We have a rather long drive ahead of us. We depart La Paz early and drive through the Altiplano to town of Oruro. The road here is in good repair and takes us through numerous little villages and fields of potatoes. Oruro is famous for its February carnival procession which has been declared by UNESCO the human patrimony heritage. Oruro used to be one of the richest towns in Bolivia in its better days, as it was the centre of the mining area rich at tin. Those glory days are long gone, as prices of tin had plummeted, now it is doted with little smelters where Indians are trying to make living. We have our lunch here after which we take a short detour to the Cala Cala rock paintings, which are easily accessible by a little used track which passes through some typical Altiplano scenery and villages. The painting themselves are viewed from a wooden platform which has been constructed with some foreign aid to protect the paintings and also to give the local community some little income from the occasional visitors. After a short tour of the paintings we return to the main road and continue south along the shores of Lake Poopo, the lake can only be seen in a far distance as the new road was built on a higher ground further from the lake. Eventually we turn off the main road which continues to Potosi and we have several couple of hundred kilometres of gravel road travel ahead of us.
Towards the evening we arrive to Uyuni, the gateway to Salar de Uyuni.
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