21:45 - Second day on the jeeps on our way toward the salt planes of Uyuni. We headed off at a more leasurly time of 9am from our luxurious dormitories in Villa Mar (I am of course joking). We headed further through the Bolivian Andes and stopped at some pretty spectacular places before reaching our resting place for the night in Culpina. We saw some drawing on the rocks and visited the lost italian city (a rock formation). Personally I can't really see why it is called that but that's what it was named. The laguna Vinto had one of the largest groups of Flamengos we've seen so far. But the most amazing place for me today was probably the Cascada. Unlike what the name would suggest there is no waterfall. It's an outstanding canyon. We also stopped at a tiny little pueblo where all the streets have names in the original Quachua language (the language spoken by the Incas). We took a route today that Sally (our tour leader) hadn't taken before due to the salt planes in Uyuni being flooded on the south, so to some degree a lot of what we saw was fairly new to her too. We got to Culpina at around 4pm. The accomodation we are staying in was also new to her and it was notnreally clear (she wouldn't disclose it) wether it was better or worse then what we would normally have had. What I can say is that when we say the place, we thought we had hit new lows in comfort :-). As it turned out we had one of the most hilarious moments of the trip as a local woman came out of Phil's and Alison's supposidely private bathroom having just had a shower, with all of us looking on. We had tea and played a charade type game that was really a laugh and finished with the two teams all square. That was followed by some predinner drinks as the weather closed in on us (thunderstorm). The pisco sour is becoming a strong favourite with the group. We had a lovely dinner with conversation varying from the legal system in the UK to the most trivial things and Sally took us through the activities of the next few days. It's a relatively early start tomorrow, so I'm off to sleep.