16:30 - Leasurely breakfast at 9am this morning. Jolanda came down to say she had caught a stomac bug and would be spending the day in her room. Thank god I am on my own :-). Left laundry for the hotel to do and booked a massage for the afternoon (in about half an hour) to see if I can sort my neck and shoulder out. The 12 hours on the bus have done it no favours. I met up with the group at 10 as Sally was taking us for a walking tour of the main sights. La Paz i...

23:30 - Transfer day... We all met for breakfast early at 7.30 and then waited for the bus that was to take us from Uyuni to La Paz. As we waited outside the hotel, the band of the Bolivian army decided they were going to practice in the open just in front of us. I am only sorry I coudn't take pictures (it's forbidden). They were not really in tune but they kept us amused until our old rickety bus turned up. What lay in front of us was 12 hours of part dirt road ...

17:50 - We had a fairly eventful night at the Culpina accomodation. As our accomodation was really a miner's place to sleep, there were in fact 4 miners staying and at 4.30am some begun to stir with no real cares for whoever might be sleeping. At around 6am they were all gone however and I got another hour of sleep. Breakfast was at 7 and we had a slight delay in setting off due to one of the jeeps having a problem with a wheel. However, it was soon fixed and off...

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...

21:00 - We left San Pedro at 8sh this morning and after a fairly slow border check so that we could leave Chile, we headed off into the Andes towards Bolivia. We soon left the tarmac and went offroad to the border with Bolivia where we would also be meeting the Jeeps that would take us all the way to Uyuni over the next couple of days. We are likely to see tarmac in about 3 days...about the same time as you'll be reading this. After the Bolivian border check, we ...