La Paz led into Oruro and Uyuni soon enough. Oruro is a dusty little mining town 3 hours south of La Paz. I actually enjoyed being stooped over for a half hour or so while exploring the mining museum, which turned out to be quite by surprise a fair bit of old disused mine shaft sunk into the hill behind the town. Amusingly enough the entrance to the mine is at the back of the nave of one of the best decorated modern catholic churches we've visited. Go the colourful murals of demons I say. Much more entertaining and educational than the ever bloodier icons of the north.

Oruro's other claim to fame is their entry in the inaugural 'Matt the Big Worst Restaurant Service' awards. For about half an hour we moved through a growing retinue of bewildered staff who couldn't work out that feeding one of us while charging (in advance) for two separate and different meals just wasn't up to code. In the end I had to reconstruct the entire itemized bill from memory before they realized that the half a meal they had gladly presented s with didn't quite make sense.

We moved onto Uyuni which is really just a staging post for tours into the incredible Salar de Uyuni. We managed to find a cheap as room in a really nice hotel without quite realizing that it was only half finished. After I had carefully balanced some polystyrene in the bathroom window and carefully checked the reflective properties of the window the bathroom became usable during daylight hours (as long as it wasn't overcast). We also picked up a pair of dutch bargaining buddies which proved to be essential when negotiating our way into a good Land Cruiser for the trip across the salar and the desert beyond to Chile.

The salar is a huge salt flat that once was a salt lake, that once was the ocean before it decided to move to the mountains. When we visited it a lot of the salt was covered with an inch or two of brine making for a truly incredible first day cruising across the salt with the landscape perfectly reflected to all sides. The desert beyond the salt flat appeared to be painted on by some rather gifted renaissance chaps for most of the way and was spotted with several large flamingo infested alkali rich lakes in a multitude of colours for variety. Honestly as far as messing with preconceptions by providing an amazingly scenic mostly lifeless desert to drive through, Bolivia does very well indeed.

At the border with Chile we transferred to a wee bus for the down hill decent to San Pedro and were greeted by Chilean customs officials who hadn't heard that they share a land border with three other countries and that fruit will smuggle itself without my or anyone else's help.