Our bus pulled in to La Serena terminal at around 7am. We had arranged to get into our room a bit earlier than usual check in, but that wasn't until 10 so we had some time to kill and we were pretty hungry. The only issue was absolutely nothing was open! We wandered a bit with our bags but to no avail, so ended up just waiting for the owner of the place we were staying to turn up and let us in. The accommodation was owned by a Chinese family that also owned the ...

After waiting on the bus at the border for ages, we made the short journey downhill to San Pedro de Atacama, a small hippy town in the middle of the dessert. The wait at immigration in San Pedro to get our entrance stamps for Chile was pretty long and tedious but fairly painless otherwise. We grabbed a giant empanada in town for lunch before making our way to the hostel which was about 1km out of town but about half the ridiculous price of accommodation in town....

In the morning we had some breakfast, very basic bread and jam, then set off for the days adventures, though the hotel puppy didn't want Fergus to leave and tugged away at his shoe laces for a while. We are pretty sure we were supposed to go to a place called the Stone Army but we didn't. Our first stop was to view the smoking Volcan Ollague, 6000m high straddling the Bolivia/Chile border. We stopped off at a beautiful view point amongst some interesting red lav...

When we turned up at the office at around 10.15 it was a bit chaotic as there were two tours leaving for the 3 day trip, and a few others just for a day trip. We had included a ticket for a bus from the Bolivia/Chile border to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, but of course they had forgotten to buy it and had to run off to purchase it for us. After standing around for close to an hour we finally left. Our tour guide seemed to be a freelancer rather than employed b...

We arrived in Uyuni after the Dakar Rally that had been in town had left and accommodation was finally available again. Fortunately we only spent one night there before setting off on our tour across the salt flats, as there really is nothing of any interest. Uyuni has one main pedestrian street with a whole bunch of restaurants along it, and in the surrounding streets it has a bunch of tour operators, and that's about it. There are some statues and old train re...