Today has been our final day on the salt flat tour. The day started with waking up at 5am so that we could see the sunrise over the salt flats. I say 5am but it was really 4.30am given that a jeep from another tour decided to switch his engine on outside our window at that time and start playing some music. A lesson learned was that salt hotels do not have double glazing!!

After prising our eyes open, we headed off onto the salt flats to watch the sun rise. It was bitterly cold as there was no cloud cover but watching the sun rise was absolutely amazing. We did get a bit trigger happy with the camera but hopefully these come out okay. After watching the sun rise of the flats, we headed Inca House island which is situated on the flats. It is made of coral and offered some great views out over the salt flats. By the time we had looked around the island it was about 7.30am an we were ready for some breakfast which our guide duly delivered.

After having breakfast, which included a homemade cake to the delight of Beth, we went back out onto the flats to take some of the famous pictures which you may have seen. You may think that it is easy to do these and wouldn't take too long but we were out there for about two hours although the temperature had picked up quite a bit.

Once we had tired ourselves out trying to get the pictures we wanted, we had some lunch and travelled to Uyuni which was where the tour ended. I think we have to say that our guide, Carla, and driver, Abel, were both brilliant and without them the trip wouldn't have been as good. The state of the roads, if you can call then that, were appalling so we can forgive Abel for having a couple of tinnies before taking us to the salt hostel!!

So now we are in Uyuni, which is pretty underwhelming. It's basically a small Bolivian village which tries to cater for tourists but isn't really our cup of tea. After searching for a hostel, we have actually settled on a hotel. Although I'm not sure that taking the 's' out of the word makes it any better! We have had tea at a great pizza place called Minute Man pizza which is situated in Tonito hostel. I wish we had have found this hostel earlier as it is a million times better than our hotel. It even has an indoor courtyard with patio heaters and settees which looked great. This would definitely be our recommendation to stay at in Uyuni if you need to spend any time here.

Overall, the salt flats tour was great and we are so glad that we have done it. I thought the most spectacular part would be the salt flats themselves but, although they were amazing, for me it was the general scenery and the stuff that I wasn't expecting to see. I did not expect to see geysers in Bolivia and although they stunk, they were great. I also didn't expect to see so many different coloured lakes due to the massive number of minerals which are found in the region. And who knew there were so many flamingos in Bolivia. For anyone who is thinking about doing the tour we would definitely advise to do it from Tupiza which is a lot nicer than Uyuni. We would also recommend Hostel Los Solares to both stay at and book the tour with but there are plenty of other agencies in Tupiza who looked as though they done pretty much the same tour.