From the Chilean Desert to the Bolivian Salt Flats

San Pedro De Atacama is little town in the middle of the Atacama desert, surrounded by the Andes mountains. We found it incredible that our hostel was located in a road with a stunning view of a snow capped volcano at the end.

San Pedro itself is a dusty little town full of tour companies desperate for trade and equally full of travellers eager to get the best deals. We quickly discovered that despite the vast array of tour companies, they were all selling exactly the same tours and regardless of who you booked through, the chances are that you'd end up going with a different company as they worked together to ensure buses were full.

Our first tour was to the Valle de la Luna, so named as it is said to resemble the surface of the moon. Here we climbed a sand mountain, saw colourful stone and sand formations , clambered through caves and over rocks formed by thousands of years of water erosion and finally saw the sun set over the Valley .

Next up was a trip to the geysers which spout water high into the air, heated by the hot earth below resulting from surrounding volcanos to a boiling point of 85 degrees.. A sleep challenging 4.30 am start and a nervous drive up to an altitude of over 4 kilometres in sub zero conditions was a little daunting, not least by a warning on altitude sickness for10 minutes. We were rewarded with amazing views of mountains and a steaming valley with gushing geysers. The sun rising over the mountains forced cold air down causing a drop in temperature to minus 5 so we were glad of the breakfast of egg sandwich and coffee cooked behind the van by our driver.

The next day we took the bus to Uyuni in Bolivia which was a 10 hour journey from hell in a very hot, packed bus and on several bumpy roads. Half way through we had to get on and off the bus with our backpacks to clear customs. As darkness fell, the roads got bumper and the driver drove faster so we were so releaved to arrive in Uyuni and our first stop in Bolivia.

Uyuni itself has very little to offer other than being a start and finish point for the salt flat tours. We chose the 1 day tour which started off with a surprisingly interesting visit to the Cemetery of Trains, which although is a lot of rusty old trains, it provides a good half hours entertainment of jumping on and off the rusty carriages.

However the highlight was definitely the salt flats themselves which are magnificent. Our Range Rover glided through the salt flats along with about 30 other cars but the space was massive as the salt and sun glistened and the surrounding mountains were reflected in the salt. Half way through, we stopped off at a salt hotel where each driver prepared a lunch of quinoa, salad, lama meat, fruit and drinks for the 6 passengers in each car. Then as we made our way back we were surprised that our driver stopped once more in the middle of the now empty salt flats to take lots of cheesey posed pictures of us. He was more keen on taking the photos than the rest of us, but they did turn out to be pretty good. We are still awaiting the copies though.