a continuar

hola otra vez

very sorry my last blog was so factual and not funny enough for you (siobhan). i´m afraid today´s may be quite the same, but i will try harder

sunday
up early had breakfast in our shelter. saw more lagunas and more flamingoes, became slightly blase about them. saw some vicunas, which are related to llamas and alpacas - they are bigger and more golden coloured and very thickly furred. i got bitten behind my ear by a big fat fly, but nothing serious came of it.
had lunch, then carried on driving in the SUVs. i fell asleep and dreamt i was driving along in halifax, by the halifax bank. am obviously a little bit homesick for my local bank. said some more stupid things to the driver like que camino - what a road, and llamas corriendo - llamas running. pretty stupid but it´s good to practise spanish.
that night we stayed in another shelter, in a town called bella vista, which really did have a good view. played basketball with a local little girl and nearly died from running around at altitude. i went to bed early as was tired and slightly sick of being in el grupo. the power ran out at 9pm in this shelter so it was candles after that. some people went for a walk at midnight and thought they heard a ghost puma near them.

monday
went to the salt flats. these are really amazing - it used to be an ocean, millions of years ago, that evaporated and left all the salt behind. in the summer they are a big lake again from the rain, and that evaporates again in the winter when the rain stops and they become salt flats again. very eerie, and so huge that you can´t see the horizon. i will post some photos at some point, as it is hard to describe in words.
we met 3 cyclists from france who were cycling all round the world. i asked them lots of questions, and was in love with them all. their website is http://roulezjeunesse.unblog.fr/ it´s in french so i can´t understand it.
we visited a salt hotel too, it was made of salt. then a train graveyard, helie you would have loved it. sadly my camera ran out whilst there, but i got a lot of good photos already.
we arrived in uyuni later on, and i read out a little farewell speech i had written to our SUV drivers. they didn´t seem to appreciate it but i´m glad i did it even though i looked like una idiota. here it is (final version, having been corrected by Juan)

muchas gracias por llevarnos alrededor de la tierra de la sal
ustedes son los mejores conductores en todo de Bolivia, y tambien en todo del mundo
esperamos que ustedes se divirtieron con los pasajeros inglesos, alemanos y canadiensos en sus camionetas
amamos bolivia

then had our best afternoon so far this trip, perhaps even so far in my whole life of 29.5 years. sat in the park drinking whisky and laughing our heads off, and taking photos of the cute children (and worrying we were going to get arrested), went to the bank and got money out and felt very clever as nobody else did this and the one ATM in uyuni was broken. we saw a dog who looked like he was waiting to get money out too which made us laugh. then went on the ferris wheel at the end of town and screamed our heads off and drank more and more whisky and took photos and videos. nobody else was screaming, it was a tiny ferris wheel. then went to the jewellers to mend my new ring which i´d broken at the train graveyard. had very funny time trying to make ourselves understood by him. danced round a traffic cone in the middle of the street and videod it. basically behaved like tourists who were drunk.
then had to go back to hotel for a briefing, then had pizza. i don´t remember any of this happening but it definitely did as we had some leftover pizza for lunch the next day.

tuesday
bus all day from uyuni to potosi. had to apologise for most of the morning to el grupo for being such drunkards yesterday. amazingly didn´t have hangovers. some bolivian women were standing on the bus all the way (around 6 hours), and one was holding a baby, so i offered to hold it for her, and she let me. i was hoping she would forget i had the baby as it was very cute, but after a while she started to cry (the baby not the mother), so i had to give her back. laura had a slightly older baby on her knee too, but he was a bit unresponsive, even to the spider man finger puppet we showed him. we thought maybe he was blind, or deaf, or autistic. the children here are so well behaved, and grown up, i think maybe it is because life is harsher over here and there is less fun to be had, so they grow up quicker. they are like little people rather than children.
got to potosi, which is famous for it´s silver, it used to be where all the coins in bolivia were minted, but it has since been overmined and is now very poor and dusty. we went out for dinner, but were tired and didn´t have much to say to each other, so nothing to report there. someone was sick as she ate a steak and then a whole toblerone, which made me laugh.

going on a city tour of le paz, where we arrived this morning now, so i will update more soon.
thanks for all emails, sorry i´m not replying, but internet is really really slow here, so i need to wait until i´ve got a lot of free time. xx