Bolivian 4wd Tour

Uyuni is a tiny town in Bolivia where most vehicles are Toyota Landcruisers. It is one of 2 towns that operate 4wd tours around the Bolivian highlands and famous Salar de Uyuni (the salt flats). The most popular tour is a 3 day experience which we signed up for. The salt flats are massive! and because of this allow you to take the silly perspective photos. These were far more enjoyable to review rather than take as we soon learnt that the locals had the art far better mastered. After a day driving with little sense of movement we spent our first night in a salt hostel on the edges of the flats. All the walls, bed frames and chairs are made entirely of salt bricks. We were served llama steaks for lunch and all were fairly pleased with the taste. Rhi was excited to learn that the Bolivian's are major exporters of quinoa and we saw being grown on the sides of the road and through most of the areas we drove on the first day. The second day you head deeper into the highlands enjoying the more challenging 4wdrving and varying scenery along with some colourful lagoons. The girls were excited to see lots of wild flamingo's at the many lagoons. We stayed the 2nd night in a little village before our last and longest 3rd day. An early wakeup was soon followed by a sharp climb to our highest (5000m) point of the drive where we walked amongst the geysers - volcanic boiling mud pools. Shortly after we spent half an hour bathing in volcanic hot springs not far away. After another (green) lagoon we headed back to Uyini via some amazing scenery. Paul (one of the dutch couple making up our group on 5) and i did some decent rock climbing as you'll see in the photos during one of our last stops near a 90km long earth rise resulting from tectonic plate movements a long time ago.
An amazing 3 days of scenery, 4wdriving, joking with our Spanish translator (who liked to be known as Robert deNiro), showering with a hose and enjoying the great food cooked for us along the way we arrived back in Uyuni and organised ourself for the trip up to Peru. For all those travelling to Uyuni - some good pre/post salt flat tour fest (probably the most western-ised food in Uyuni) can be found at Minuteman pizza. A guy from Boston married a Bolivian lady and decided to start a pizza shop - a fab result - delicious pizza...we tried 6 different types!!!