We took a day time bus from Salta to San Pedro so that we could start our salt flats tour from here. This was an unexpected stop for us but meant I could tick off another country I had been to. The bus was quite long and as it was during the day we had the sun keeping us very warm inside. We stopped off a couple of times to get our passports stamped and on the second time it was in a very dusty run down area. Helen joked wouldn't it be funny if this was San Pedro unfortunately this proved to be correct as the bus drove away and left us eating dust...

We walked into town with a group of people and found the first of only 2 cash points, it didn't work and as we had no Chilean money this was a bit of an issue. We set off with fingers crossed to the other cash point which had a large queue but did actually give out money. We then lugged our cases across the dusty town to our little hostel which looked a bit like one of the houses in a shanty town. We met the owner 'Andreas' who was very nice although not quite with it. He showed us how to light the boiler so we could have a hot shower (Helen obviously didn't listen as she couldn't do it the next day but luckily I was on hand to save the day).

We had booked a sandboarding class for one of the days and set off with a minibus full of people and an instructor who looked a lot like Jack Sparrow and also acted like him (drunk) to a large sand dune. I don't think I had quite understood the height or slope you come down from so it was a bit daunting at first. Also neither of us had thought about the walk up which was very tiring especially in temperatures over 30 degrees. Jack Sparrow gave us next to no instruction on what to do so we just winged it, with little success initially. After a while we both decided that it was easier to just try and go straight without breaking till the end and then fall over to stop yourself. This worked quite well and we even got a few action shots to prove it.

The next day we took a tour called 'valley de luna' which involved a large group of us travelling round in a monster truck-esque vehicle to many different sights. I especially enjoyed the cave trek and sunset parts.

We had to change hostels for our last night as we stayed longer than planned and our original place was fully booked. We found another hostel in the middle of the town so we lugged our bags all the way back into town only to find our hostel didn't exist, a quick stop for breakfast and a check on google maps I set off to the new address. Once again the hostel didn't exist so I used my immaculate Spanish to chat with a local and get his thoughts on the matter. A couple of phone calls later and a dodgy, hand drawn map I was on my way again. The hostel did not exist again where the map pointed me but at this point a lady asked me if I was looking for somewhere to stay and I said yes as I was so bored of the 'hide and seek' game. It turned out she had been on the other end of these phone calls and was waiting for me. I had finally found our hostel which was a whole 30 seconds away from our original one. I went back to the cafe and found Helen nursing the final few sips of a drink so as not to be thrown out, she was not best pleased to find out we had to take our luggage back where we came from.

After initially having thought of San Pedro as some very small dusty wild wild west place we really grew to like it.