Santiago, the capital of Chile, was a surprise to us as half the time we felt like we may as well have been walking around North Adelaide. The city was very large, developed, clean and organised which is completely different to what we have become used to. The city centre had streets and streets of malls that put Rundle Mall to shame and back streets lead to beautiful café niches while across the river we found the largest market we've come across for a while. ...

We decided to make our next stop in Argentina in Mendoza as it is famous for being a wine region and - well who doesn't like wine? We gathered a group together from our hostel and, with Sonja in the lead, we took a train to one of the regions and walked from one winery to the next. Normally this is done in a packaged tour to two wineries or by bike but, knowing our tendency to feel the effects of our alcoholic beverages faster than most, we thought it would be be...

We took an overnight train from Uyuni in Bolivia to the small border town with Argentina called Villazon. We assumed it would be another straight forward* border crossing before quickly moving on to Salta, our intended destination in Argentina. It wasn't. *Border crossings are never "straight forward", they are always disorganised, time consuming and often involve a lot of searching and walking around for the correct offices to make sure we don't just stroll i...

Our last stop in Bolivia was the small town of Uyuni which is the base to see the salt flats. We decided to do a two day tour of the area. The tour operators have quite a production process going in Uyuni, and like many in the region, will tell you anything if it means they think you'll buy whatever they're selling. All of the tourists usually arrive in the town in the morning after travelling to Uyuni via overnight bus. Each tourist visits a few operators to...

La Paz - how do we put this softly - let's just say we caught the first bus out of the place. We arrived in the capital city late at night which wasn't a good start as we had to walk down smelly, dirty back streets filled with sleazy bars and drunken locals. We woke in the morning to find not a lot had changed with the rise of the sun and quickly decided to book the overnight bus onwards. While we were there we had just enough time to do half a walking tour of th...