Potosi - Bolivia. Chilling out whilst the mother of all hailstorms batters the windows and roof. Been here a couple of days, not done much other than the obligatory trip to the mines of Cerro Rico. Nearly 500 years of mining in this killer mountain. 8 million people have lost their lives - most of them African slaves brought over by the Spanish. The silver found in this place made Potosi one of the richest Cities in the World for a short while and founded the majority of Spain's wealth during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Now it's mined by about 5000 indigenous Bolivians who work 6 days a week, sometimes for 24 hours at a time, in back breaking conditions 2KM inside the mine. Most will die of some lung related disease and yet they still continue to head into the mines everyday to earn money for their families. The conditions are horrendous - I'd had more than enough after 2 hours. The heat is stiffling and you can almost feel the imposing mountain bearing down on you. We bring gifts for the miners in the form of bags of Coca leaves which they chew into golf ball sizes lumps and suck on them all day, alcohol, (96%) and cigarettes. We also leave some gifts for the God of the mine - Tio. I tell you, I will never complain about my job again....... Check out the film The Devil's Mine if you want to know more about the place.

So far, I've continued to be blown away by this amazing continent. It just keeps on giving and surprising at every turn. On this note - I will not apologize for the length of this post, nor try to make out I'll be keeping it brief.

Since leaving Santiago on my tour to La Paz we stopped off at La Serena - a pleasant enough beach resort in Northern Chile in the Elqui Valley which is famous for it's Pisco and for it's amazing clear skies and Intenational Observatories, and Antofagasta - a strange place on the coast in the middle of a desert which used to belong to the Bolivians and is still a bone of contention between to the 2 nations, espeically since Bolivia is now landlocked as a result of losing the place to Chile.

San Pedro was our first main stop. It's in North East Chile in the middle of the Atacama desert on the Bolivian border. The place is beautiful - white washed walls, haciendas everywhere, lovely people and lots of things to do and see. It's an oasis in the middle of one of the driest places in the World. The surrounding scenery makes you feel like you are on Mars or something. They have names for places like Valle de Muerte, (Valley of Death, so called due to a mix up when the place was named Valley of Mars which translates to Valle de Marte in Spanish - Marte / Muerte....), Valle de Luna and Dinosaur Valley. The landscape is incredibly impressive and beautiful with huge sand dunes, deep gorges and valleys of red rock, desert going on forever, strange rock formations and smoking volcanic peaks on the horizon. We watched the sunset in the middle of Valle de Luna, trekked through one of the many deep gorges, trekked up to stunning miradors and monuments, investigated Incan ruins and mountain biked the Quebrada del Diablo - a never ending, twisting and turning gorge with a track just wide enough for you on a bike. Absolutely amazing place.

San Pedro is the starting point for the Atacama crossing into Bolivia and the Salar de Uyuni - the Worlds largest Salt Lake. This was a 3 day tour finishing in Uyuni in Bolivia. It was utterly, breathtakingly, surreally beautiful. Like being on another planet - at times I ended up laughing at how totally unbelievable the landscape was. We must of driven past over a hundred volcanoes, some active, some not, some snow capped, some with many different colours, (the 7 Colour Mountain was one stop), and some which were perfect cones. We travelled for most of the time at over 4000M - our first night was spent at 4500M and the highest we went was 4900M, and yet each of these volcanoes were still towering above us..... There was one right next to the Bolivian border control point which was essentially just a hut. Straight after this we drove past the first of many lakes we were to pass. This one projecting a perfect reflfection of the surrounding landscape. OUr first stop at Laguna Verde prompted much oooooo-ing and aaaaa-ing but when the wind picked up and disturbed the algae and minerals in the lake, it began to turn green, starting on the far shore and creeping towards us like some weird and spooky green fog until the whole of Laguna Verde was verde. All of this with a perfect volcanic cone on the other side. Volcano Licancabar - one of the highest and also one of the most important. The crater holds the Worlds highest laguna and several pieces of equipment owned by NASA as they try to understand the conditions on Mars.......

We left Laguna Verde for our lunch stop which was at a natural hot water springs set on the edge of another stunning laguna surround by more beautiful mountains. To be sat in seriously hot bath water at over 4500M was just brilliant. It just kept coming, next we had to walk and navigate ourselves over ground of geysers with boiling and spitting mud with vents and holes in the ground churning out boiling steam. At some points the ground was so soft and warm that the danger of it collasping into a new geyser was very real...... After that we saw our first bunch of Flamengoes. All of them perfect pink due to the incredible red / orange colour of Laguna Colorada. We lost over half our group to altitude sickness, (albeit mild), on our first night so only a few of us managed dinner in the strange barracks-like accommodation in the middle of this unbelievable place.

At this point I should mention something about the tour - There was 8 of us plus Hernan, our Peruvian guide with a wicked sense of humour and of adventure. We had a couple of German girls, Meike and Michaela. Three English lasses, Siobhan, Amisha and Jane and a couple from England, Stacey and Neil. We also kept bumping into a load of familiar faces from San Pedro. We had our guide for the Salar de Uyuni, (Carlos), our drivers, (Saul and Amando), and our cook, (Ale). The driving was just ridiculous. We had big old Toyota Landcruiser 4WD and they don't half take a pounding. There is no road on this desert, just stone, sand, rocks and lava. You can go where you want but often have to turn around. Your bones get rattled out of your body and you bump your head, knees, elbows etc every few minutes. Sounds horrible and yet 8 hours like this and it seems like 5 mins because there is always something to be amazed by. If it's not a volcano, then it would be a beautiful laguna of some such colour or it would be amazing landscape of nothingness, hardened lava flows, llamas, vicunas, (a small llama), flamengoes, geysers, mini tornadoes sweeping across the desert, fossilized coral reefs, (yes, fossilized coral left over from when the sea used to cover the whole place), the dust cloud of another 4WD or huge rocks literally dumped from out of the sky by massive erruptions.

Our second day started with the arbol de piedra, (tree of stone), which is a mad rock in the middle of the desert surrounded by other crazy huge rocks with all sorts of wind and rain eroded formations. These rocks 'landed' there from huge volcanic eruptions. It's a playground in the middle of nowhere and much time was spent climbing, jumping and posing on the various formations. After that and we really were in the middle of absolutely nowhere and the driving was getting tougher. We had lost sight of the other 4WD but after we failed to make it up a huge sand dune, we turned round and dropped into a valley only to come face to face with them coming the other way after also failing to get up a dune. We stopped shortly after to take a long look at 7 Colours Mountain. However, I discovered a new setting on my camera so we had a little fun in the desert with this instead. If only I'd known about when jumping from ledge to ledge earlier that day.......

The day finished with a visit to several beautiful lakes. Honoa was my favourite although one had a huge amount of flamengoes strutting there stuff. Our last stop was a short trek up, over and through the hardened lava flow from a still active volcano. Great view of the smoking volcano and lava path down the side but the landscape created by this hardened lava flow was amazing. An epic last 2 hours of driving over fossilized coral reefs and a much smaller salt lake saw us arrive for a brief stop in San Juan. A town in the middle of nowhere with girls playing basketball, entire families riding across the desert on a single bicycle, and 7 year olds charging you B's, (Bolivianos), to use the banos. We had another scary moment shortly after where we were steaming along, no visibility at all due to the sand and then out of the dust this truck appeared coming the other way. We finally made it to the Salt Hotel where we were staying for our second night. Everything bar the roof and floor was made out of Salt. The pillars, the beds, the headboards, the tables, the chairs etc. Amazing! We had a great night watching the utterley incredible 'rainbow' clouds turn into a burning sky as the sunset before having a few drinks with our hosts, guides, drivers and cooks, watching local children sing and dance for us and trying to speak Spanish. Probably not the best prep for a 4am start the next day! What the hell? However, despite my feeling of roughness on awaking, the moment we left and saw the stars and then jumped in the 4WD and started to drive across Salar de Uyuni, this left me. It was pitch black apart from the stars and faint glow from the East. Saul turned the headlights off and we were motoring across 12500KM Sq of pure, flat, white, salty nothing. We couldn't see a thing in front of us but there was nothing to hit! As the light grew, we could make out the silhouette of distant volcanoes and what looked like a small rock ahead of us. This rock eventually turned into a huge island in the middle of this massive Salt Lake. It's called Fish Island and was to be where we watched the sunrise. It was INCREDIBLE and an amazing way to get our first proper glimpse of Salar de Uyuni. The place is staggering. My brain could not comrephend it. A vast white expanse for as far as the eye could see 360 degrees with distant volcanoes on the horizon. And there we were on this island in the middle of it all. An island covered in fossilized coral and hundreds, maybe thousands of absolutely giant cacti. This is definately up there with Torres Del Paine and Iguazu Falls and was certainly a Tuaca moment...... And it was still only 7am...... Breakfast on this incredible island followed where I befriended a Rhea, (like an Ostrich), which was just walking around. It was then time to walk into the lake and mess about with pictures. Since the backdrop is pure white and blue for as far as the eye can see, you can do some funny things with photos. So, 'giant' Tuaca and Me Bird moments followed! Amongst other attempts at being funny and clever with the camera. It was alot of fun but not as much as jumping back in the 4WD and just flooring it across this white desert. Nothing got any closer and when we stopped after an hour or so we couldn't see Fish Island anymore so it was truly 360 degrees of sheer white going on forever. More messing about with photos, (using my newly discovered setting to try some Matrix style photos) before heading for lunch at the only Salt Hotel left in the lake, (pretty much an illegal structure so tours only stop there for lunch). The last section of driving had us negotiate pools of water giving the lake a desert island feel before hitting 'land' again. A short drive and brief stop at the train graveyard later and we were checked into our hotel in Uyuni. A strange town on the edge of this amazing wilderness. Not much to see other than marvel at the faces and dress of the locals. Such amazing looks on their faces with the women in particular captivating you with their smiles, thick knee length socks with sandals or heels, big pleated skirts, waist length pleated hair and a vast array of different hats, (bowler hats, flat caps, stetsons etc). And most carried a child on their backs or fronts wrapped in colourful blankets. The blokes dressed postiviely boring in comparison.

So, an interesting evening followed eating pizza cooked by a guy from Boston in this strange place, chatting to everybody else, (everyone goes to the Minutema Pizza place in Uyuni with it's massive array of 'Salt Lake' photos) who had just completed ths same trip, (including many familiar faces and a group of hardcore bikers biking the continent - Scampi eat your heart out!). The whole experience was made even more memorable by the fact we were nextdoor to the local army base - we soon got used to the sirens, band music and marching!

That pretty much brings me up to date. I can't quite believe what I've seen and done in just 2 weeks. I'm now about halfway through my time in South America and still have so much more to come. Seriously, you can unsubscribe from these updates!

I hope everyone is well, being good and having fun back home. I'm off to La Paz to mountain bike the 'World's Most Dangerous Road (TM)' and to meet up with Andy, Kate and Em. We're then off to Lake Titticaca and into Peru for some Amazon Jungle spider dodging and monkey fighting before hitting the famous Inca Trail, (which we hope will have re-opened). No doubt I'll not have much to say about these places...........

Big thanks to those few of you still reading these and sending messages! Keep it up, not long to go now.....

Until the next one, be safe.

Cheers.

Matt.

P.S. Steaks off the menu now but Llama is on - quite nice actually. Still debating whether or not to try Guinea Pig in Peru.......

P.P.S. New favourite drink is Pisco but will help Kate drink the supplies of Tuaca she is bringing out......