Well! We are now in Santa Cruz (Bolivia, not California). We flew here this morning in a tiny 21 seat plane having had a fantastic experience on a three day trip through salt flats, mountain ranges and desert. Day 1 was spent travelling across the immense salt flat near Uyuni which cover an area of just over 10,000 square kilometres making them the largest salt flats in the world. Formed when an enormous lake evaporated 12,000 years ago the salt extends to dept...

There is only one reason to come to Uyuni and that is to leave as quickly as possible. Set at 3,600 metres on a desolate, windswept plain its few dusty streets hold little attraction. People come here because it is the jumping off point for trips to the nearby salt flats which, as the largest in the world, have become one of Bolivia's main tourist attractions. It wasn't always like this. Uyuni grew up in the nineteenth century as a major railway centre. Here th...

If you're travelling through the Andes sooner or later you will become aware of people using coca leaves. You will see people standing or sitting by the side of the road or in parks holding a small plastic bag containing the leaves which they dip into every now and then and add a few more leaves to the wad already in their mouth. Our hotel in Potosi has coca leaves on the breakfast buffet and you can even get it in tea bags mixed with matte - a herb used to make ...

Potosi exists for one reason and one reason alone - silver. Cerritos Rico (Spanish for 'Rich mountain") which dominates the town contains the largest deposits of silver in the world. It is estimated that as much as 60,000 tonnes of the metal has been extracted from the mountain since mining started there in 1545. The Incas knew that the mountain contained silver but, according to legend, their gods told them it was not destined for them and so they declared it ...

This may appear to be just a boring photo of a cement quarry but what you're looking at is the site of the largest collection of dinosaur footprints found anywhere in the world. Over 5,000 of them are set into the Cal Orck'o cliff, just 5kms from the centre of Sucre. Workers at the cement factory discovered them in 1994 on a giant 3,900 ft. long by 260 ft. high wall inclined at an angle of 70 degrees. The footprints date from the Late Cretaceous Period, about ...