Even more flamingos!

At this point, our exact itinerary for the four days blends together in my mind, so I can't guarantee that these pictures are in the proper order. Looking back, I still can't believe that places like this exist. Such amazing mixes of colors and patterns.

We saw a few groups of bikers biking on incredibly tough 'roads' in the middle of the day at altitude. Wow.

We knew before we started the tour that we were going to places with a lot of salt (hooray!), but what we didn't expect was when our guide pointed to the white-powder-covered-ground around the lake and explained to us that it was borax. Good thing I didn't head down there and try to eat it. Even though we were in a national park, there is one village that's allowed to harvest a certain amount of borax per year. When the land became a national park, it would have essentially ruined any way these small villages would have of supporting themselves if they restricted the mineral harvesting entirely. Similar cases were pointed out to us at a couple other locations on the tour.

Borax extraction

A really cool marsh the road passed through. Its funny to think that a massive canyon can have such humble beginnings.

This specific type of grass reminded me of the hair of those little troll dolls that were popular in the '90's

Laguna Colorado is full of plankton and algae that have red photosynthesizing pigments. The soil at the bottom of the lake is also red. Flamingos flock to this lake to feed on the lil guys in the water and have adapted to the high alkalinity of the water. They use their beaks to filter the water from their beaks. (They make this really weird swishing sound when they do it.)

I just really love the patterns in this one

The wind was blowing up big clouds of borax

This guy isn't pink because he's a teenager. 

The one that's all puffed up didn't like anyone to get near him.

Most of the flamingos were super afraid of humans, but this one didn't seem to care at all!!

After getting to see a few flamingos in Chile and being SO EXCITED, many people said "wait til you get to Bolivia." Now you can see what they meant. They were everywhere! We also got to go to this crazy group of volcanic rocks in the middle of the desert. The most famous of these is the Stone Tree. On our way to the Stone Tree, we slowed down to take pictures of this cute little fox. He came strolling up to the jeep, and Augustina tossed him some crackers. I wonder how many jeeps he manages to get food from.

Noms plz.

See the tree?

We even had time to crawl around on some of the other huge rocks

The view from the top of one of the rocks

More rock photos

In the afternoon, we got to visit some hot springs. They were the perfect temperature and we showed up later in the afternoon as all the tour groups were leaving. We had the whole thing to ourselves. Yessssssss.

Hot springs with a view

Checking out the mirador for a semi-active volcano, Ollague.

That evening we stayed in a salt hotel! Everything was made of salt. Well, the roof wasn't. But the walls, floors, tables, chairs and bedframes were. Nom nom. I mean, no... we'd never lick the wall. Thats just gross. We also cracked open our Four Loko and shared it round. God they're horrible. That's the unanimous facial expression whens someone tries it for the first time. Ugh.

A bit of advice from the Stone Tree