Just finished a three day off-road trip of the salt flats in South Bolivia. Had such a good time, and the sights were beautiful. We were in a group of 7 in a Toyota 4x4 truck thingy, stayed the first night in a hotel made of salt. Yes, made of salt. I have the picture to prove it, and I even found a scorpion in my room in the morning! We had quite a drunken night there as bottles of wine were suprisingly reasonably priced - considering we were tourists stuck in the middle of nowhere. - I came to the enlightened idea that steak and battenburg cake would taste great if served together (remember you heard it here FIRST), someone tried to steal
a stuffed armadillo, and our driver said he had to go and find some tourists who had got lost in the desert - so we were a bit worried for a while that we would be stuck in the salt hostel forever, but we did get a new driver the next day, who got us scared again by dropping us off at the toilets in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and then disappearing with the truck and all our bags...but it turned out he´d "just" gone to the hospital (round the corner) to pick up some medicine...and that turned out not to be so serious either.
Anyway, apart from those bits, the actual sights were amazing. We saw flamingoes, the laguna verde - green because of the copper or cobalt in it I think, a pinky-red lagoon, where the flamingoes fed on the pink algae, volcanoes, geysers of boiling mud, stone "trees", and, of course, salt flats, which were huge and carried on for miles. We also went through a desert named after Salvador Dalí because of the way it looked. We got a lot for our money. We ended up in Chile, in a small border town called San Pedro. It is SO HOT here, really a big difference from Bolivia, as La Paz was so wet and miserable most of the time, and the Salt flats trip took us up to 4900m in the mountains, where it was pretty cold, although it was sunny. So I´m sweating in this Internet café waiting for my bus to Santiago which leaves in a couple of hours. Everyone I´ve asked about Chile has said "it´s expensive" and I was desperate to know what else was good about it, but I spoke to a German girl today who is studying in Santiago, and she said pretty much the same: although there are beautiful places to go, it seems that you might as well go to Argentina to see similar things at a fraction of the price. It really is a shock to come from Bolivia, the poorest country in the continent, to Chile where the prices are just like English prices, which I guess isn´t so shocking in itself, but for me on a budget it is, so I´m going to travel through Chile fast. Also, the German girl said Santiago is full of people trying to be western, and lots of them actually are German or American, so that´s another reason to hurry through...Anyway, hope you like the photies, of course the photos don´t do justice to the place, but it really was a trip worth going on. Lots of driving on bumpy ground, but we were able to plug in an ipod so had good music part of the way. BTW, warning: ipods break at around 4800m, but as long as you don´t go higher, they can come back to life when you get lower down. Up to 6000m though, and they break properly.
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