San Pedro De Attacama

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With 2 hours of sleep i set off on the 10 hour bus journey. It actually wasn't too bad and was one of the few times i slept for hours on a bus. I was trying to stay awake because the scenery as we drove up into the Andes was so cool. We started to get pretty high are some stages and the altitude was affecting Al pretty bad although i could hardly breathe at some points. After going through the Argentinian side of the border we passed a spectacular volcano before going through the Australian like border(no veggies etc...).

San Pedro is a beautiful little town. Melissa was saying this was how she imagined South America. Dusty streets and cowboy hats. The town was also surrounded on nearly all sides by volcano's, both active, dormant and extinct which is pretty cool. San Pedro is located near the driest desert in the world but it seemed to working out ok for the town, which was packed with restaurants, tour companies and even nice showers!!

So after we checked into our nice and quiet hostel(which i needed after the last 2 weeks of partying, rehab in the desert!!) we signed up for sandboarding at midnight under a full moon. I was thinking falling on my face in the dark but the moon was so bright!! It was brilliant and the highlight so far. Our guide Andreas was really cool and showed us the ropes and after a few tries and sand in every orifice we got the hang of it. Al was defo the king of the boarding and had the bruises for it the next day, twice he slammed into the sand which is a lot more forgivable then snow!! With the altitude(will be using that quite a lot) getting back up the hill was a challenge so we just sat at the top of the dune after a while and downed a few beers. Great night.

The next day was spent sorting tours(which takes a day) eating and having a few beers. We did sign up for some horse riding the next day so we could look forward to that. The horse riding was great fun. Melissa for some weird reason was given the biggest horse on the ranch. It wa massive. He refused to do anything for her so they switched her to a smaller one. The reasoning in the beginning became clear, her new horse was the laziest git ever and didn't want to do anything. Me and Al's horses were great. I had grahams words in my head from the last time we went horse riding in Mendoza, ya gotta show them who's boss!! It was really good cos they let us go galloping which was pretty cool and my ass wasn't as sore as last time so i must have been doing something right!!

After that it was an early night before our tour of the salt flats(again for me) but San Pedro was a great little town and really got us into South America vibe.

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Photos

San Pedro. View from the hostel, not too shabby!!
Volcano´s loom in the background