Well... we have arrived safe and sound in Argentina, which is no small accomplishment, when you´re travelling by bus in Bolivia let me tell you!

From Sucre to Potosi, we travelled in a shared taxi, for 3 hours with a crazy taxi driver, swerving all over the road, driving way too fast, and spent the majority of the journey on the wrong side of the road for no apparent reason! But, we arrived in Potosi, the highest city in the world. The main ¨tourist¨activity there is to visit the mines. However, we´d heard it was a pretty horrible experience, climbing around in small tunnels, hard to breathe and generally unpleasant. Given Dan is clostrophobic and I have asthma, we decided it probably wasn´t ther place for us! 25 miners have already died this year, and hundreds of thousands if not millions in the life time of the mine. The miners work in horrific conditions, so not sure how much of a tourist attraction that really is anyway???

From Potosi, it was 6 hours (to go just over 200km?!) on a bus to Uyuni, and the beginning of travelling on unpaved roads on the side of mountains... oh what fun!

In Uyuni, we did a one day trip out to the salt flats... which was amazing. The salt flat is huge and you can take great pictures as you´re able to create these really weird optical illiusions... you will see the photos!

From Uyuni we wanted to get down to Salta in Argentina and discovered that it is a VERY LONG WAY! So, our trip started at 6am in the freezing cold, on the dirtiest oldest bus you have ever seen (there was old food on the floor and everything was thick in dust... totally disgusting) with NO HEATING! So, off we went freezing our butts off with no heating and windows that didn´t close, bringing in not only cold air, but tonnes of dust from the road, well if you could call it a road, at some points we were driving through dry river beds, covered in ice! No sealed roads in sight until we reached Argentina! After the bus nearly slid off the road and down the side of the mountain about 3 times, scaring even the Bolivians on the bus (and they´re used to travelling in these conditions) we finally arrived at the border at about 6pm. I can honestly say it was the most horrific journey of my life... the dirty disgusting bus was one thing, but when they had to keep hopping off to break away rocks that kept getting stuck under the bus it got pretty scary!! So we collected our bags, which were 5 cm thick in dust and wet.... great!

By this point we were pretty excited about getting to Argentina, proper roads, clean buses, hot water (what a luxury!!). So we bought our tickets to get to Salta and walked over the border... only to discover that of course we got ripped off and paid too much for our bus tickets... oh well, if was a nice bus that would make up for it!

So at 8pm, we got on the night bus to Salta... the bus was ok, amazing by Bolivian standards, but not as good as the stories we´d heard of first class bus travel in Argentina. Nevermind, the roads were sealed and we would be in Salta by 3am, or so we thought! The bus got stopped not long after we borded and the police got on and checked our passports... no idea why! Then at about 1am, the bus got stopped again, and everyone had to get off with all our luggage and everything got searched by the police. So an hour later, back on the bus again, only to have someone behind us decide that 2am in the morning is a good time to play music out of your mobile phone at top volume... what is wrong with people?!?! Then an hour later and the bus was stopped again, police checks again, but only documents this time. So, eventually, after no sleep and the worst journey in the world we arrived in salta at about 4am. We shared a taxi with some other travellers and set off to the hostel... ¨sorry no room¨ so we went to the next one ¨sorry no room¨ and so this went on and on... evertually about an hour later, we found somewhere with room, it was pretty grim, but it would do! Still no hot water, and we had such high hopes for Argentina. We fell into bed 24 hours after leaving Uyuni - GREAT!