San Pedro De Atacama

Everything went well with the bus journey, except that we thought we were at our stop twice before we actually were... which was again because of our lack of Spanish! The bus man was quite quick to tell us to stop getting our backpacks off the bus and to get back on!

The journey went really quickly. When we woke up in the morning on the bus we looked out the window and we were in complete desert! Nothing to be seen apart from orange sand! When we got to San Pedro De Atacama, life had gone back 200 years!! The streets were sand, the buildings were made out of muddy cement, and there was very little shower water! It looked like there should have been cowboys running around on their horses!!

We found a nice hostel which we stayed in for two nights whilst there. We learnt that Paila Huave was scrambled egg and ham so we had that for dinner :) and Cazuela again for the next two nights! We stayed here to book our Salt Flat trip across to Bolivia. We met a couple of nice guys called Humphrey and Peter, who we went bike riding with next day.

We rode to a lovely local swimming pool which was three km away. Nothing was very lovely about it though as it had green slimy floor and dirty water... We should have realised it wasnt going to be fresh clean water really as we were in the middle of the desert! Had a bit of a sunbathe on the sand and then rode to see some remains of an Inca Fortress which was another 6km away! Suprisingly Kla could still ride a bike! We walked up hundreds of steps and reached the top of the fortress to see an amasing view of the desert with snow capped volcanoes in the background. We had a great day :)

We were all up early the next morning to leave for our Salar De Uyuni 3 day trip across the border of Bolivia to Uyuni.

xx