¨Äsk the Leyland Brothers¨ Bolivian style

We drove about 2 mins out of San Pedro to the first border stop.. drove about 1/2 hr on a nice paved road before we turned off onto a dirt track, towards a building into the middle of nowhere. The very unofficial building was in fact the Bolivian border control. This was our first land border crossing of the trip and it seemed very informal to say the least! Next to the ¨customs office¨we saw rows of old landcruisers lined up with drivers standing by... the ¨facilities¨at the border control were to squat behind a burned out bus.. welcome to Bolivia!
After a quick cuppa we strapped our backpacks on the roof alongside large fuel containers. And it was off on our 3 day adventure to Uyuni via the Salar de Uyuni these massive salt flats.. our car consisted of Alison and Neil from London who had arrived in Chile via India, SE Asia, Aust and N.Z... they kept us amused with tales from their travels over the last 7 months.. also on board are Thomas and Silka (sorry if I spell it wrong) from Germany, Thomas was our professional photographer http://www.thomas-rathay.de while Silka was our ever patient interpreter as the guide only spoke Spanish.
Our driver and guide Flavio was quite a character, I think he is in training to become a world class rally driver, complete with overalls that look like they are from a F-1 pit crew.. the Landcruiser must have been at least from the 70´s but that didn´t prevent him from racing all the other cars at every opportunity. I´d say it has had at least a few engine rebuilds as none of the dashboard gauges worked, and it had an old 8-track player in the dash.. although he had installed a cassette deck and rocked out to some Musica de la Bolivia as he sped through the desert.

We departed the border, not on a road per se, but rather followed some car tracks in the desert, it was very Leyland Brothers... you could just sense the adventure!

A brief overview of the trip :
http://wikitravel.org/en/Salar_de_Uyuni
although we did it in reverse since we came from San Pedro in Chile.