Not a lot to report today - the majority of it taken up by a long bus journey! We woke late at about 9am and stayed in our rooms until checkout at midday. The morning was leisurely - watching a bit of TV, repacking our rucksacks and munching on a few biscuits for breakfast. We made another skype call and managed to speak to Scott's niece. It was a relief to have had a bed for the night after the events of yesterday. I would have to say that apart from the first few hours seeing the geysers and lake in Bolivia, it would have to go down as our worst day on the road......days like that make you realise you are really not on holiday and travelling instead (there is a difference)! Since we had been told it was a 5 day holiday here in Chile, which explained the lack of accommodation, we felt it prudent to try and phone ahead to La Serena - our next stop - to make a reservation. We tried in vain at a phone box struggling to get any call to connect - we must have been putting in the wrong area code or something- either way we had to give up and hope for the best tomorrow.

Since it was a Sunday in the middle of a long bank holiday the town was like a ghost town - shops closed up, restaurants and cafes shut, and all the ATMs run out of cash! Luckily we had about £40 cash in Chilean pesos left so hoped that would last us. We managed to find a small fruit shop open and a little corner shop selling the Chilean equivalent of a Cornish pasty (except for the fact that they put boiled egg in instead of potato!) and hence lunch was pasty and banana sitting on the kerb!

We arrived in good time at the bus stop and in true South American style it was late. But once we finally boarded we felt pretty smug when we realised we had the whole downstairs of the bus to ourselves! Fully reclining seats - pillows and blankets - 3 back to back films in English - and snacks brought to you - this 18 hour bus journey was turning out to be the most luxurious travel we had had in a long while! The landscape was pretty much the same the whole journey - barren sandy desert with mining vehicles everywhere - but the road was tarmacked and a lot smoother ride than the buses in Peru or Bolivia. I managed to drift off to sleep by about 10pm having watched the sun set creating silhouettes of the sand dunes at the horizon.