Vern: The night bus dropped us in a beach town called La Serena and from there we caught a bus into the Elqui Valley and to a tiny town called Pisco Elqui. The Elqui Valley is supposed to be one on the most picturesque parts of Chile, with lush vineyards draped over the hills, fed by a rampant river, and it's the number one spot to observe the stars and planets: there is a famous domed observatory here and a few of the hotels on the valley slopes have installed s...

Vern: San Pedro de Atacama is an odd place. It turns out that desert tourism is surprisingly popular and as such this little town which comprises of a small grid system of dirt roads has sprung up to serve the travelers who happen upon it. There seem to be no residential blocks, just the full assortment of accomodation options: Campsites for the hippies who wear hemp pajamas all day, concrete floor dorms for backpackers and five star hotels for wealthy Santiago d...

Vern: Crossing from Bolivia into Chile took a very long time! It should have been a transfer after our salt flats tour but the southern border was closed because of excessive snow. Instead we woke up at 3am to catch a 4am bus out of Uyuni. At 8am we passed through immigration at the Bolivian border and into no mans land. And there we waited. On a barren, windy plain in between the two countries. Half the people on the bus disembarked and offloaded a random assort...

Andrea: Six hours after leaving freezing cold Potosi on a bus we arrived in freezing cold Uyuni. On the bus the book had told us about the incredibly cold wind that whipped through the streets of Uyuni and we were a bit scared because it had said nothing like that about Potosi, a city where we never actually got warm. Uyuni is the jumping off point for the famous Salar de Uyuni (largest salt flats in the world) and the best thing about the town itself is that it'...

Vern: We planned to spend two nights in Potosi but spent a reluctant third because we couldn't get bus tickets onward to Uyuni. Potosi is supposedly the highest city in the world at 4070m above sea level and sprawls out around the base of Cerro Rico, a large symmetrical mountain out of which the Spanish extracted millions of tons of silver which funded their empire-building in the 1500s and 1600s. Thousands of indigenous people and African slaves died in the mine...