20TH APRIL

Day three began much like day two - with an early start and a crap breakfast!! After loading the jeep we drove the short distance to Sol de Manana. It still wasn’t bright red like in the brochures, but it was still a magnificent sight, bathed in the early morning light with a backdrop of huge cone volcanoes and with thousands of resident James Flamingos. We hung around for a short while checking out the lake and the flamingos before heading into the Desertio de Sildli, a vast expanse of nothingness which just seemed to stretch out forever in front of us.

After a while we arrived at the day’s next attraction, the stone tree. As you can see from the photo, this thing is pretty self explanatory. It’s made of stone, and it looks like a tree!! It was in fact part of a series of mad stone formations just sitting there in the middle of the desert. Another surreal feature to

add to the ever growing list!!

The next few hours was spent travelling north through the desert stopping on the way at the many multicoloured and bizarre lagunas which are dotted around this part of the world. I’m afraid that I can’t remember the details of each one individually, but as a group they were simply amazing to see. Each one is coloured from some weird and wonderful mineral which is the result of all the volcanic activity around here. I really can’t stress enough how incredible the scenery was on this day, the towering volcanoes along with the strange lakes in the desert, and the wonderful high altitude skies just made for a totally other worldly experience. We hadn’t seen skies like this since we were in Tibet. There is definitely something about being at high altitude which makes the clouds do things that they just don’t do back on Planet E