Well....after 27hrs through the US, gbp 200 later and a hell of a lot of hassle and tears (by me), we finally arrived in La Paz, Bolivia. The highest airport in the world, the town´s altitude is not to be sniffed at, we were literally falling over and bumping into each other all day...quite funny! Of course you are supposed to spend a few days acclimatising to the altitude before heading off anywhere higher, but we were on a deadline to get to Santiago, so stuff that!
We hopped on a long distance bus that evening to Uyuni in the South. All was going well until we heard a massive ´pop!´in the middle of the night and had blown a tyre! On we trudged until later that morning when the tyre blew again. This being Bolivia, we only had one spare, so some genius decided to turn back to the nearest town to get it fixed, the nearest town which happened to be 40km away, through dusty ´roads´. We were hoping to get to Uyuni and start a tour of the Salt Flats, however after standing in a small town in the middle of nowhere for around 5 hours, we decided to put it off until the next day!
Uyuni was quite an odd little town, literally surrounded by desert, but with 60 plus tourist operators (if you can call them that) lining the streets. We chose a company called Tonito Tours and put together a group of six (Nicole and Daniel from Oz, Karin from Switerland and Rachel from tupt north!) ready for our 4x4 3 day tour of bolivia.
The scenery we saw was absolutely spectacular (salt flats, coloured lagoons, volcanoes - apparently -, flamingos and the list goes on), and thank goodness it was because we experienced some GROSS conditions to see it. First off there are actually no real roads around, dust, stones and rocks are about all you can expect, then there are no real toilets (and the ´ferral´ children seem to be taught to poop on the floor!) and there are basically no showers (we were lucky enough to have freeeeezing showers on the first night, but when it was minus 5 outside, it wasn´t really that welcome!)....so it was hard to put it mildly, but we got through it! If you feel you can put up with the conditions, I would definitely recommend going! We has a really good group of people, drank wine in the evening (well on the first evening, after getting up at 5am on the second day we all fell asleep at about 8.30pm wrapped in a million blankets on the second night! ha), played cards and talked about poo (Nicole!).
So, four days after we arrived we were on a bus to Chile (San Pedro De Atacama), where the roads were instantly....well roads!
