Extremes of Temperature

The next morning, we woke up at 5am to see the sunrise. We saw 300˚ geizers in the snow and our tour guide warned us that 3 people had died last year because they didn´t know hot it was. One of the people who died was a fellow tour guide who tried and failed to save a dopey German.  Bearing that in mind, it feels really inappropriate that we are grinning idiotically in this photo and I apologize if including it is bad taste.

A few members of our group decided that it would be a good idea to test out the hot springs when it was -5 degrees outside! 

This is the mountain in the background

This is the hot baths

And here´s the ice heart in the foreground; and steam from the baths in the background.

This place wasn´t only heat-extreme but colour-extreme. The red lake wasn´t as red as usual when we saw it because it´s winter here and a lot of the bacteria die. But come summer, it´s practically bloody.

We got really close to the flamingos, which are the only creatures that can survive the acidity of the lake. There so are no fish and if you bathe in the sulfury bit of the lake, your hair falls out!

By contrast, the next place we stopped was like a desert.

The greenest thing we saw for hours was some bulbous moss

We felt like little kids in a giant playground

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