Butch Cassidy, flamingos and a lot of salt

Having passed the border crossing between Argentina and Bolivia with ease (apart from trying to lift our backpacks in the altitude), we carried on to a little town called Tupiza in the south of Bolivia. The town of Tupiza itself isn't that spectacular but it's the surrounding mountains and scenery that really made it worth a visit. . Legend has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their end at the hands of the Bolivian army near Tupiza and the place certainly had a wild west feel about it. With this in mind, we decided to do a spot of horse riding. We walked to the ranch and when we got there we were given leather chaps and cowboy hats - a good start already! It was just the two of us with a guide and we got to ride out and see some amazing rock formations. The ride was around 3 hours though and by the end our bums had had enough riding for one day!

Tupiza was also the jumping off point for our 4 day tour in to the salt flats of Uyuni Bolivia (Salar de Uyuni). These are the largest salt flats in the world (basically a huge flat salt crust that goes on for miles) and not to be missed when in Bolivia. We set off early one morning in our 4-wheel drive, full of excitement for the trip ahead, little did we know what treats were in store. Along the way we got to see thousands of llamas, thousands more flamingos, lagoons of green, red, white and blue, some incredible space age scenery nicknamed "the Dali desert", a rock balanced like a tree and tons of cactuses. In fact, the salt flats was not even the most impressive thing we saw - although we did get to take some cool perspective pics when we got there. Our car did break down on at least three occasions where we had visions of ourselves being stranded in the weirdest of places but we had an excellent driver who always seemed to be able to fix any problem that could go wrong. Overall, the whole trip was one of the most incredible things we've ever done!