We arrived in Uyuni fairly late after our adventurous journey past the miners' strike, across rivers etc to find the hotel to be the best place we've stayed since Ushuaia. It's owned by an American guy and his Bolivian wife and they've got a great business going on there. At the back of the hotel there's a pizza place which serves fantastic gourmet pizzas. Despite still being at altitude (3675m), Sarah and I decided it was time to get back acclimatised to the red wine so we polished off 2 bottles (with a bit of help from Jonathan).

Monday started off as a really bad day for me. I was having one of my lonely days. Those of you who've travelled while identify with me here. You can't explain why, you don't exactly know what you're missing or what you're miserable about (although in my case there was a huge contributing factor) but you just feel mopey and blue. Even though you're surrounded by 100 people, you can feel like the loneliest person in the world. What a day for it too as we were going out into the salt flats to do some silly perspective poses and it was all I could do to stop the tears streaming down my face every 5 minutes.

Anyway, we got into our jeeps with our props for the day (Bearded Barbie, Mario, penguin, the fly swatter, flowers, a wine bottle etc). Our first stop was the train cemetery which is a graveyard for rusting steam trains. It was pretty cool seeing all of these ancient engines. Next stop was a little settlement where the process for collecting, drying and packaging salt was explained. There were also quite a few tat shops where Michelle and I bought ourselves some matching simple hats (with the tassels) that are also reversible (result!). I asked for a discount for buying 2 and, even though I challenged how

much change the lady gave me back, she insisted it was correct and we ended up getting 2 hats for hardly more than the price of one! Bargain! Most of the buildings in this little place were made of salt blocks that are just cut out of the ground.

I perked up a bit later on and we then hit the salt flats - wow, wow, wow! They are incredible. They are the world's largest (12,000 square km!!) and highest (3653m) salt flats and were created after a prehistoric lake dried up and left the slat residue behind. Amazingly, on the edge, the salt is about 25cm thick and in the middle it reaches 27m deep! Unbelievable! The flats are surrounded by volcanoes but apart from that, all you see is white, white and more white. It looks like a huge snow field and the glare was incredible. We drove for miles to the old salt hotel (made entirely of salt, including salt tables and chairs) and then miles and miles further until we got to a very odd island which was created by coral from the old lake. The island was full of cacti which all looked very odd in the middle of all of this white. After a super lunch we set out onto the middle of the whiteness to start taking our photos. We were out there for 2 hours and it wasn't nearly enough time. We could easily have spent another 2/3 hours striking silly poses. Some of the highlights were the girls being chased by Bearded Barbie and us clinging onto the red wine bottle for dear life! It's actually a lot harder than you think to get these photos right so some of them are a bit dodgy but it was great fun to do. I'm still collecting other people's pics but there's a good selection already on picasa: www.picasaweb.google.com/lindylou73

On the drive back to town the light started to change and the salt started to turn a pinky colour (yes Steve, it really was pink!!) and then we saw an amazing sight - a huge flock of flamingos took flight and just flew across the flats. The contrast of the white glare against their pink and black feathers was amazing and they really are incredibly graceful when they fly.

Got back to the hotel for more wine (we've forgotten all about this altitude sickness lark!) and pizza although we were badly done to as they had run out of pizzas so we had to supplement with salad and garlic bread (Garlic bread? What? Bread with garlic?). Fantastic food though and highly recommended for any of you who make it here. The party then shifted to our room until we ran out of wine (ah yes, which Sarah and I were drinking out of our water bottles as we had left our cups on the truck! Classy birds or what?!).