Salt Flats, Day 3 - Day 4

Chris woke up with the larks on the 3rd morning, bringing me coffee in bed (in our 7 bed dorm)...the korean girl very jealous telling her boyfriend to take note!! It was to be a day of lakes!! After visiting the Rock Valley, bizarre shaped rocks scattered across sandy desert, we went on to 4 lakes! These lakes are home to hundreds of pink flamingoes, very strange seeing all these birds at above 4000m meters with such barren landscape all around. But once you´ve seen one lake you´ve seen them all, so it did start to drag after a bit! We had lunch in middle of big dusty desert before heading onto another rock formation, this one looked like a tree, and then another lake! Lake Colorado was pretty spectacular with such an assortment of colours and yet again more flamingos. We slept that night at a little hut in middle of nowhere where it was damn cold! And to make matters worse I seemed to contract a stomach bug and spent all night running to throw up in the outdoor lavatory!! This was possibly the worst night of my life, made worse by our 4am wake up call, not that I was asleep, but I definitely didn´t want to be getting in the back of any jeep, bouncing neverendingly over rocky ground!!! So with sick bag on my lap and toilet roll to hand (it was coming out both ends!) we set off to see some thermal gysers....they looked quite spectacular but feeling rough as hell and the temperature still below zero I wasn't going to get out for a closer look! After this was breakfast and a chance to bathe in a thermal springs....neither of which appealed to me, and Chris seemed to be more interested in hot chocolate & banana cake than stripping off to his board shorts in -5 degrees! But with the sun coming up and starting to warm the air, I began to regain a bit of life in order to get out of the jeep to enjoy our 6th and final lake (with stunning reflection of the mountain behind), before making the final journey to the Chilean border and the end of our trip!