Framedlight

Oh the joys of digital photography! I took so many pictures on our salt flat tour it has taken an age to sort and process them. This is the problem with tours that are not  photographic. You might get only 15 minutes at a location, so the tendency is to shotgun the area in case you miss something . There is simply no time to absorb and digest the information in front of you. You probably would not believe this, with the number of photographs I am posting, but I use the blog as a small 'sorting agent'. I find that seeing my photographs in a different location helps to distance them and make me more objective.  Deleting photographs is so difficult. After lunch we drove for about an hour through the Siloli desert till we reached some strange rocks, carved by the wind in to weird shapes. We had been alone in the desert until then, but the rocks drew in a host of four wheel drive vehicles and their tourist occupants who were busy climbing over the stones to get good pictures of ...

On the second day of our Salt flat tour we got up after a night in the Salt Hotel near San Juan. The bed had a base of salt, but did have a mattress and we slept in our down sleeping bags as it got very cold. Breakfast was good and we had pancakes to fortify us for our 7.30 start. The salt was now mixed with the sand and grit of the Salar de Chiguana. We were not that far out when we came across the railway line. Pauli asked us to walk across while he took the Land Cruiser across. I don't know if this was because the thing would not have got across with us in it (it was a fairly old specimen) or that he thought it safer for us if we walked. There was no road to speak of - only tracks in the sand. I would not have wanted to be driving this on my own. Soon the great Ollague volcano came in site. This is situated on the Bolivia/Chile border and towers to over a mile above the surrounding plain. There is the remains of a road running up it which rises to 5,650m ...