San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni

On the first day of the tour we crossed the border into Bolivia which was the easiest crossing we had.  At the border we met our driver Pedro who spoke no English but we were lucky as a Swiss guy who was in the 4 wheel drive with us had good Spanish.  There were 6 of us in total in the car in total, us 3 Irish a girl from Poland and two other guys one from Switzerland and the other from Holland.  On the first day we saw some lagoons and got to stop off at a hot bath which was a pool outside on the side of the road (this was the highlight of the day).  We also passed the highest point on the tour the first day nearly 5000 metres above sea level.  I experienced some altitude sickness but was not badly affected (just some tightness around my forehead).  The scenery was ok but once you've been in a desert for a while its the same thing over and over.  On our first night we stayed a a place up in the mountains where there was just a few buildings, no hot water and it was very cold at night even with my sleeping bag and blankets over me.  On the second day the highlight was the geo thermal vents, we also stopped at a bolder formation and some more lagoons, the second day quickly got boring.  We also got to stop at a train graveyard where old steam locomotives where just left to rust.  The most interesting thing about the second day was that we got to see it snow in the desert.  We arrived in Uyuni that evening where we were staying at a hotel where we were collected for our third day of our tour to the salt flats.  The salt flats were out of this world, they had been recently flooded so we couldn't go the the island on the flats.  It was amazing how even with so much water on the salt how it stayed rock hard.  We had lunch on the salt flats and also got to see an old abandoned hotel on the flats.  The food we got on the tour was good with breakfast, lunch and dinner included.  The area around the flats and Uyuni is basically a garbage dump with trash everywhere.

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