Uyuni

Early Wednesday morning, we headed to the airport in Cochabamba to catch our flight to Uyuni. Mistakenly I thought it was an hour earlier and set the alarm to the wrong time, but fortunately the hotel was good enough to call us to say we'd slept in! So we rushed and made it with plenty of time to spare.

Our mode of transport for this part of the journey was a Super DC-3 - for those of you who don't know what a Super DC-3 is, flick on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and watch out for the plane early on that crashes into a mountain! It was actually really cool. We got to go into the cockpit and everything - and me who's a terrible flyer, really enjoyed it.

We landed in Uyuni around 10am, at an altitude of 3,660 meters above sea level. Most of the tours had set off for the day. We expected to stay a night there and catch a tour the following morning but we were lucky to find an agency which stuck us in a tour last minute. The tour is a 3 day excursion across the salt flats and into the south western highlands. I knew this was going to be a highlight of the trip, I just didn't realise how much of a highlight it would turn out to be!

Our jeep showed up and we hopped in to be greeted by the driver and the other passengers we would be spending the next 3 days with. Matt and Charlotte are a couple from the UK who had been living in Derry. Irish connections already! Really nice guys. Also we met Fedri and Michelle, a couple from Switzerland. Another bunch of really down to earth people. The group was a really good one. I would say most of the bad stories you hear about these trips are because the groups don't get on with each other, but this would not be a problem for us. We all seemed to gel pretty well, and the long journies in the Land Cruiser seemed to fly by!

On the first day, we stopped off at a graveyard for old abandoned steam engines, just on the outskirts of Uyuni. We were able to get up close and even climb aboard some of them. Then it was back into the jeep to pick up our cook - who we think was married to our driver, or at least they must have been having some kind of affair! She was quiet and didn't say much, but man could she cook! We had something different for every meal and it was always delicious.

With the cook on board, we headed out onto the salt flats. It's the most bizarre place I have ever been. 12,000 square km of salt. Millions of years ago, the whole area was an ocean and over time, the water evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving the salt, which eventually compressed. You can look out in all directions and see only the white salt on the ground and the clear blue sky. It really is an eerie kind of place. Gives you the opportunity to take some very amusing novelty photos though!

In the middle of the flats, there are a number of islands covered with giant cactus. How random! Some of them are over 10ft tall and some are over 1,200 years old. Here we ate lunch and hung out for a while, taking in the awsome scenery. Then we sped off again in the jeep to a cave where ancient nomads had once buried their dead. The graves have since been pillaged but you can still see the tombs were the bodies were placed. Very strange feeling there, but nevertheless, interesting.

Our first night was spent in a small village on the edge of the salt flats, called San Pedro. The hostel was very basic but comfortable. We all chilled for the evening after another delicious feed and got some well earned rest.

Early the next morning, we headed into the south western highlands. The scenery was just incredible. Volcanos, lakes, mountains all over the place, and such amazing contrasting colours. We stopped at a few lakes where the flamingos go about their daily lives. Hundreds upon hundreds of them - but I didn't see even one flamingo standing on one leg - very disappointing! The lakes we saw were of different colours; red, green, blue, white, yellow. The plankton in the lakes combined with different minerals in the earth create the different colours which really look beautiful.

Our second night was spent in a much more basic, and less comfortable hostel - I won't even begin to descrive the toilet - and it was so bitterly cold. We were at an altitude of about 4,300 meters at this stage, and the winds just howl through during the night. We had to get up early on the third day to make it to the volcano. Up at 5.45, the stars were unbelievable. I have never seen so many stars in the sky, or seen them so clearly. It was a great way to start the day.

We arrived at our volcano at an altitude of about 5,000 meters. Wow! There were bubbling mud pools, steam rising from the ground and pools of superheated water, coloured by the sulphur. I don't know how to describe it, it was quite surreal. The smell was overwhelming at times but worth it for what we saw.

Our next stop was a hot spring on the way to the Chilean border. You could hop into the pool if you wanted. The water was 37 degrees, and the guys loved it! Seeing as I had no togs or a towl I just stuck my feet in, but even that felt so good!

The Swiss were leaving us at this point to carry on into Chili. They were going to climb a mountain but the guide seemed to be taking them for a ride so they decided against it. We left them at the border and started back on our 10 hour journey back to Uyuni.

All in all it was an amazing 3 days. I have never experienced anything quite like it. At times it felt like we were on another planet. What made the experience even more amazing were the people we experienced it with. They were a fine bunch of people - and guys if you're reading this, skiing in February!!!

We stayed over in Uyuni on Friday night as our bus to La Paz was booked for Saturday night. We just chilled for the day and hung out with Matt and Charlotte. I think we really needed the rest after the manic two weeks we've had so far. God, 2 weeks. It seems like we've been here for months, I guess we've just seen and done so much.

At the moment we're in La Paz. We arrived this morning at 6am. Our bus from Uyuni was actually on time. The first half of the 10 hour journey was on unpaved roads, an my god it was horrific. But once we reached the paved road at about 1am it was smooth sailing. Tom and Tadhg get into La Paz at about 1 in the morning so I'm excited that I'll see them. And then it's Peru for us on Tuesday.

Don't know if you've been hearing about the goings on in Bolivia at the moment, but it's all concentrated in the east in Santa Cruz and Sucre. Although one small town in the far north had martial law declared yesterday. Kinda crazy, but these things happen in Bolivia all the time. We're pretty safe here and far from any conflicts. But if anything changes, we know to get the hell out of Dodge!

Thats's all for now, see you later, C