5th October

Our salt flat excursion started at 1pm so in the morning we just walked around the town - nothing to see or do really. Then the 4x4s picked us up to start our adventure. First we stopped 5mins outside the town to see the train graveyard, where rich spaniards had dumped old trains during the colonial period when the train track was transporting silver from the mines in Bolivia to Chile.

Next we stopped at a small town where the people make a living through collecting and selling the salt. We were shown how the salt gets dried above a fire for 30minutes then mixed 1 part ***sulphur*** to 5parts salt and then bagged. Although collecting the salt is hard work, the perpetration for sale process was quite quick and easy.
**salt flat is 12km square and the largest in Bolivia. It also has 70% of the world's uranium/lithium** source but there's no industry.

We then drove a couple of hours into the desert and into the salt flats. We spent probably 2 hours just taking photos but it was lots of fun to all be together as we'd been doing our own things the last few days. Everyone tried all different props using the landscape to distort the picture, it was a lot of fun but hard lying on the salt to take pictures- by the end we were very ... salty!
We then drove another hour to reach our hotel but we had a slight issue with our driver staying awake! The hotel was positioned slightly up the base of a mountain so we had a great view of the salt flats and there were a few flamingos by a small lagoon. We stayed in little salt made huts with 5/6 beds in each and ecological toilets. After dinner we shared the bottle of wine Edith had given myself, Nicole, Tobias, Ollie, Sinead and Neil's, as the winning team of the yolo challenge in Peru.