We arrived in Uyuni from La Paz at 6am Monday morning.....and it was freezing! We had a million layers on and yet the cold just hit you as soon as we got off the bus!

We hadn´t booked a hostel so had to find the main plaza and knock on a few doors before we found a room....which really wasn´t that much warmer than outside!! But we got a few hours kip before finally wrapping up even more and heading into the town (which was little more than a few blocks, a main square and a train station) to get some food inside us (surprise surprise!).

We also wanted to book our tour for the salt flats for the next day...there were however, about 50 different agencies all offering tours, so it was hard to know which were the good ones and which ones we should avoid! We ended up getting lots of prices from different agencies, and decided to wait until the evening to book. We had arranged to meet up with a friend Annie, who we had originally met in Peru, and she turned up with another friend of hers, Nick (who she had met in Sucre), and we finally booked a 3 day tour for the 4 of us which left at 11am the next day.

The first day of the tour was good fun. We had a nice driver called David, and we spent the morning on the salt flats, trying to take silly pictures (as you will see from our photos), visiting a hotel made entirely of salt and an island completely covered in cactuses!!

We then drove for a couple of hours to reach our accomodation for the night. It was very basic (no hot shower as we were promised), but there was a group of very cute children living there who entertained us for a while.... or rather we ended up entertaining them, especially lee, who ended up throwing them up in the air, much to their delight, until his back was about to give out!!

The next day was a lot of driving, and although the scenery was nice, we hadn´t expected to spend so long in the 4WD. We saw some nice lagoons, and lee had an encounter with the soft sulpher mud that surrounded them - his boot sunk into the mud at one point, so he tried to pull it out (which proved rather difficult), eventually managed to pull it free, only to walk off and sink into some more mud, so both boots and trouser legs were covered in mud and lee was pretty smelly for the rest of the afternoon!! He wasn´t a happy chappy!!

The place we stayed for the second night was really basic again and absolutely freezing (think it got down to -14 and there was no fire or heating to warm us up!). The third day, after a very early dip in some hot springs (Lee got fully in, Jess dipped her feet!) we headed back to Uyuni, so it was another very long drive (about 8 hours). I think in hindsight we would have only booked a one day tour if we had known how much driving was involved in the 3 days.

We ended up leaving Uyuni on Friday 3rd to head to Potosi. Potosi is the highest city we have been to, and so again it was freezing cold! We spent Saturday wandering around, and had some good food, before leaving Potosi Sunday morning for Sucre ....and hoping for some warmer weather!!