Hallucinogenic salt deserts, spurting geysers and eerie lagoons

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Day 1- After a long pause waiting in our jeep for our guide to join us, we finally head off on our 4 day tour through what is said to be one of the most beautiful place sin the world. It turns out that our delay was due to the company briefing or guide on what we´re about see. they had been photocopyin all the papers detailing all the sites that we are gong to, so that he would be able to read them out to us when we hit our destinations! it turns out that it was his first tour to the Salt flats, and it would be as much a holiday for him as it would be for us!! His name was Arsel- similarly pronounced to Ass hole! and our driver´s name was Adelio..but for some reason, our guide couldn´t pronounce that, and kept calling him Idiot or Elliot....so there we go, we were travelling with ass hole and idiot!

our tour group consited of me, Alex (UK, and whom i´d been travelling with since BA), Rachel (Florida, US), Helen M (UK), Helen (Ireland), Simone (Switzerland). 5 of us had been travelling together since salta. the whole group gelled right from the start!

The first day was filled with new things- seeing Llamas and vicunias for the first time. passing by amazing landscapes. beautiful view points. Cacti! Cacti! Catus! they make great pictures! We stopped off for lunch at a random wayside house. basic food and tasty...and plenty of avacado! stepping outside, we some across a man that was offloading opened up corpses of sheep...luckily we had finsihed our luch by that point!
We seemed to have been blessed with the slow jeep, as time after time we were overtaken by other groups. Our driver´s explanation was that he was the only driving his own car, so that he took extra care of it. Which is why he shouldn´t have let me sit in the front...i accidentally broke one of the plastic pieces of the front sun cover! oops!

That night, we stayed in........., arriving past sunset. we were deposited in a lodging that was bare, containing 6 beds and a missing window to keep us warm! at high altitude, we froze. To keep ourselves warm, we all hopped into bed together for body warmth- 3 in each bed. we couldn´t stop laughing that night...great bonding experience on our first day together!

Day 2- after an early start, we head out through the colourful landscape that Bolivia is known for...it was a damn shame that this was also the day that my camera decides to fail on me as the battery ran out. turns out that in cold weather, batteries last much less!

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