San Pedro de Atacama

The bus from Salta to San Pedro was Semi-cama again, and I was sat beside a nice Irish guy. The journey went fairly quickly, for the first time in a while it was actually a scenic journey, with views of multi-coloured hills and winding roads across the Andes. It featured a stop at an extremely windswept and barren customs post on the Chile-Argentina border. Here a vindictive customs official put the border stamp right on top of my Ushuaia fin del Mundo stamp, that I'd gone to the end of the world to get! What a scumbag! There was a strange juxtaposition of on-board films, with Rambo 4 followed by Sex in the City. We actually got to San Pedro much earlier than expected, and I found it to be a very pleasant little place. After some consideration I decided that since I'd lost a lot of days in Salta I would head straight out on the Salt flats tour the next morning, as many of the activities around San Pedro were similar to those included on the tour, and also Bolivia would be much cheaper! I checked into a hostel, where I was in a very social dorm full of anglophones. I got my tour booked and had dinner in a nice restaurant with an open fire in the town. As seems normal here a local band with pan-pipes passed through to do a couple of songs. The opening number of ¨Close to you¨was not what I expected. I went back to the dorm (which was a bit more like sick-ward, myself included), had a bit of a chat with people and then had a much needed early night in a very comfortable bed. It was a fairly early rise the next day to head off on the three-day tour across the salt flats in Bolivia - it was an hour in a minibus to the Bolivian border, where we got divided up into our jeeps for the rest of the journey.