Salt flat tour, Day 1 - Day 2

Having been told our jeep was leaving at 9.30 we headed into the centre of town for empanadas (breakfast,south american style-pasties to you and me) visted the post office and then returned to our hostel awaiting the start of our trip... However it wasn´t as straight forward as that our jeep was parked about 300m away from our hostel and when we finally found it and got in they told us that instaed of the 7 people that normally travel we were going to be 10 for the 8 hour journey, BRILLANT!! The journey started off not to bad stopping at various landmarks and crazy rock formations, this was however short lived as after the first 2 hours we powered ahead stopping only for lunch (ham and cheese sandwiches, of course) and for random photos of graveyards and other shitty things, compliaments of our fellow travellers (happy snappers)...Arrived in Uyuni and had our tea (spag bol) not very exciting but filled a hole. Turns out rest of our group are on different route so our guide booked us onto a different tour with another company for next 3 days (its a long story) but we have no idea what this company is about..very annoying not to know what is going on!!! Went to bed in our sickly smelling room awaiting tomorrows events...
We got very poor sleep due to the uncertaintly of if our tour exsists and were up at first light to go searching for this new company turned out it was just across the street but that was the easy part,they had lost the key to 1 of the padlocks and were busy trying to force open their roller shutters we stood and watched for 15 mins wondering what the hell we'd gotten into, eventually they gained access thanks to the help of a random passer by (must of being a cat burglar on his way home..) Good news was thay had heard of us and the booking stood they even sorted out free breakfast for us at our hostel which was very unexpected.
At 10.30am we pilled into the jeep, us, 3 koreans and 2 germans....the conversation we soon realised was going to be very limited!!! first stop was at salt processing plant...well an old mans shed with big fire to dry salt and victorian looking grinder, turns out they produce salt for all over bolivia (no sign of any method of cleaning the salt). We even committed our first tourist crime and bought a 'souvenir' 2 candlestick holders made of salt...having only 2 weeks left in S america seems to be making us crazy!!! From here we went onto the main part of our trip, the Uyuni Salt Flats, a huge salt desert/lake which thanks to recent rainfall had a foot of water covering it! But didn't stop our driver ploughing right on through!! The pictures speak for themselves (when we eventually get them on here!), we lunched right in the middle at this bizarre Salt Hotel (where everything including the building itself and the furniture is made of salt), nothing but whiteness for miles around! Very surreal and cool experience, much better than we had anticipated.
To complete the first days activities we stopped off at shitty train cemetary and small mining village in middle of nowhere, before arriving at an equally small town where we slept the 2nd night...so far so good!