Bolivia!!

---

Apologies for being so long updating this, Bolivia has been amazing and so busy and crazy, i hope I remember what we´ve been up to. Sadly my Camera and all my lovely photos went walkies along with a bunch of cash in Sucre, so won´t be many photos 'from now on apart from the ones i manage to steal off other people!

We spent our last couple of days in Chile chilling (!) out in hammocks in the uber-touristy dester village of San Pedro, a strange old place full of tour operaters, expensive bars and cafes, and with temparatures going from 30+ degrees in the day to almost zero at night. I went sand boarding on some huge sand dunes in the ominously named Death Valley, and had great fun throwing myself off and tumbling grace-lessly down the slope. Sand was to be discovered in all sorts of extraordinary places for days after!

The main reason we were in San Pedro was to book onto a tour which would take us in to Bolivia across the Uyuni salt flats (the biggest salt flat in the world apparently), and so onto the next leg of our journey. After hearing all sorts of horror stories about drunken drivers, altitude sickness, and jeeps breaking down in the middle of the desert, we got a little group together and set off to decide on a tour operator, finally settling on the Cordillera Travel. Thankfully all went well and we had a great group on our tour - myself and Phil, Tim from Germany, Ozzie Keriie, and an older couple freom Canada Richard and Dotty - no breakdowns, no drunken driver (as far as i know) and great grub. The altitude sickness on the other hand.....awful! But there´s not a lot they could do about that, and plenty of Coca leaf tea (yes the leaf that makes cocaine!) was provided to ease our symptoms.

The Uyuni salt flats were just incredible, probably one of the best expereinces I´ve had in my life, and so surreally beautiful, unlike anything I´ve seen before. Red lakes, green lakes, flamingoes, stinky geysers, thermasl springs, Llamas, llamas, llamas, giant cactus, vast expanses of desert and then lunar like rock formations appear from no where. All finished off on the final day by the drive across the salt plain, which is looks like a field of ice that stretches as far as the eye can see, but is in fact a thick layer of salt crystals covering earth and water underneath. It so hard to explain without photos! So you´ll have to take my word for it - incredible.

---