were just hanging around and having silly photos taken on the salt, but our group was more adventurous and headed off for a walk around the island. It was just nice to be walking again, believe me, sitting down in an old off roading vehicle for 3 days solid took its toll on the old bones and bum!

We headed off and had the strangest sensation of the salt beneath our feet. Wow! It confused your senses even more when you were walking on the stuff. It crunched almost like compacted snow and without sunglasses you’d have been truly snow blinded. Looking away from the island was white as far as the eye could see and it would be totally disorientating to a untrained driver. It would be incredibly easy to get lost in an environment such as this as horizons dissolved into mirages and distances became impossible to judge. The patterns in the salt were fabulous, they were hexagonal shaped with little

ridges separating the different hexagons. It tasted salty and it was salty, in fact there is more salt there than you are ever likely to see in your life.

Wow we’d seen some sights over the last 3 days but this place really did top the bill!! I wondered whether people who walked to the South Pole ever did training here as I would imagine the landscape to be very similar. Endless days of nothing but white with the odd distant object peeping out of an unidentifiable horizon. The only difference would be the temperature, but other than that I’m sure it must be pretty similar. As we walked around the far side of the island we saw a solitary tent pitched. Now that takes camping to a new level and boy what a level it would be!! If we ever return to Bolivia then I would try my best to have a night camping in this wonderful place. The clearness of the skies would give you unprecedented views of those