Our hostel was in a pretty rough part of town near the bus terminal. Gareth was spat on (apparently, it is supposed to be an "accident" and whilst the spitter tries to wipe off the spit, his accomplice will snatch your bag) - Gareth heeded the warnings from the Lonely Planet and from Martin, and having being forewarned, Gareth and Sian just walked quickly on. I have never celebrated Halloween in my life, but we needed an excuse for a night out, so w...

Also known as the White City, Sucre is the official capital of Bolivia, although La Paz is the financial and commercial center. I can understand the alternate name - the historical city is primarily made up of beautiful white colonial buildings. We visited Parque Cretacico which has the world's largest repository of dinosaur footprints, dating about 65 million years old. It is funny that it is such a boy-girl thing - the boys were fascinated by the footprints an...

It was only $3 more per head to charter a private bus to Potosi vs taking the public bus (which we are told are pretty dire, with no loos, and folks would board the bus with their chickens, etc), so naturally we all voted for the private charter ... only to find that the bus was not in that great shape either, smelt of stale body odour and petrol, with sections falling off the bus as we made our 6-hr journey on unpaved roads through narrow, winding mountainous te...

We climbed up a good distance from San Pedro, crossed the border into Bolivia at an altitude of 4,500m (14,760 ft), and started our 3-day desert crossing in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Our first stop was the beautiful Laguna Verde (Green Lagoon) set against the Volcan Licancabur, first passing by Laguna Blanca (White Lagoon). These lagoons, like all the other lagoons we visited afterwards, were populated by flamingoes. We drove past the Piedras de Dali (Dali stones)...

San Pedro is an oasis village, just north of the Atacama desert. We enjoyed some beautiful desert scenery on our horse riding trek. The sunset tour of the Valley of the Moon was also interesting. The valley was so named because the landscape resembled that of the moon. We stopped by at the Death Valley - when explorers first visited the place, they said it resembled Mars. The locals had never heard of Mars and thought the explorers said "mueres",...