unforgiving there.
But next we stopped at the 'stone tree' which is actually rock but through water and wind erosion it looked a little like a tree. All the rock formations in this area were very unusual which made it stunning.

S: we headed to the hostel for the night which has no shower and just dorm rooms. The guys we were travelling don't usually stay in dorm rooms, so it was quite funny seeing them acclimatise to sharing the room. We were given a bottle of red wine and we thought playing a game of spoons was on the cards. The guys really enjoyed it and we had a lot of laughs before heading to bed. It was a 4am start to see the sunrise. We headed to the fumaroles (boiling sulphurous mud pots) and they were impressive but smelt like rotten eggs. We watched the sun rise and took some amazing pictures of the scenery as we were in snow at 5000 meters altitude. We then headed to the Termas De Polques (hot springs), all of us apart from Marcus stripped off and jumped straight in, it was so hot none of us wanted to get out especially as there was snow all around. The weather wasn't great the last morning and we couldn't see very far, so we headed straight to the border.

J: those hot springs were extra great as for all our searching we couldn't find the bloke to pay so it became free!
Once we hit the boarder we found out our bus coming from the Chile side was going to be late as Chile shut the border in the mountain, thankfully they opened it once the cloud cleared, but then the bus was full, we had to get moved into a different but much, much nicer bus so it all worked out well.