Jeep tour day 1 (Tuesday 6th September)

Wow today was super fun. Our initial apprehension about being in a car with 4 other people was soon out to rest as we met an amazingly fun couple from Germany (Sandra and Fabian) and a couple who lived just at the end of our road in the UK, but are now moving to Australia (Natalie and Tim). Our English speaking guide Oscar  was more the type of guide you might imagine would be on a tour led by faulty towers, but as he kept saying... "don't worry, you with Oscar".
We ventured onto the salt flats, this time by jeep, and soon realised just how vast they really are. We also spent a LOT of time with Sandra and Fabian jumping around like excited 3year olds and posing for all manner of creative photos (I shall leave these for you to enjoy once we manage to upload them!). An almost pleasant lunch was then followed by a trip to cactus island, where Oscar said he would leave us for 2 hours... What?!! I guess its a big island... We were up and down it in about 30minutes, but oh yeah baby, they have a shop that sells beer. Several cans and an hour and a half later we were ready to meet Oscar (he didn't bargain for that when he left us alone for 2hours did he!).
We had a few more stops, before watching the sunset. One being the magnificently named Pira Pira cave, which Oscar was delighted to tell us was so creatively named because it means... Wait for it... "hole hole". Now maybe it was the beer, or simply the way Oscar delivered it, but whilst we were stood in the very obvious hole hole, we found this incredibly amusing, I was almost in tears!
Nevertheless we managed to hold it together for a few more jumping photos in the sunset before going to our home for the night... The Salt Hotel as it had been advertised to us.
The Salt Hotel had moved down in the world as the day progressed. This morning it was the Salt hotel, by lynch time it had become the Salt Hostal, and now Oscar was fully ready to reveal its true status... "Its more of a Salt shelter really". It certainly lived up to its new title, but showed little evidence or its former two!
It did give us the chance to sample two bottles of Bolivian wine and run semi naked from the shower to our room! And the salt beds weren't too bad, if only we hadn't been instructed to be ready for breakfast at 6am, we might have had a decent night's sleep!