Hallo all, Here we are in Chile in a very dodgy internet cafe waiting for our onward connection to Arica, where we´ll cross the border into Peru. The week has been mentally busy - in a fit of eagerness we booked ourselves onto every trip leaving Salta for 5 days, and ended up with five 6.30am starts in a row - yikes! It was worth it though, as t...

Hi again, Well the rest of the week in Salta improved as the tour company, Nordic Tours, managed to pick us up each day, although they did leave us sweating for around an hour the day after they left without us! We visited Cafayate, Catchi and also did the trip to the clouds, but by bus not train as its either booked up or not running depending ...

Filled the car and checked the tyres and realized that we had been driving along on tyres with a pressure of only 16 and also had to top up brake fluid. From Caldera we drove along the coast for a bit then headed inland. This must be the most boring bit of road in Chile. It's flat, flat, flat and there is nothing of interest to see. A huge indus...

Folloiwng my rushed post on Monday morning, I joined the remainder of my six person tour and we jumped on board our 4x4, in which we would spend a good chunk of the next three days. Uyuni looked like some dusty Middle Eastern town which had been bombed but was salubrious compared to Colchani, 22 klometres away and on the eastern shore of the 12,...

Well...we made it through another long trip. This will probably be the last "long distance" bus ride that we take which is good news. The bad news is that from now until USA, the distances will be smaller but the time on buses will not be less - roads will be worse and the vehicles older, so mixed feeling. Anyway, the reason for coming to Calama...

De Antofagasta, me llevó un colectivo (como un bus pero es un coche) hacia la salida de la ciudad. De ahí no tardó mucho para que una camioneta con un ingeniero eléctrico me lleve en dirección de Calama. Estaba en su día de descanso y le llamaron de la mina porque habían problemas. Me dejó en Sierra Gorda, dónde almorzé para coger fuerzas para s...

Despues de pasar una noche inolvidable y un frio impresionante en el pueblo de San Pedro de Atacama ya hemos vuelto a tomar al ruta (abandonando a los dos chicos con quien viajabamos) para La serena y de ahi a Santiago de Chile y Valparaiso! Nos quedamos dos dias en san pedro donde vimos mas parques nacionales y mas formas geologicas con lo que ...

Sunday, July 09, 2006 Sunday meant relaxing and waiting around for the bus to Calama in the evening. I wandered the town, looking at Lapis Lazuli and kept balking at the prices. By the time I'd decided to make a purchase, the shops had closed down to watch the World Cup Final. We all caught most of it over a cheap lunch on a small TV, whose sign...

Getting out of San Pedro turned out to be much more of a problem than we thought it was going to be. We booked a first class bus to La Serena (7hrs north of Santiago, on the coast) and headed off on TUesday afternoon. After an hour and a half we got to Calama and then continued on to the mountain pass that would take us from the Andes to sea lev...

Up early to try and get to Arica, we jumped on a bus to Calama which we were hoping had more connections! It was not to be...we had abit of a bad hour in that we got dropped quite a way out of town at a random bus terminal so had to wander back in then we thought we'd lost the guide book and then we found out there were no buses until the evenin...