La Paz, Uyuni & The Salt Lake Tour On our last day in La Paz (Monday) we went to the coca museum, museum of musical instruments and spent some time walking around seeing the town as it had stopped raining. We had accidentally spent the whole of the day before at Oliver's Travels. We had a roast lunch (as was Sunday, and it was v good), watched football and gradually aquired a group of friends as people joined us on the comfy sofas. On Monday night we did the overnight bus journey from La Paz to Uyuni which is in south Bolivia. For a lot of the journey there were no proper roads, just tracks in the desert, so it was extremely bumpy and we didn't get any sleep. There isn't a lot to do in Uyuni except get on a tour of the salt lake so we stayed there for just one night. Uyuni was a massive contrast to La Paz. It is based around a couple of long and wide dusty roads where the few cars travel at about walking pace. It is calm and there aren't many people, although bizarely there seemed to be an awful lot of school kids. On Wednesday we we started our 3 day tour of the salt lake and natural reserve which are between Uyuni and the boarder with Chile (Salar de Uyuni & Reserva Eduard Avaroa). All 3 days were spectacular - once again, I have never seen scenery like it. There were 6 tourists in our jeep plus the driver, his wife who was the cook, and their 3 year old son who was the most chearful little chap in the whole of Bolivia. He contributed to the entertainment by helping with the driving, chasing seaguls and laughing a lot, even at 6am. The salt lake was amazing- it looks like snow but is actually salt for miles and miles around. After we drove through the salt lake we stayed in a hotel which was made of salt - Simon licked the walls to check. The next day we drove through desert surrounded by mountains and volcanos and went past some beautiful lakes with flamingoes in them. At the end of the day we arrived to the start of the Reserve and Lake Colorada which is red due to the natual pigments of the algae which live in its shallow waters (definitely didn't copy that out of my guide book). It was such a bizarre thing to see a lake of red water. All of the other colours of the surrounding landscape and mountains made it one of the most fansastic natual sights I have ever seen. Shame about the place we stayed that night, which was made of brick but had no running water. The scenery was worth it and we weren't really there very long as we had to get up so stupidly early the next morning anyway. On the last day we first saw bubbling mud and geysers. It looked like there were aliens in the pools of mud throwing handfulls of mud out of them as they were bubbling so vigourously. Then we went to some hot springs which are at the side of another lake. I dipped my legs in but didn't get right in. I didn't predict that it would seem a good idea to take off layers of clothes, coats, scarves, gloves and hats to jump in a lake at 7am, so I wasn't prepared with bikini and towel. The last part of our tour was the Laguna Verde. It is supposed to be bright green, also something to do with the algae. However, the intensity of the greenness is dependent on how strong wind is and we arrived when it was completely calm, so it wasn't very green. However, because it was completely calm, there was a reflection of the mountains behind in the lake and again, the scene and colours were stunning. We actually experienced road rage on our tour though. Miles and miles of desert to drive in and some nutter coming from the other direction decided he wanted to drive into our jeep. It was nearly a head on collision with the drivers playing chicken driving towards each other on the same track. At the last moment our driver (who had the right of way in the first place) slowed down and moved over, but driver of the other jeep continued on course, at speed, and ended up clipping the back of our jeep. There was a big dent and smashed back lights. The other driver just carried on driving in a cloud of dust, so we did a U-turn and experienced desert speed driving in hot pursuit of the lunatic. We caught him and there was a lot of shouting but he wouldn't admit it was his fault. The quality of the jeeps has to be questioned even before the desert rage incident. Ours did the job - got us to see what we wanted and didn't break down, but our driver was "checking" the engine a little too often and on one up hill part that was too much for the jeep, we all had to get out and walk so the jeep had a chance of getting up the hill. Also, on our last morning when we left the place we were staying at 5am (why do all the best things have to be seen so early and when its freezing cold?), we thought it a little rude of our driver to beep for a long time in order to wake anyone up who wasn't already awake. An hour or so and a lot of inappropriate beeping later, we realised that there was some sort of bad connection in the jeep which made it beep randomly. That's all from Bolivia. Onwards to Chile and Argentina! Josiexx