Onwards to Chile

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So after leaving Potosi and the Sillver mines I was now on my way to Uyuni and a 3 day tour to see the Salar de Uyuni or the Salt plains. There were 6 of us squashed into a Toyota 4WD Landcruiser with all our luggage on top and the first stop was a graveyard for trains, not that exciting but worth seeing nonetheless.
Then it was onto the Salt plains, a huge expanse that used to be a salt lake and has now dried up and in some places is 20 metres thick of salt! As we continued we came to an island full of cacti growing very high, quite a surreal place in the middle of this salt desert.
That night we visited a necropolis, a place where a group of Ecuadorians thousands of years ago came to die thinking it was of special significance, they would sit in these coral caves and pass away, it looked very weird and you could still see their bones and some were less decomposed than maybe you wanted them to be.
The next day we had an early start to see the sunrise at some geysers, very mystical with lots of sulphorous smoke to choke on and if you got close enough you could see them bubbling away, in fact one guy died last year by getting too close and died of burns a few days later! We continued visiting lots of lakes with amazing colours and they all have names like Lago Verde (Red lake) or Lago Rojo (Green lake). It was an amazing experience, so very different form anything else I have seen, it was like Mars!
From here we reached the Chilean border and were now in a miny bus to San Pedro de Atacama, the driest desert in the world, but before we got there a couple of Italians were hurriedly throwing their coca leafs out the window as it is illegal in Chile, we even threw an apple as they are very strict with what you can bring across.
So our first taste of Chile was a proper smooth road, very welcoming after 3 days of cramped bumpy conditions in Bolivia.
San Pedro is a small town, very hot and as I later found out very expensive, especially compared to how cheap Bolivia was. There was not much too do here, it was really a stopping point to go onwards to Salta, Argentina. I found an agency in town that offered a night time trip to their observatory where I could look at the stars and galaxies with an explanation of them, and then afterwards we were given a talk about the stars, solar system and galaxies, it was very interesting.
I managed to book a bus to Salta leaving a few days later, I was relieved!

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