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As we sit here and reflect on the last nine days since our most recent blog, it certainly has been a varied and amazing time.
Since we climbed out of the Silver Mine in Potosi and headed back to a hot shower and heated (we were so excited!) hostel room, things have not been dull.
We headed south to the town of Tupiza, variously described as the Wild West Town of Bolivia......in actual fact, the place where Butch Cassidy met his end. We had originally intended to do our salt flats tour here but we quickly realised that was not practical or economical. So we settled for a days horse riding through the amazing country side similar to Central Australia (we felt). The seven hours we spent in the saddle, was undoubtedly two hours too long as we were both very saddle sore and were sure the horses were equally sick of us! The whole day was dominated by a power struggle between our horses.....Mal´s horse continually tried to bite Nat´s and insisted on being in the lead!
We travelled 200km in seven hours the following day from Tupiza to Uyuni along a very mountainous, bumpy and desert road - but once again, the scenery was fantastic and having locals with lambs sitting in the aisle next to you is always entertaining!
Onto our Salt Flats tour......we realised very quickly we were again in luck with our 4WD group. Two Danes and two English, one of the Danes spoke fluent Spanish (our driver7guide spoke no English!). The tour lived up to expectations providing an amazing range of scenery, the like of which we had never seen before. We marvelled at the Salar de Uyuni on Day One, enjoyed taking a range of optical illusion photographs and slept in a Salt Hotel, just outside the actual Flats.
Day Two saw us headed into Volcano and Desert Country via a market in ´no man´s land´ between Bolivia and Chile. Unfortunately this proved to be the worst move of the trip so far........as our camera was taken from Nat without her even realising. There went all our photos from the previous day, as well as previous shots from La Paz, Sucre, Potosi and Tupiza (internet connections had been so slow in Bolivia it had been difficult to back up!). Our despair quickly began to evaporate due to the kindness of the Danish guys on our tour (and the others in our jeep, not to mention a couple of Danes that we went horse riding with who all offered us copies of photos........the generosity of fellow travellers is heartwarming) who told us to use their camera as our own for the remainder of the trip and we could copy their shots from the Salt Flats day (this explains why there are some people you will not recognise in our photo album!). We saw various coloured lagoons with the red one with flamingoes a highlight. Sleèping arrangements were pretty basic and this is the one and only time that we pulled out the sleeping bags.....but it was well worth carrying them around for three months for this one freezing night!
Day Three saw a 5am get up and a climb to just on 5000m in the car to see geysers and boiling mud pools before heading to Hot Springs for breakfast. A final trip to a Green lagoon and surrounding volcanoes saw us at the Chilean border at 9.30am where we caught our transport into San Pedro de Atacama.
We enjoyed a couple of days with the Danish guys chilling out in this oasis like town in the driest desert in the world. Loui, was able to help out at the police station when we reported the theft of the camera with his Spanish skills!
Today we unexpectedly found ourselves walking through, at times, calf deep snow towards the volcanoes that surround this desert. Had we been told this when we booked our tour, we would have been a little more prepared! It was absolutely freezing, particularly after waiting for 30 minutes, still in the snow, for what we consider to be the ´Slowest Tour Group´we´ve encountered ever! We only dried out when we visited the Atacama Salt Flat which was a fantastic contrast and gave us an ever closer view of flamingoes. It was a shame that in this case, we only had an old style film camera which we have bought for $24!! We´ll have to wait for the film to be developed until we see what our shots (as there is no zoom!) turn out like.
We laugh each time we click for a photo and hear the winding on of the film inside...it is so loud! We hope to buy a digital camera on Saturday in the larger city of Salta (in Argentina), as we head on a day bus ride, back over the Andes, on Friday.
From Salta, its onto Iguazu Falls which is located on the Argentine/Brazilian border and then into Brazil for our final ten days or so.......time is flying as we approach the end.
Hope you are all well.
Mal and Nat
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