From one extreme to another...

San Pedro De Atacama's inglesia

Our journey to Chile was almost as scenic and adventurous as our tour of southern Bolivia! In order to avoid a several day long bus journey we opted for another jeep ride. This jeep left Uyuni at 6pm and was due to arrive in San Pedro de Atacama, northern Chile lunch time the next day. The journey didn’t get off to a flying start due to a flat tyre in the middle of the desert, at night! We stopped at a very very basic ‘hostal’ and had fried egg and rice for dinner – one of the least imaginative meals we’ve had in Bolivia, maybe not the least nutritious though. We shared our meal with several Chilieans and that proved to be a real pleasure. They were all absolutely lovely and keen to give us lots of information about their country and their contact details should we need anything else.

After filling our guidebooks with notes we all hit the sack, for about four hours – alarms went at 3.30am! Not the earliest start of the trip but certainly one of the coldest. We were straight back on the ‘road’ (read rough track in the pitch black). Then the snow started, then the insides of the windows froze. It was actually quite fun but fairly long – four or so hours later we arrived at a little pit stop next to a lake, lit a fire and phoned ahead to the frontera (border) to check the weather. Whereupon we were informed that they weren’t sure if they could open the border due to the weather and there was a real danger of us staying in the middle of nowhere with no food for the rest of the day/night! Oh dear. We started wondering which pieces of furniture we could burn. Turns out it was a false alarm, the sun came out and off we went. The border crossing was fairly informal at the Bolivia side, a quick passport stamp and then a bus to a tarmac road – wooohooo – off to Chile.

The frozen window of our jeep

The x-ray machines at the customs office were the first indication that we were now in a far more advanced country! San Pedro de Atacama turned out to be a lovely, if somewhat expensive, town in the Atacama desert (driest place in the world). With dusty streets and a remote location it was a surprise to discover this is a major tourist destination in Chile and there were plenty of restaurants and bars to show for it. A lovely surprise when compared to our fried egg dinner for our last night in Chile, but our budget was going to need to be revised!

Although still very cold at night, San Pedro was lovely and sunny during the day and that combined with the food, and great wine (right at the top of our list of course) meant Chile immediately felt like an extremely different destination to Bolivia. We had inadvertently chosen to travel from the poorest to the richest country in South America. Monkeys it may not have, but Chile promised to deliver a whole new adventure.

San Pedro's impressive backdrop