The final instalment - nearly

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Well - a lot has happened in the last ten days since Irene and Gaby arrived and Polly and Marianne headed for home.

We started by flying to Sucre - a beautiful colonial town in Bolivia. It would be a lovely place to live: large courtyards, rolling roads lined with jacarandas and flame trees with fun shops, markets, and an easy way of life. We went to a number of fransiscan monasteries (how could you not with Irene in two, even with Gaby muttering "a person can only take so many religious icons..." as you go around). The only problem with Sucre was that it was blockaded by striking truckers at the time, but once we sneaked through, we enjoyed the peace of a traffic free city. The British Ambassador to Bolivia (with who we had drinks the other day - darling!!!) said you haven´t visited Bolivia unless you´ve been blockaded, hijacked, or kidnapped, so I guess we were lucky just to be blockaded.

Then on to the salt flats at Uyuni. A long and very tiring journey in 4 wheel drive taking a whole long day in blistering heat - and you couldn´t open the windows as it was on track not tarmac, so the dust was unmanageable. But the drive was spectacular - as Gaby said, a lesson in geology. The rocks were of every colour in different places - red, green, silver, black, some barren, some clad with purple jacarandas, some topped with snow, some with blood red iron deposits and the altiplano, varying between bare and cultivated, with llamas, alpacas and vicunas wandering around, very beautiful.

We all said, as we settled in for a very cold night in Uyuni - a small outpost on the edge of the flats - that we weren´t sure what could be worth that drive. But Uyuni was, when we saw it the next morning. After playing for an hour in a "train cemetery" in the desert - it sounds strange, but was real fun and saw Lauren and Marcus climbing atop rusted trains bearing graffiti saying "George Bush - you will end up like this too" and Gaby and Irene posing in drivers´cabins - we went on to the salt flats.

None of us have seen anything like these. Hundreds of kilometres of whiteness, made up of hexagons, where perspective is lost and the world seems to stretch for ever between mountains in the Andes. It is a strange, peaceful world. The only equivalent I can think of is the experience of flying above white clouds - but here you are actually sitting on them. And where occasionally you see "land", you in fact see small islands covered in giant cactuses - an incongruous site. It´s hard to drag yourself away from anything so beautiful.

But, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, we did drive back to Potosi - a silver mining village where 5,000 people mine daily without salary in the hope of finding enough minerals. We donned hats, jackets, boots and lights and headed down the mines. A salutary experience, if very interesting. None of us have signed up!

Then back to Sucre and La Paz and then to Lima for our final excursion to the Nasca lines and the Ballestas Islands.

Our plane is about to be called from Lima to Madrid. So the real final instalment shortly.

Very strange to think we are on our way home - so you needn´t comment. We´ll see you all very soon.

Love to all

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