Day 24 -Across the desert to the start of the salt flats at Uyuni!
 
Today saw us boarding our local bus for the remote 8 hour journey across the desert to a small town basically in the middle of nowhere -Uyuni! After a bad start on my behalf in that the bus had double booked lots of people, was trying to jam local families down the aisle on the floor, the windows were stuck and the door between us and the driver was jammed and wouldn't open, not a good start for yours truly! A few tears later (sorry Kamuka guys!) and holding the door open with our feet so the driver couldn't shut it, we were finally on our way .
 
Within 5 minutes we had left the paved road and were onto a dirt/sand track and basically that was the journey for the next 8 hours!!! Hot, bumpy, remote, winding round the rocky mountain scenery with not a lot of civilisation but a whole heap of dust! Ads had managed to strain himself opening a window for me so for most of the journey I spent holding the curtain back and forth to stop all the sand coming in! The driver did amazingly as at times we were skidding in tyre deep sand which easily you could have lost control over. Every now and again we would pass random shacks, the harshness of the existence living here really hit home when I witnessed an old lady sat literally in the dirt trying to salvage any food that may have grown from the few seeds she had planted. How anything grows or lives here I will never know! Despite its harshness it still was beautiful in scenery but it made you see why so much of Bolivia is uninhabited......
 
Ahead, after 2 'natural loo stops' (for Hayley and I!) in the prickly desert bushes, we could finally see our destination and gleaming behind it was a white plane which if you were mistaken could have been snow! We were both so excited, the salt flats have been a dream for such a long time and to finally be close to that was just wicked!
 
Our hotel was a lot nicer this time and to make life even better the American guy and his Chilean wife that owned it did the best pizza's and chocolate fudge cake ever, this was heaven! Stuffing our faces we all feasted on way too much food for words with lots of pizza breakfast boxes being ordered then a tad shattered collapsed to bed!