Our 4 day tour from Tupiza to Uyuni to visit the famous Salar de Uyuni, largest salt flats in the world, was truly amazing! Despite the early starts, usually 4 or 5 in the morning (I am not a morning person) and the altitude sickness, it was one of the best things I've done on this trip!

Our group was me, Pete, Kate and a Czech girl Magda that we met in Tupiza. Our driver/guide only spoke Spanish but that didn't really matter as we all understood. The first day we saw a lot of canyons, mountains, valleys, cacti, llamas, alpacas... we stopped by a group of llamas to see a newborn baby llama, it was apparently only a few hours old, and watching it trying to stand up and falling over was very cute! We passed through a few VERY desolate villages, and ended up in the small village where we were spending the night in a family home. No electricity or hot water, but thats pretty standard! We set off to visit a rock formation called the lost city of Rome due to their resemblence to Roman ruins, but by this time I had got so sick from the altitude that all I could do was try and sleep in the car to avoid the splitting pain in my head!

The second day we had a lot of similar landscape, but everything was frozen, the rivers, and ice on the ground, it was freeeeeezing outside! We passed some enormous volcanos, and visited the laguna blanco and laguna verde, named for obvious reasons! We saw our first few flamingos at these lakes, I got VERY excited! We finished the day at the thermal baths on the edge of the lake, where an enclosed pool has been built that holds the thermal water, with an amazing view over the lake and the mountains. It was really nice to be in such hot water after being so freezing for two days that I'd been wearing my alpaca jumper OVER my hoodie! That wasn't to last however as we arrived at our bed for the night. I've never actually been so cold in my whole life! I managed to wear my jeans, thick ski socks, leg warmers, a t-shirt, hoodie with the hood up, jumper with the hood up, gloves, inside my sleeping bag, under two blankets, and I was still so cold I couldnt sleep!

The next day we got up before sunrise so that we could get to the geysers to watch the sun rising over them. The geysers were pretty cool, some of them went ridiculously high, and some of them made squeaking noises, or seemed to come out of nowhere! After the sun had risen we stopped for breakfast at the highest point we'd been to so far, just over 5000m! We then visited laguna colorado, which was literally covered with flamingos! We became nature photographers for about half an hour! The lake was cool too, rippled with different colours, with a mountain in the background! The rest of the day we saw a lot more lakes and volcanoes, and arrived for our third night in the salt hostel, made entirely of salt, the warmest place we'd stayed so far (I didn't even need to wear a hoodie or jumper in bed! AND it had hot showers!

The last day of our tour we woke up before sunrise again to head to the salt flats. As its rainy season we had the water covering the edge where we were, and the reflection of the mountains and sunrise in the water. We then headed out to do our salt flats pictures, where we got to pretend to be borrowers (see photo albulm!) in the enormous expanse of salt where you can see nothing else for miles! It actually looks like a desert its so vast. Our guide had a lot of fun doing our pictures with us before we finally left the salt flats for Uyuni, stopping off at the train cemetery where all the old rusted trains were left after the trainline became disused. We spent about 8 hours in the s***hole that is Uyuni, many of which were at the only bar open, the extreme fun pub, before finally boarding the bus headed for LA PAZ!