Potosí So we left the dust and salt of Uyuni behind, and set off through the red mountains again for Potosí. The journey coming back didn't seem as long as it had on the way there, and we felt fine with the altitude, thanks to our little pills.  From a distance, Potosí looks like a shanty town, sprawling accross the hillside at just over 4,000m and down into the valley, but it was once the wealthiest town in South America. In the 17th and 18th centuries, t...

Tupiza to Uyuni We really enjoyed our rest day in Tupiza. Our heads were much clearer, but we still did everything really slowly. The fact that our room was on the second floor was a challenge in itself! The small town had a completely different atmosphere on a Monday morning, as it had been quite deserted on Sunday evening. We wandered around the market, which was crowded with little bowler-hatted ladies doing their shopping (some of them keep their money in th...

Sunday 13th Having eaten a rather dodgy meal last night, I took a dose of Imodium this morning, (just in case!), as we had the prospect of a 9 hour journey in the truck, and a border crossing into Bolivia, but luckily I was fine. As we left Salta, we drove through the foothills of the mountains and up onto the Altiplano, the vast desolate plains, with scrub, cacti and occasional clusters of adobe buildings in various stages of disintegration. The dwellings wer...

So, yet another retrospective entry - but at least this time we're still in the place I'm writing about! This is Saturday, our third night in Salta, and in fact our last night in Argentina, as tomorrow we cross over into Bolivia! We had a long drive day on Thursday, across more flat, flat landscape. It was a bit more interesting than the day before, as we occasionally drove past villages, with pigs, goats and horses wandering about grazing by the roadside. We a...

Last night's meal in Asunción was complicated by a power cut, which seemed to affect quite a few blocks of the city. Luckily we had placed our orders and had just got our drinks when the lights went off, so we sat sipping in the dark for about 20 minutes, and then a waiter arrived with a candle on a plate, singing "Happy Birthday to you....".  We thought that was quite funny, until we saw that the candle wasn't much bigger than one you'd have on a cake, and ha...