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From our Lake Titicaca adventure we entered Bolivia, our 5th country! We headed straight for the capital seat of La Paz and booked ourselves into another party central hostel. Our week in La Paz was spent catching up with people we had met along the way and generally exploring the interesting but run down city. Carrie's highlight of Bolivia, South America and potentially our whole trip (time will tell!) was biking down Death Road on a double suspension amazing mountain bike in the fastest group of the day! Whilst Carrie was dicing with death (they don't call it Death Road for nothing) and getting covered in dust, Laura wandered the city and generally felt very lost without her sidekick!
We spent a great deal of time in the markets which sell fake stuff for pence!! Unfortunately due to a rather strange turn of events Carrie had her passport stolen out of her bag at one of these markets and then rather randomly given back to her fifteen minutes later! We also went to the Witches Market which as well as being stuffed with everything a traveller could want to buy was also home to dead and dried out llamas and frogs and plenty of strange potions! Another highlight for us were the amazing ice creams you could buy at the bottom of our road, trust us we sampled a fair few!! Our favourite thing about Bolivia was that we could go out for a 3 course meal and barely have it cost a pound!!
From La Paz we booked onto a tour of the Salt Flats which we had heard about since the day we landed in Brazil. Feeling rather excited we boarded a normal looking bus one night and figured we were in for some good sleep. How wrong we were! Roads don't appear to exist in Bolivia, just rocky paths so it was an interesting 14 hour journey! When we arrived in Uyuni to start our tour we couldn't believe the temperature!! Definitely the coldest we had been in South America so far! Our tour got off to a rather rocky start as in the clapped out old Land Cruiser with us was a rather annoying man from our bus, gutted! The first day was spent travelling across the salt which stretches for miles and miles and miles, it looks just like snow! We visited a hotel made entirely from salt which was full of salt tables and chairs and then visited an island in the middle of the salt which was completely covered in cactuses! Bizarre! As we travelled along a bit further we realised we were losing our chance to take perspective pictures and had to quickly stop the driver! Difficult with limited Spanish! We only spent a few minutes lying in the salt trying to capture the perfect picture before we were ushered back into the car so consequently the pictures are rubbish! Our accommodation for the first night took us all by surprise. A long muddy building in the middle of a town that looked like it had been under nuclear attack and everybody had deserted it! We were less than impressed. However, given the cold we were tucked up in our sleeping bags with our woolly hats on our heads and socks on our hands straight after dinner!
The second day was spent in the desert and off of the salt. We saw more amazing sites, an active volcano, lots of pink flamingoes and an entirely red lake!! The most entertaining parts of the day however were getting a flat tyre that had to be changed in the middle of the desert with a jack the size of a beer bottle. Needless to say, it kept sinking into the sand! There was more entertainment provided in the form of many stops for banos naturales but the less said about that the better!
Our second night's accommodation had concrete beds and was even colder but there were more people around so we were pleased. We made a run to the "shop" to stock up on wine and pringles.... that made us a lot happier!! I think we can safely say that it was the coldest night's sleep we have ever had, it was -18 when we woke up at 5.30!!! Not fun to get dressed at that temperature. It was our last morning so we were off to see the geysers and the thermal pools before being dropped at the border into Chile. Once at the border we came across a problem. The company we had booked everything with didn't exist in Chile so we had no transfer!! Luckily, there was space on the bus that was leaving that morning so we were allowed on to it and were very glad of the heater that thawed out our fingers and toes. Well, Laura's fingers and toes..... Carrie's still feel frozen to this day!
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