Ready Salted

Exciting times! We were travelling, but not on a bus, not a coach even, but a train! Sad isn't it, but after four months of buses, sitting on a train was very exhilarating... honestly. In fact it was doubly exciting as we were about embark on one of the number one adventures in South America, the Bolivian Salt Flats. The view from the train was of a stark landscape with nothing much but the occasional tree to break up views of dusty hills silhouetted by the setting sun.

We arrive at Uyuni station, grab our bags and head off for dinner and a hostel. Making quite a lot of noise whilst dragging our bags on the bumpy pavement Priya stops dead in front of me and in turn almost creating a luggage pile up. I'm not angry as I can see something's up, she looks petrified! I look around to see what could be the matter when I see something with it's head in the bin. Something BIG... and black. In the darkness I can't quite make out what it could be. All I can think is panther! It stops rummaging it's head in the bin and looks at us. It's not a panther, but a dog The biggest bloody dog we've ever seen! We decide it's ok to carry on, but due to the jack hammer style noise coming from our wheels this mammoth canine shadows us almost until we get to the hostel. It goes without saying we were more than pleased to get indoors, limbs intact and attached.

After the coldest, most uncomfortable nights sleep ever we made our way to our tour guide for the start of our two day tour of the Salt Flats. I won't go into detail about the previous night but to say that we were sleeping on squeaky beds was like saying that Conchord used to make a bit of a noise! Although possibly a little less than the beds we were lying on. When we arrived we were greeted by a very enthusiastic young man who as it turned out didn't speak any English. He was to be our guide. To accompany us were an Irish couple and an Aussie, who although were all very friendly, didn't speak any Spanish at all. This meant to get the full experience of the tour, thus to understand what was going on, the whole party of six were relying on mine and Priya's very basic knowledge of Spanish to get by. This was going to be a long two days...

The itinerary for the tour was as follows:

• Train graveyard

• Visit a salt village

• Walk on a coral island

• Sleep in a salt hotel.

The next day:

• Walk up a volcano

• Leisurely drive home.

I love a good bit of adventure, so this sounded amazing, I mean a train graveyard! To be honest if you put any word before graveyard i'd be up for it... tank graveyard, wrestler graveyard, cheese graveyard. They all sound worth a look i'm sure you agree. As it happens it was as good as I hoped. Lots of rusting, rotting trains in dusty dessert, we could have spent hours taking photos, but only had ten minutes unfortunately. Still there was plenty good stuff ahead and it was a great drive. There was nothing around, but the occational Alpaca family and dozens of dust tornados. Not dangerous of course, but still an awesome sight to behold.

After a quick stop off at the salt village, which I think was only added so tourists could buy souvenirs, we arrived at the coral island, Fish Island. A bizarre sight in a world of nothingness. A huge mound of land covered in the tallest cacti you will find anywhere in the world. Even stranger are the rocks, they are fossilized coral from when it was a sea. We stopped here for lunch and enjoyed basking in the glorious sunshine on this prehistoric freak of nature.

The salt flats themselves are very eerie and blindingly white as far as you can see. We all posed for the requisite weird photos and felt very parched in the baking heat.

All that was left for the day was the inevitable sunset and our first ever night's sleep in a room made from salt. Frisbee in hand we all left the hotel early for the sunset and we played as the sun burnt out in the distance and the stars began to come out. We felt like we'd found something very special, with only the flamingos in the nearby sulphur lake to share our secret.

The next day we woke up early and took a short ride to the Tunupa volcano. This volcano was sold to us without warning or concern, so we understandingly presumed that it would be a relatively easyish climb. As it turned out it was the toughest this I have ever done. If you combine all four days of the Inca Trail and the chuck in the Three Peaks Challenge and fit them into half a day you'd be somewhere close to how difficult this climb was. It was mainly the altitude that was the problem. The air was so thin that it was difficult to get your breath and thus claimed two casualties within half an hour. The second thing was after three hours of hiking you get to the last part, a steady half mile of sliding rock at 45 degrees. Imagine walk the travelator on Gladiators for half a mile! Every time I put my foot for my next step it would slide back almost to the beginning again. The views from the top were incredible though and it's an fantastic feeling when you finish something so vast. Would I do it again though? No, but I can say I did it and feel pretty bloody proud, I think!