Hi there. Just a quick post to describe the bus journey from hell from yesterday. The trip was only 12 hours (tiny compared with a lot of others) from Salta in Argentina to San Pedro in Northern Chile. Nobody had warned me about this trip, but I probably should have figured it out for myself. To get to San Pedro you have to drive over the northern Andes which, unlike further south, is a wide flat desert. After about an hour the bus started going up.........and then went up and up and up. By the time we got to lunch about 4 hours in, I was starting to feel a little strange. Shortly after lunch it got horribly worse. By this time we had gone from about 1,200 metres at Salta to almost 5,000 metres and I got my first experience of altitude sickness; and it's ugly. For the next 5 hours I sat with my eyes closed, sucking in deep breaths, while my head enjoyed it own seperate heartbeat and my stomach churned lunch around again and again and again. Add to this the freezing temperatures, your whole seat vibrating from the horribly corrigated roads, and the bus filled with dust to make those deep breaths all the more enjoyable, and you've got a quality afternoon. Many others weren't so lucky to keep lunch down, and apparently the toilet in the back of the bus had seen better days by the end of the trip. Eventually we headed back down the other side to San Pedro at a reasonable 2,400 metres. Sadly, I'm getting into a 4WD to go back up the mountain tomorrow to spend 3 days going along the 'Altiplano' into Bolivia. I'm told the first nights accomodation is just below 5,000 meters. I'll let you know how it goes (if my head doesn't explode first).