We got up the morning of the second day of our Bolivian safari and rushed to get dressed and packed in the cold.  After a quick breakfast, we waited as Matias loaded up the car, watching a funny episode of a sheep trying to sneak food as the people who ran the hotel kept chasing it out of the kitchen. 

Our first stop was Arbol de Piedra, otherwise know as Stone Tree.  Seemingly for no reason right in the middle of the desert, these tree-like stones jut up from the ground.  They look as if they grew up from  the soil, but they also have that carved-by-water look to them.  We’re still not sure what formed them.  

Lauren fell in love with Stone Tree, crawling all over the rocks and finding new angles for new photos.  It was pretty cold, though, and I headed back to the LandCruiser to warm up.  Everyone else was already there, also avoiding the cold, but Lauren was having too much fun.  I almost had to go out and drag her back to the vehicle.

On our way to see more lakes, Matias pointed out the Mountain of Seven Colors.  I’m not sure our photos do it justice because it was a bit dusty, but you can clearly make out all the different colors on the mountains.

The rest of the morning was filled with lakes.  I was getting a little lake-fatigued at this point (I think everyone else was too because by the last lake, no one actually got out of the LandCruiser to take photos — we just rolled down the window), but we did get to see some amazing wildlife.

The first Lake was Laguna Honda, a white lake covered in ice.  Matias let us out at the top of a cliff that we walked down , meeting him and the LandCruiser at the bottom.  Laguna Charkkota was next — blue and covered with ice.

It was at Laguna Hediona where we finally spotted flamingos close up. Lauren and I had seen them from a distance the day before at Lake Colorado, and we had seen lots of Flamingos in Africa, but we had never seen any this close up.  We got a few shots and started leaving when we realized that we had a better angle, so we made the ever-patient Matias stop again so we could take some more photos and see them even closer.

At the next lake, Laguna Canapa, we spotted a fox.  Instead of running away when he (she?) realized we spotted him, he came running towards us and posed for photos. 

Much of the rest of the day, Marcus warned us, was going to be a really rocky road called Pasita Tuntun.  While most of the “roads” we had been on were just dirt tire tracks, here Marcus had to engage the Landcruisers 4×4 capabilities and slowly roll the vehicle over large rocks.  I had visions of our stuck-in-the-crater episode in Africa, but it never got quite that bad.

For lunch, Matias stopped at another rock field, similar to Stone Tree.  We all went exploring the area, trying to get a good shot of Volcano Ollague.  The volcano is half in Chile and half in Bolivia, and one half of it (not sure which) was actively spewing lots of smoke. (Our camera doesn´t have a great zoom, but you can see the smoke starting to come up out of the left side).

Lunch was easier said than done, as fierce winds made it almost impossible to eat the picnic Matias had packed.  Our tuna had blown away, so a lot of our lunch ended up being rice with mayonnaise (yep, all the food ain’t so glorious…)

The rest of the afternoon was a long and scenic drive towards our ultimate destination — the Uyuni Salt Flats.  Around 2pm, we crossed a railroad tracks, officially entering salt flat territory, although we wouldn’t go exploring it until the next day.

That night we would be staying in a hotel entirely made of salt before getting up early in the morning to watch the sunrise over the infamous 4000 square miles of Bolivian salt flats.  Lauren or I were really excited - everything we had seen so far had already made the trip worth it, though the salt flats was the reason we had come in the first place.