According to the Oxford English dictionary, the word 'adventure' means 'an unusual and exciting or daring experience'.
It sums up perfectly our travels in Bolivia - where even the most mundane tasks, such as catching a bus, turned out to be mini hair-raising adventures all of their own.
And we started our trip with probably the best adventure of them all - exploring the immense salt flats. Think a desert, but with pristine white salt instead of sand, that would fill half of Wales!
Anyway, the tour started with another spectacularly remote border crossing where we stopped for a picnic breakfast before splitting into groups and boarding our jeep.
With Jeferson behind the wheel, our superstar driver who also turned out to be a mechanic, DJ and photographer, we set off through the most beautiful scenery - sparkling lagoons, a desert area named for its likeness to a Salvador Dali painting, before stopping at hot springs for a cool-off and lunch.
We were already pretty high up at this point, but the next stop was for geysers sitting at nearly 5,000 metres (or over 16,000 feet high. That's only a couple of hundred metres off Base Camp Everest, or nearly four times the height of Ben Nevis!)
Lots of water, and our first try at chewing coca leaves, managed to stave off altitude sickness, although we did have some intense headaches. (Coca leaves are the leaf which cocaine is extracted from, but when chewed act as a mild stimulant which is legal, and very popular, in Bolivia).
We finished the day at Laguna Colorado, a striking, blood-red lake home to hundreds of pink flamingos. Absolutely stunning.
The second day started off with some rock climbing before another lagoon - flanked by a huge canyon - that was home to lots of llamas.
We finished off at a tiny town in the middle of nowhere where Freya was challenged to a game of chequers (played with different coloured beer tops) by a sweet six-year-old Bolivian girl called Grace.
The sweetness become ruthlessness on the board though, and it took the collective effort of most of our tour group to make sure Freya came away with a draw.
We spent the night in a hotel made of salt - which we confirmed by licking the walls - and headed to star gaze after dinner. They were just as amazing as in San Pedro de Atacama, and we got some cool pictures with the group - especially after discovering the 'ghost' effect.
We were up at 5am for our last day on the tour for our first glimpse of the actual salt flats. The mirror reflection from sunrise was stunning.
We then headed to drier land and had good fun taking the customary optical illusions photos on the massive white expanse.
The tour finished at a train cemetery, before we quickly hopped onto a bus heading to Potosi - known as the highest city in the world (sitting at 4,000 metres altitude).
The main reason to stop here is to explore the silver mines which, back in the 16th century, produced 60 per cent of the world's silver, and pretty much bankrolled the Spanish empire.
Although now greatly diminished, miners still work in pretty terrible, and toxic, conditions to extract zinc and the bit of silver remaining.
Workers normally start as a teenager, with the average age expectancy around 55 years. Freya and our travelling buddy Kayla loved the tour, and found the miners are super proud of their job.
After two days we headed over to Sucre, the White City, where we spent a week learning Spanish. With narrow, cobbled streets and colonial architecture that makes it feel more like a European city, we absolutely loved the place.
There were some amazing views of the city, and the local markets were our daily stop to pick up fresh fruit and saltenas (the Bolivian empanada).
The food was superb, with a highlight the Italian Monterossi restaurant - located in the front room of the owners' house!
We also checked out some 68 million year old real-life dinosaur footprints at Parque Cretacio. There are more than 5,000 dino footprints in the 1.2 kilometre-long limestone wall, which was pushed up into a hill when the Andes mountain range was formed.
Our next stop was the chilled-out expat town of Samaipata - after what turned out to be the bus journey from hell.
The road was so bumpy at times it literally threw us out of our seats as Bolivia's own Michael Schumacher whizzed us round cliff-edge roads - all in the pitch black (it was night and there were no street lights).
Just to top it all off, the bus kept breaking down every hour - cue loud clangs as the driver did DIY mechanics on the road side - oh, and the toilet was the side of the road, whenever Schumacher decided to make a pit stop.
After being dropped off on the side of a road at 4.30am in the morning, we walked the 15 minutes to Samaipata, and luckily our hostel let us kip inside for a few hours.
The sleepy town had great food options - the Mexican at La Cocina a particular highlight. We also did an amazing walking tour through nearby mountains, where we had condors circling just a few metres above our heads, before navigating a shallow river to three waterfalls.
After a short stopover in Cochabamba (not much to report here, apart from its own version of Christ the Redeemer) we arrived in La Paz. (Another bus journey from hell, this one exacerbated by a bloke who sat on the floor next to us and wailed for most the way, and stunk of urine.)
We met up with travelling buddies Dom and Steph and later headed to the Cholita wrestling. The Cholitas - Bolivia's indigenous women - fought WWE-style dressed in all their traditional gear.
They were also fond of some crowd interaction, with one women swigging a spectator's Coca-Cola before spitting it over her opponent, and another stealing a chair to hit over the head of the ref.
The local Bolivians absolutely loved it, and came armed with all sorts of gone-off fruit to lob at the wrestlers (a pair of white undies were even thrown in at one point). Possibly the most bizarre evening of entertainment we've ever experienced.
The following day we did the obligatory walking tour, which started outside the mad San Pedro Prison. Inmates have to buy their own houses inside the prison, and can live inside with their families.
The prison has its own economy and at one point was the biggest exporter of cocaine in Bolivia (if you haven't already, read the book Marching Powder about an English drug smuggler who got locked up there, it's loco).
Unfortunately, the tourist trips (organised by inmates who bribed the guards to let travellers inside) have now been stamped out.
We also walked through the Witches' Market, which sold potions for every ailment under the sun, and baby llama skeletons which we learnt are used as part of religious rituals to ask 'Mother Earth' for more wealth.
I also later saw the San Pedro drug trade in action. A see-through bag containing a white substance was lobbed over the prison wall into the street outside, landing right next to us with a thud, before a shady bloke who had been standing on the street rushed over, picked it up, and fled.
One of our final days in La Paz was spent hurtling down the infamous Death Road - where an estimated 300 people died every year. The 70-kilometre dirt-track road starts at 15,400 feet and winds around terrifying drops.
It's now closed to normal traffic, but cycling down the road has become one of the most popular adventure activities in the country.
It was literally a white-knuckle ride, with floating mist often shrouding our vision for some points (not a bad thing sometimes, as it meant you couldn't see the sheer drops), and even having to navigate waterfalls en-route.
But we all made it down OK, with just three falls (including me hitting a huge rock and being thrown over the handlebars, luckily nowhere near the edge of the road, and no damage done).
It had been a few days, so time for the next journey from hell - a hair-raising taxi ride from La Paz over more mountain-hugging dirt tracks to Rurrenabaque, the gateway to the Amazon. The driver was literally going full pelt despite dust from the car ahead meaning we couldn't see a thing.
Somehow arriving safely, we booked onto the Pampas tour, basically spending our days sailing down the river spotting the abundant wildlife.
On day one alone we saw a sloth (they are amazing), squirrel monkeys, a caiman, tonnes of birds, including the bizarre Hoatzin, and pink dolphins.
After arriving at our riverside lodge, we also saw an alligator - lurking just inches away from our rickety abode (which also had gaps between the floorboards).
We saw an amazing sunset too, before the dark came in and an unimaginably huge army of mosquito swarmed over us. The mutant flies could even bite through two layers of clothes, and copious amounts of repellent spray.
Day two we spent in wellies looking for more wildlife, seeing a baby anaconda and a huge tarantula, before a spot of piranha fishing.
Our last day was spent in the rank, murky-brown river water (which also had a layer of oil on top from all the boat fuel) swimming with the pink dolphins.
When I say swimming, I mean us all clinging onto a life ring absolutely terrified as the dolphins weaved around us (we could only see them when they came to the surface), some choosing to nibble our toes, while others playfully splashed water over our heads. Not exactly what you dream about as a child!
One too many horrific road journeys meant we opted to fly back to La Paz on the smallest plane I've ever been on, flying from the smallest 'airport' I've ever seen.
But the views of the Amazon region, and the huge mountains near La Paz were stunning.
We hopped onto a bus after the flight and spent our last days in Copacabana, next to the world's highest navigable lake, Titicaca.
Bolivia surpassed all our expectations - one big adventure we won't forget anytime soon. Next up, Peru.
