Right, after an hour of writing up the Uyuni blog post, crappy off-exploring and their Beta site which is clearly still full of bugs just had a fit and logged me out, losing the whole post, so 2nd time lucky I hope.

So, after managing to hold it together for the god-awful bus journey, I crumbled pretty much as soon as we got off the bus, and Paul had to stagger around looking for the hostel, while I stood in the street crying. Not my finest hour. Fortunately got into the hostel pretty quickly, where I then started the 12 hour vomathon. Paul managed to book another night as I clearly wasn't up for the tour, postpone the tour for a day, and eat dinner on his own all without getting lost. A major feat.

Uyuni is not a place you want to hang around, pretty much a 2 street hovel which is bloody freezing at night. Fortunately we had a private bathroom, with hot water which was paradise, despite the noisy gits in the dorm next door (another travelling revelation, somewhere along the line, we have turned into 2 old gits...). Only food on offer is pizza and terrible pasta. The 2nd night we visited the "best restaurant in town", Minute Man pizza, run by an expat American. Paul reckoned the pizza was pretty good, I took his word for it as hadn't progressed to solids yet.

It started p'ing down in the night, and the next day was grey and drizzly (note we are practically in the desert). We'd booked the tour with Red Planet after seeing some great reviews online. They are more expensive, but we'd heard the horror stories about some of the cheaper tours (ranged from crap food to downright dangerous with poorly maintained 4x4's, drunk drivers etc...and friends had been on the tour a week or so earlier and seen a car roll in front of them, so seatbelts were a must). Less than 3 days left in Bolivia, but we were soon to find Bolivia was going to have a final hurrah before letting us go.

We were a group of 11 doing the 3 day trip, in 2 cars. 1st prob, our car was knackered, so had to wait around for over an hour for a replacement. The replacement turned up... knackered looking jeep with massive cracked windscreen, no seatbelts and the bonnet was up 5 minutes into the tour at our first stop, the train cemetery.

Fortunately this was a stand in, while they were waiting for the proper car to turn up, which duly did and we piled in there instead. By the time we got to our 2nd stop, the salt extraction (as basic as it comes in Bolivia: literally a room with a fire in it and a man putting salt into plastic bags) and salt hotel, all the other tourists were long gone and we had the place to ourselves. The Salt Hotel - yes it's made of salt - didn't look like much from the outside, but was suprisingly lux inside, and we had lunch here. Afterwards we hit the Salt Flats. Despite the tour being called the "salt Flats", the salar only makes up a small amount of the 3 days. The rain had left loads of standing water, and at this point the sun finally decided to come out (yay) and it was beautiful. We managed to take the requisite weird perspective photos, although sadly missed out on the hexagonal patterns you see on all the postcards as the rain had broken up the surface of the salt.

By this time it was about 4pm. Our guides had planned to stay in Uyuni that night due to the delay, but instead decided to press on to another village, supposedly about an hour and a quarter's drive away. Unfortunately, they hadn't properly reckoned on the weather affecting the road as badly as it had. Loads of rain on a very dry base had already turned the roads pretty slimey, which made it slippery going, but as it got dark, the temperature plummeted, and we encountered snow higher up, turning the slime into a skating rink, so the going got very slow.

We were in front, with our guide taking it very gingerly thank god. We'd just passed over a particularly icy part with a bridge over the Rio Grande, when a little further on our driver stopped the car, as he couldn't see the other jeep's lights anymore. No phone signal at this point, so we sat there for about 10 minutes before he decided to reverse over 500m back up the narrow, dark icy road. ARGHHHHH. Apparently this was a lot safer than trying to do a 10 point turn. Thank god he stopped before the bridge. He twigged that clearly something had happened to the other car, and he and our guide got out to investigate. We were left in the car for about 20 minutes, and all we could see were a lot of stationary headlights, so were praying nothing bad had happened.

Fortunately everyone was ok, but the car had gone onto the bridge, hit ice, skidded around, hit the side of the bridge and bounced off and ended up sideways in the road (thank god otherwise they would have been in the water). Had taken out the front axle, so the car was knackered. They had managed to push it out of the way, and load 2 of the 6 passengers into another passing jeep which followed us, leaving the other 4 plus driver to get picked up later. We drove onto the next village at snail's pace, hoping to find accommodation. No room at the inn at the next 2 villages, so we ended up driving for another hour and a half to the original place they'd planned to stay, arriving around 9.30pm. Thankfully they'd managed to get a phone signal, and 2 other guys from the tour agency were coming out in a replacement jeep from Uyuni to pick up the 4 stragglers, otherwise our guide and driver would have had to turn around and go back to pick them up. Poor Edgar, the other driver, had to stay with the broken jeep overnight however to stop people nicking parts, but they did bring him loads of blankets and food. Unfortunately for us, he was the chef, and the food was pretty up and down for the rest of the trip. We got to bed about 1am in the end, after the others turned up around 11pm. What a start.

Next day everyone had a lie in apart from the 2 agency guys who had to get the 5am bus back to Uyuni. Yikes. Weather was still rubbish until suddenly just as we reached our first stop we came out from the huge bank of cloud to beautiful sunshine and an amazing view of the surrounding mountains and rock forest. We spent the rest of the day driving further into the desert, bathed in sunshine, slathering on the sun block, checking out some incredible lagoons, including the Red Lagoon with its flamingoes! And also saw the rock tree which was caused by a massive lava blob cooling rapidly. This is the highest desert in the world, around 4,500m. Absolutely amazing, and surrounded on all sides by massive volcanoes.

We saw the Andean coloured mountain range bordering Chile where the smugglers take their coca through, just before we reached our 2nd stop of the trip, the refuge.
We'd expected this to be a hovel as the Bolivian description was "very basic" accommodation, so were pleasantly surprised that it wasn't, plus had indoor flushing proper loos! We were sharing with one other group of pissed up Aussies and Americans, who lured us into a false sense of security with a decent playlist on their ipod, so one of our lot lent them some speakers. Music promptly changed to sh*te 90's euro pop house which they kindly blared out as we were having dinner. Nice.
We all headed to bed pretty much around 9pm when the hot water bottles made their appearance (verrry welcome), leaving the other guys to their cheap Bolivian rum and drinking games. Apparently one of the Aussies was puking into a plastic bag all morning the next day. Glad we weren't sharing the jeep with him.

Ruuuude start at 4.30am and it was BRASS. Literally the coldest we've experienced all trip I think including Canada. Stars were pretty amazing though. We piled into the jeeps and headed off to see the geysers as dawn was breaking, and then to a green lagoon which unfortunately wasn't green as there was no wind to stir up the minerals lying on the bottom, so just freezing still and finished at the hot springs. Paul and I decided not to bother as it was still ridiculously cold, and frankly we are over the sulphur smell which comes with them. Had breakfast here and then it was time to head to the Chilean border. Hurrah.

This was by far the easiest border crossing yet. The Chilean transfer bus was already there waiting for us, and as we'd already stamped out of Bolivia in Uyuni, all we had to do was transfer our bags and say our goodbyes. Loaded onto the Chilean bus (a proper minibus with comfie seats and no prayers on the windscreen... in fact it had a proper, non-cracked windscreen), and 5 minutes later we were on a tarmac road with crash barriers and everything. Hallellujah!!!

Made it down 1,500m and 35 minutes later we were pulling into the Chilean border control in San Pedro, a passport stamp and cursory bag check later and we were in Chile. Yippeee!