Hi everyone

Here is the next instalment from Uyuni. We are having some trouble with our photos and so there may be some delay in seeing the album. Hopefully we will work everything out.

Ok, so we set off for our 3 day 4WD tour of the Bolivian Salt Flats (Salar de Uyuni) very keen to see the sights. We left an hour late but were getting used to this type of time keeping! In our car we had 2 young English guys from Hertfordshire called Simon and Johnny that had taken a break from university before starting new courses. They were very sweet guys but a bit shy at the beginning..that changed. We also had the cook, Gloria and her 4 year old son, Saul (the devil´s spawn) and our driver Jordan. This keyboard is a bit all over the place so forgive my punctuation.

Our first stop of the tour was only 1km out of town and seemed a little pointless. They talked it up to be a train cemetery when really it was just a dumping ground for old trains! The boys seemed to like it and took lots of Indiana Jones style pictures jumping from train to train but us girls stayed in the car keen to get the real tour going.

From here we continued onto the Salt Flats. Once out onto the salt expanse it was so bright and you could only see white for miles. It covers an area of roughly 12, 000 sqm and is at 3650m in altitude. The mountains in the distance even started to have shiny reflections off the salt and our car just burned along passing salt mounds every now and then. We couldn´t get over the size of it.

We stopped in a small town, Colchani, where the villagers sold salt based trinkets (crap basically!). Jane and I managed to take some photos of us on salt carvings of horses etc but it was another pointless stop. We continued onto Fish Island (Isla de Pescadores) where we able to take pictures, have some lunch and use a flushing toilet. The cacti on this island is amazing and Mark and I climbed to the top to take in the panoramic views. After a reading a travellers guide to Sth America titled ´Llama for Lunch´ it was no surprise that that is what we got for our lunch. Great, big, chewy llama chops!

After lunch we continued our drive separately from the rest of the 20 car convoy. This was meant to be the selling point of our tour. Our 3 cars went off and were to stay in a ´legal´ salt hotel. There are a few salt hotels constructed along the way and the are apparently illegal to stay in because of environmental concerns. Our was meant to be one of the approved ones. Let´s hope so anyway. The place was amazing when we found it and felt like it was out of the Flintstones. It was all white and cave like and based around a circular atrium that had skylights for light. The floor was just salt grain and all the bed bases etc were made out of salt bricks. They had used cacti for a lot of the wood foundations and tables. Very inventive.

Before dinner we went and visited these caves nearby that encased fossilised coral from when it was a salt sea. When we came back to the hostel the sun was setting and we were in the middle of nowhere and it was beautiful. Boy did the temperature drop quickly though.

We met some other people on the tour and cracked open the fiesta size bottle of red we had carried in. We spent most time with Rick, Miriam and Tom from Manchester. They were fun and Mark enjoyed their banter a lot. Kate, Jane and I left them to party on with a whisky bottle and talk of football.

The next day we were up at 7am and back on the road. The frost was incredible and we were glad we had bought our alpaca wares! We had a very toasty nights sleep in the salt hotel so the insulation must have worked well. We were off to check out the different laguna´s and Siloli Desert. We drove for hours and the landscape kept changing dramatically. It went from quinoa fields to red-brown rock and sand. The Siloli Desert is 4600m high and contains many huge wind eroded rock formations. The most popular is the Rock Tree (Arbol de Piedra). It looked like a Star Wars film set.

Our next stop was Laguna Hedionda (Stinking Lake, due to the sulphur). It is surrounded by snowcapped mountains and one prominent volcano called Volcán Ollague which is active! I had hoped to see more flamingo´s here but was assured they would be at future laguna´s. We had lunch here before venturing on to Laguna Colorada.

Laguna Colorada sits at 4278m and coveres 60sqm. It gets its name from the effect of the wind and sun on the micro-organisms that live in it. Up to midday it is a relatively normal colour but then turns red. The pink/red algae gives the flamingo´s their colour.

We were to stay here for the evening and when we arrived there were no rooms at the inn! Surely our accommodation was booked?! We were told to drive to the next place and were able to stay, although I think it was a dodgier version! Our room was 6 bed dorm infested with flies on the roof. This gave Johnny great delight for the next few hours as he proceeded to kill them all with an empty plastic bottle. It was literally raining dead flies.

We all had a rest before dinner as there were no showers and not much else to do. This made dinner widely anticipated and we were told it would be a Bolivian surprise! That is surely was....some big pot of hot dogs, llama, boiled eggs and veg. It stank and when Tom was asked how it was going down he aptly said ´...like a mug of sick!´ I passed and had a second bowl of veg soup that had been served as well. One polish lad seemed to like it immensely and had everyone else´s serving.

We went to bed that evening wearing everything we had as we knew it would get below zero and this shack didn´t seem as well built as the previous one. Our wake up call the next morning was 4.15am, yikes! We had 3 candles to share in the dark and unfortunately someone had created their own Bolivian Surprise all over the floors in the bathrooms. The temperature was -7deg and we were keen to get the car heater on. Within 15 minutes we were at our next tourist sight, the geysers at the Sol de Mañana which are meant to sprout for 50m. I say meant to because it was pitch black and we could hardly see a thing. You have to see them at this hour though because they aren´t as high later in the day. It was too dark to take photos so we kind of let the hot air envelope the car.

We continued on to the 30deg thermal waters at the edge of Laguna Chalviri. It was only just becoming light when we got there and so we enjoyed a beautiful sunrise. About half the group went for a dip but even though the wash would have been nice I don´t think I could have coped with the cold getting out. One person put their bathers on a rock whilst they changed and they froze! We had breakfast here before moving on for the final stop.

We travelled for an hour through the barren landscape of the Pampa de Chalviri at 4800m, via a pass at 5000m, to Laguna Verde at 4400m, the most southern part of the tour. It covers 17sqm and is at the foot of Volcán Licancábur (5868m) which is on the border between Bolivia and Chile. It was truly beautiful here and the snowcapped peaks a sight for sore eyes. We had a team photo and moved on because we were dropping the english boys at the Chilean border. We arrived there at 9am with an entire day´s sightseeing already achieved. Mark and I can now say we touched Chile as well! It was now time to drive back the 400+km to Uyuni.

It was a long drive back that got us there at 6pm. We killed time by playing stupid word games and competing with the other cars! Without the boys it was a luxury to spread out and as we got closer to Uyuni the scenery became more lush and we saw more llama´s, alpaca´s and vikuna´s (a smaller version of the two).

We checked into the same hotel again with Rick, Miriam and Tom as well. It was nice to have a laugh and common whinge about the tour when we had dinner that night. I am not saying it wasn´t a worthwhile trip by any means but you didn´t need 3 days and some sights were clearly just thrown in for good measure and time wasting. We have some spectacular shots though of the changing scenery which we hope we can share soon.

That night we all went to bed exhausted...girls earlier than boys. Unfortunately our 6quid a night room wasn´t as nice this time as I pulled up the sheets and smelt an armpit that definitely wasn´t mine and I couldn´t blame Mark either, not that he would ever smell like that! Exhaustion lets you take these little winners in your stride though!

We were all off to Sucre the next day and it was fun to be travelling with our own little tour group!