So I finally arrived in Mancora, tired and stinky, but I arrived, and spent 3 days there, dragging myself away before I gave in to Jody asking me to work there! It was pretty much the same as the last time I was there, hot and sunny and good parties, just with different staff, and I made friends with some cool American guys Dave and Matt and hung out with them for a few days.

Then I headed straight off to Arequipa with a brief stop in Lima, another 30+ hours of buses, but by bow I'm becoming an expert at entertaining myself for hours by staring out the window, reading books, not understanding wierd films in Spanish... So I spent another 4 days in Arequipa, working bar shifts back in the Wild Rover for free accomodation and food. That was cool to see the friends I worked with before and have a few parties with them! I also went white water rafting while I was there with some Aussie guys I met which was good fun, although we weren't still drunk from the night before like the last time I'd gone in Arequipa!

From Arequipa I'd planned to go straight to San Pedro de Atacama to do the star tour I'd heard lots about, then straight from there to Santiago. It turned out not to be as simple as that! I had to get a bus from Arequipa to Tacna, but the latest night bus went at 10pm, so arrived in Tacna about 4:30am. I then had to catch a collectivo to the border to get my passport stamped and across to Arica in Chile. I arrived in Arica at about 7am, and from what I'd read about it it sounded like an alright place to waste a bit of time whilst waiting for another bus to San Pedro, however when I rocked up there the weather was miserable, the town didn't look anything special, and the bus station was the smallest I've seen so far I think! So I decided to head straight for San Pedro, but whenI asked about times, all of the buses going at 10am from every company were full, and the next buses weren't leaving til 10pm... after a few minutes of walking around in despair at the thought of staying in this s***hole of a bus station for 15 hours I decided to find another way of getting there!

There was a bus leaving for Iquique, sort of half way to San Pedro, at 10am so I got on that and crossed my fingers I'd find a bus to San Pedro when I arrived there! I was lucky, when I arrived it turned out there was a bus leaving in a few hours to Calama, an hour away from San Pedro, and there were only 2 seats left! I met a French guy Antoine at the station in Iquique who had also come from Arica and was trying to get to San Pedro so we bought our tickets together and spent a few hours wandering around Iquique looking at the beach and the main plaza. Its a pretty nice places actually and amazingly is on the sea, but surrounded from the back by ginormous sand dunes! We arrived in Calama pretty late so I decided not to try and get to San Pedro that night, and find somewhere to stay in Calama, which proved pretty difficult as everywhere seemed to be full or ridiculously expensive, but we eventually found somewhere with space and managed to negotiate a stay in a double room for the price of one person as long as we were out in the morning before the owner came!

The next day we went to visit the copper mine Chuquicamata, the largest copper mine in the world, and the only real sight in Calama, as well as an abandoned mining town. The abandoned mining town was actually pretty interesting. The residents were told they had to leave as the level of polllution in the air is too high from the mine, but it was once a huge town with banks, shops, schools, and now its just a ghost town! The mine was prety impressive as the width and depth of it is huge, but the tour wasn't the best, and actually health and safety laws here mean you can't go down to the mine like in Bolivia, but it was free so we can't really complain! Then that afternoon we caught another bus and finally arrived in San Pedro!