Andrea: Six hours after leaving freezing cold Potosi on a bus we arrived in freezing cold Uyuni. On the bus the book had told us about the incredibly cold wind that whipped through the streets of Uyuni and we were a bit scared because it had said nothing like that about Potosi, a city where we never actually got warm. Uyuni is the jumping off point for the famous Salar de Uyuni (largest salt flats in the world) and the best thing about the town itself is that it'...

Vern: We planned to spend two nights in Potosi but spent a reluctant third because we couldn't get bus tickets onward to Uyuni. Potosi is supposedly the highest city in the world at 4070m above sea level and sprawls out around the base of Cerro Rico, a large symmetrical mountain out of which the Spanish extracted millions of tons of silver which funded their empire-building in the 1500s and 1600s. Thousands of indigenous people and African slaves died in the mine...

Vern: We spent two more quiet days in Samaipata. One day hanging around the hostel listening to two Spanish guys play classical guitar (which relaxed us like a resort holiday soundtrack) and the other walking in the hills around the town. Then we caught a night bus to Sucre. This was the first long distance bus we've taken without a bathroom on board, and the solution was to pull the bus over at a halfway point in a nowhere town then wake everyone up at 2:30am an...

Vern: We started our fourth day in town in a terrible archaeological museum watching a short film meant to explain 'El Fuerte' (the Fort) a mystical red rock, and the village which formed around it, which sits in the mountain above Samaipata and is covered with carvings and etchings dating back past 500 BC. However they don't actually know much as they only had the budget to excavate 10% of the complex. Nonetheless the film-maker was commissioned to fill up 20 mi...

Vern: The shared taxi from Santa Cruz to Samaipata leaves when full so we sat down in a little taxi office and waited. A few men wandered in and added their names to a list on a chalk board so Andrea insisted I add our names too so we wouldn't be forgotten about, and we sat patiently and ate an ice cream and twiddled our thumbs. Finally a car filled up and we left though no other passenger names were ever added to the chalkboard. We enquired and it turned out to ...