The roof of the world, witches market and the World's Most Dangerous Road!

15th - 19th August 2012

La Paz - highest capital city in the world

After such an amazing three days our arrival to Uyuni was a serious letdown. The last stop on the Salt Flats tour was the train cemetery which was on the outskirts of the town. This was so bad I didn't even want to put it in the salt flats entry but it's necessary to mention it here as its part of the reason we felt the need to get out of Uyuni straight away! It's basically a huge area full of broken trains and scrap metal. The area around and drive up to it was covered in rubbish and I mean covered! It was absolutely disgusting. The town itself is an awful looking, boring, horrible town with nothing going for it!

The only sight in town!!

Myself and Ronan had very loose plans about what we were going to do once we reached here as we had no bus or hotel booked. We had a notion of staying in Uyuni and heading to another town along the way but we had already arranged with Kate and Alice to meet up again to do the Amazon tour in a week or so as our routes for the next few weeks were almost identical. They had already booked a bus to the capital, La Paz, and were leaving on it from Uyuni that evening. I had spent the last 3 days sympathising with them getting an overnight bus after such a cold few nights while smugly seeing myself and Ronan in a lovely warm hostel somewhere in my minds' eye!

I was eating my words when we saw Uyuni and realised we needed to get out quickly! So we set about trying to find the available bus out of Uyuni, which happened to be to La Paz. We were always aiming to go there but decided to go a couple of days early. We paid b$90 (equivalent of €10.40) for the 10 hour bus knowing it was too cheap as all decent buses cost b$230 (€26.60). You definitely get what you pay for but desperate times call for desperate measures and myself, Ronan and Damien were all booked onto the same bus. Kate and Alice were on a different bus which was fully booked up. This was sorted by about 3.30pm so we had a few hours to kill before getting the bus at 8pm. Ordering food in Bolivia is an extremely long process so getting a pizza each for dinner killed a few hours as did getting a hot chocolate afterwards. Then it was time to say goodbye to the girls for the first time in 72 hours but we were booked into the same hostel in La Paz anyways.

When we got on the bus I was excited to see blankets and thought as long as I was warm it would be okay. How wrong I was. When the bus set off on the bumpiest road you could imagine I was thinking to myself this can't be the main road. Unfortunately I was wrong and it continued in this awful, bone-shaking manner for five and a half hours!! It was a 10 hour journey but the second half wasn't as bumpy. After about 20 minutes on the bus I would have gotten off, had we not being in the middle of nowhere. Apart from the bumpiness, the speed was horrendous and it actually felt like we were leaving the road at times with the speed they were driving. To top it all off I chose this time to remember something I had read about long distance night bus drivers having a tipple to help them stay awake! Why I didn't remember that before purchasing the ticket is beyond me. Also it was freezing - even though I was wearing the many layers of jumpers, leggings, thermals that I had for the salt flats along with the blanket, it was so cold. In fact ice formed on the inside of the windows that is how bad it was!

Around 4am we got a puncture, just to top off all the fun! We eventually pulled into La Paz, two hours late at 8am on Thursday 16th August . We took a taxi to our hostel, the Irish owned Wild Rover. We bade farewell to Damien at this stage as he was moving on from La Paz later that day so he headed off sight seeing! Kate and Alice had arrived on time so had already had checked in, had showers and were extremely refreshed. Myself and Ronan were knackered and wearing the same clothes for 4 days at this stage and hadn't a decent shower or being proper warm since we left San Pedro!

We didn't get to check into our room until 2pm but somehow passed 6 hours fairly easily in the nice bar and restaurant area of the hostel. Tea was free until 12 so I had 5 cups just to try to warm up! The rest of the day was a write-off and we did something we never do - we basically spent 30 hours straight in the hostel! The food was really good so after an afternoon nap and shower we did dinner and drinks in the hostel. It's a really sociable place so we were just chatting to different people getting an idea of what to do next!

We had plans for another three day tour, this time to the amazon, so the few days in La Paz were to be chill out days anyways and we decided not to put ourselves under pressure this weekend. We had a nice little sleep in Friday morning before meeting Kate and Alice over breakfast. Like Chile, breakfast here is very sociable and can take a while! The 4 of us decided to do the sightseeing bus at 1.30pm so we did that and it went up the mountains so we got good views of the city and visited another Valley of the Luna!

At the top of Luna Valley

We learned some really interesting things on the bus journey such as the fact that water will boil at 85 degrees at this altitude  (La Paz is at 3,600m) and if playing golf on the worlds highest golf course, the ball will go much further than it would on a normal golf course! After the bus we went to a bar recommended by a friend of Kate's, Oliver's which turned out to be an English bar which was completely geared towards the premier league which was starting the next day (reminding Ronan to pick his fantasy football team!). The 4 of us had lunch - I had my first BLT ever, totally addicted  now - and some pisco sours for the girls (traditional Chilean cocktail that none of us had tried while actually in Chile, it was rotten and made with raw egg). After this we wandered up and around the Witches Market which is a bizarre place with things like llama foetuses for sale - burying one under the front porch of your house is meant to bring good luck so there are hundreds of them for sale along with other ointments and potions and the normal souvenirs.

Actual llama foetuses

All over South America they dress their dogs up in little outfits but the funniest had to be the dog in jeans and a jumper that we saw at the market! It was a very relaxed fun day!

Dog's fashion

Saturday 18th followed similar lines, with a little shopping for souvenirs before hitting Oliver's for the late kickoff match. The time difference to home is 5 hours so the 5.30pm kickoff at home was shown at 12.30pm here so we watched that. Can't remember who was playing but think it was Newcastle! Ronan spent most of the match explaining the rules of football to the two Kiwi girls - he was in his element! Later that evening back in the hostel, I came down to the bar to find Ronan with coins all over the table explaining the offside rule to five women!

Bolivia is the strangest country we have ever being to! There are so many weird things we have seen such as:
- The clothes the women wear, apart from being really old fashioned, they wear bowler hats. The story behind this is hilarious - basically a British guy came to Bolivia years ago with a load of men's bowler hats that he couldn't sell to men and told the Bolivian women that they were the latest fashion in Europe and all the women were wearing them! So the rich Bolivian women bought them to make a fashion statement and gradually the trend extended to all classes.

Ladies fashion

- There are kiosks dotted all over the place selling minerals and crisps and they all have a landline phones that members of the public can make calls on (basically the Bolivian version of a pay phone as mobiles haven't yet taken over!). These kiosks sell minerals like coke and sprite in glasses so you have to stand making small talk with the kiosk owner while having your drink!
- The public buses all employ someone to shout the destination out of an open door rather than using signs or a numbering system. It took us a while to figure out why people were roaring at us from buses!
- Having to book a matrimonial room to get a double bed! They are highly religious so they only give married couples double beds!

Sunday 19th, we (me, Ronan, Kate and Alice) had booked our trip to mountain bike down The World's Most Dangerous Road, so called as 85,000 motorists died on it between the 1930's and when the new road opened in 2005. Now there is a new better road and the old road is mostly used for cyclists and not many vehicles. Vehicles can still drive on it if they want but it's one of the few roads in the world where you drive on the opposite side to the national rules. This allows the driver to see how close they are to the edge as when passing another car as it's not uncommon for them to have to put half the wheel of the car over the edge. For those who have seen the Top Gear episode, not much dramatisation was needed!

Like every single tour we have done, we needed to be careful as to the company we went with as there are so many bad stories about poorly maintained bikes and badly trained guides causing accidents. We went with Barracuda Biking, who are the second best company and much cheaper than the top company.  We were up at 6am and had breakfast in Oliver's where we were meeting the guides and rest of the group. We had a 45min drive to the top of the mountain to 4,700m (La Paz is at 3,600m) and the bike ride is down to 1,000m. The others on the bus were feeling the effects of the altitude so I was dishing out the tablets as I had to buy 30 and you only take half so I effectively had 60 doses that we weren't going to need! The Inca Trail is also at high altitude so we will need them for that aswell.

Unfortunately when we got to the start of what is usually a 64km cycle, the conditions were awful with terrible fog and snow so we had to skip some of the beginning. We were all wearing layers as we were told it was freezing at the top and warm at the bottom. But we still hadn't banked on having a snowstorm so we were freezing!

Brrrrrrr.....

As soon as we started the cycle (having skipped the first 14km due to the weather) we were all soaked through all the layers and our shoes were drenched within a couple of minutes. Unfortunately the person booking us in had forgotten to tell us to bring spare clothes so we were stuck in the wet clothes from 9.30am until we got back to the hostel at 7pm! The first part of the cycle was on a tarmac road to get used to the bikes. They were proper mountain bikes with disc brakes so if you just pulled the front brake like you would on a normal bike, you would end up going over the handlebars. Both needed to be pulled together. Our guide was really good, taught us the correct safety procedures and felt really safe so we were fine and all got it fairly easily.

We reached the top of the actual Death Road after about an 18km practice on the tarmac road. Death Road is a 32km cycle from the top to the bottom. It's on a very bumpy road with loose gravel and is only 3.2m wide along a cliff edge. The cycle down took about 2 hours with all the stops to regroup as people were going at different speeds and stopping for photos. At each stop the guide told us the type of road coming up so we knew how dangerous the next section was going to be.

The tiny dots at the edge of the cliff are all of us!

Death Road

Once we got to the bottom we got lunch and then went to visit the local animal sanctuary, la Senda Verde. We weren't really bothered with this but it was included in the package so we went and it turned out to be amazing! It's a sanctuary for wild animals which were captured and sold on the black market as pets. We were amazed with all the monkeys, turtles, different types of birds, even an alligator that people thought they could keep as pets! The guide showing us around was actually an Irish girl who volunteered over there each summer so we got to ask loads of questions. These animals are stolen from the wild as babies and sold as pets but once they start to get bigger and, particularly in the case of monkeys, go through puberty, they become harder work and not the cute little quirky pets that people thought they were getting. The sanctuary tries to let the animals be as wild as possible but the monkeys still crave human attention and prefer it to the company of other monkeys. We were told to leave everything behind in the restaurant before going into the monkey enclosure as they put their hands everywhere and pull at jewellery. We were even supposed to take out earrings but one girl didn't and we weren't two minutes in the monkey enclosure when one of the monkeys climbed on her and pulled out one of her earrings and started trying to eat it which was obviously dangerous for the  monkey! They put their hands in everyone's pockets, pulled at zips and generally anything that wasn't secured to you wasn't safe, even glasses!! Ronan was delighted as he felt the one thing the honeymoon has been lacking was monkeys so he loved having them crawl all over him. I had heard they are vicious little buggers so I wasn't too fond of having them crawling all over me!  You can rent a cabin or treehouse in the grounds of the animal sanctuary and spend a few nights there and I was wishing I knew this in advance as I would have definitely stayed here a few days!

Not sure if Ronan and Alice picked up on the message of how bad it was keeping wild pets as animals as on leaving the sanctuary they both asked was it wrong that they wanted a monkey even more now!

After a really fun hour in the animal sanctuary it was time to start the excruciating journey back to La Paz. Usually the death road tour takes you back up death road in the minibus but we didn't want to do that as it is such a horrible road and takes 4.5 hours! Instead we took the new, 'good' road which took 3 hours to travel 85km. Yes we travelled at the painfully slow speed of under 30km per hour the whole way back! We eventually reached the Wild Rover at 7pm to finally change out of our wet clothes! We had to check out of our room that morning as we originally only booked for 3 nights, this was our fourth night and they already had a reservation on the private rooms so myself, Ronan, Kate and Alice all moved into a 4 bed dorm for the night.

We were filthy and cold so needed hot showers. We were leaving the next day so had to pack for the heat of the jungle as we were leaving for the amazon in the morning. By the time we had all this done and got something to eat we were all wrecked and it was time for bed! Next phase of the adventure was starting!

We made it & in one piece!!

The amazing Salt Flats of Bolivia!!

13th - 15th August 2012

We had booked our place on the Salar de Uyuni or the Salt Flats tour to leave San Pedro de Atacama, Chile on Monday 13th August and arriving in Uyuni, Bolivia on Wednesday 15th. This is the largest salt flat in the world at 11,000 square km. It was formed by prehistoric lakes and has a crust of a few metres deep of salt. It is exceptionally flat and white!

We were collected by our tour company Cordillera Traveller, on Monday morning at 7.30am. Then we went to their office to sign in, exchange our last few US dollars to Bolivian currency and buy 6litres of water each! They wouldn't take euro so we had to use up our dollars and we got totally screwed on the exchange rate but had to take the hit as we needed cash to pay into the national parks and for toilets along the way! The 6 litres of water were necessary as we were going to be at such high altitude that we needed to drink at least 2 litres each per day.

It was in this office that a beautiful friendship was born when we met sisters Kate and Alice from New Zealand! We were going to be spending a lot of time together over the coming weeks but we didn't know it at the time! There was another person on our trip also - Damien from Belgium. Usually there are 6 people on the tour so we were delighted with 5 as it meant more space in the jeep which was important as this is where we would be spending most of the next 3 days!

The 5 of us (and our driver) bonded instantly as within 10 minutes of being on the road we were all dancing and singing away to the BeeGees Staying Alive!!

After meeting our group we got a bus out of San Pedro and did the whole immigration thing to leave Chile. Then we drove for an hour before hitting the Bolivian border. It was the only border crossing we have been through where both immigration offices were not within two minutes of each other and we were in No Man's Land for an hour. After a bumpy ride we finally reached the Bolivia immigration office and here it is!!!

Bolivian immigration office - literally the middle of nowhere!

We couldn't believe it either. No wonder things can be smuggled across the border! Next it was time to have breakfast at the border. The bus driver grabbed a table out of somewhere and pulled out a picnic basket to lay this spread on for us!

We met some nice guys on their way back from doing the same trip who gave us a bottle of wine they had left over so that was a really nice start! At the border we transferred from the bus into the jeep and we were off!

Me, Ronan, Alice & Kate

The real adventure was starting now! The first day of the tour was mostly about visiting various lagoons and the geysers. We started at Laguna Blanca and Laguna Verde before visiting the hot springs. I wasn't sure if I was gonna swim as it was so cold outside (probably 3/4 degrees air temperature) but when we got there it was so inviting we all decided to go for it. The water temperature was 40 degrees and it was divine. It was funny taking photos of us in bikinis while people were in full ski wear behind us!

The whole gang!

Note the ski jackets in the background and the bubbling water we are in!

Ronan acting the mick as usual!

After swimming it was time to visit the geysers. We had to go up an active volcano up to the dizzying heights of 5,500m ( 5.5km above sea level) so our guide gave us coca leaves to chew to counteract any sickness. They were absolutely disgusting and nearly made me sick never mind the altitude sickness.

Before planning this trip I was never really aware of the dangers of altitude sickness or Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) which I believe is the technical term. But altitude sickness can have a range of symptoms such as shortness of breath, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches to more serious things leading to death. It is the reason people die while climbing Mount Everest. So while it can be very serious, symptoms can be alleviated by chewing coca leaves, taking anti-AMS tablets or simply going to a lower altitude when you start to feel ill.
By the way although coca leaves are what cocaine is derived from it has no drug properties in this form and does not send you high! It is also completely legal!

So back to the geysers, again there is no health and safety here and we were able to wander about where we pleased feeling the ground bubbling underneath us. Apart from very slight headaches we were all feeling remarkably okay considering. After this we descended to go to our home for the night to have lunch (lunch was amazing mashed potatoes and sausages yum yum). Thank god as it was 3pm and we were all starved but the snacks had come in handy. You need to eat little and often at high altitude so we were eating something every two hours to avoid feeling ill! The lodgings were very basic with no shower facilities, no heating (fun that night when temperatures dropped below freezing) and the only electricity was lights so no charging for an electrical devices. After lunch we went back out in the jeep to visit Laguna Colorada which was excellent and we saw loads of flamingos.

Flamingos

Then we were back in our lodgings for the night. It was up to us to amuse ourselves so from 5pm we had a very bad karaoke session where we brought out Ronan's xoom (Motorola version of the iPad) and sang every Number 1 from 1995 to 2005 - thanks to Cian who gave us all this music last summer!! So that passed most of the evening along with the bottle of red wine we got from the boys earlier in the day, and we were all so wrecked that we retired to bed at the ungodly hour of 9pm!  It was lucky that we were all getting on so well as it was dorm-style accommodation only so the 5 of us were sharing a room! It was so cold I wore a tshirt, thermal top, thermal outdoor jumper, leggings, thermal pants and two pairs of socks along with the layers of blankets provided. It was literally the coldest I have ever had to sleep at in my life! Brrrr....

Next day was Tuesday and we were up at 7am for breakfast before leaving in the jeep at 8am. We had slept at 4,500m which was super high (consider the highest we trekked in Nepal was 3,200m and we slept lower than that) and myself and Ronan were definitely feeling the effects. He was worse than me with a terrible headache, sinuses and nausea. Of course neither of us had brought AMS tablets but thankfully Kate, who is a nurse, sorted us out with half a tablet each! It worked a dream and we were both feeling fine within 15mins.

This day was more about covering the distance and we drove through some really rough terrain. We saw more lagoons, more flamingos than we could imagine, the famous UNESCO protected rock tree (I had never heard if it before either!), volcanos and loads of desert!

At the rock tree Ronan, Damien and our driver Luiz decided it would be a great idea to rock climb about 3 stories high (with no equipment) to wave a Bolivian flag we found on the road a few miles back - needless to say I was shitting it seeing Ronan climb up and jump from one rock to another!!  The tablets had obviously worked wonders considering he could hardly stand upright a couple hours previous!!

Ronan, Damien and Luiz are the tiny dots up the top with the Bolivian flag

Getting back down - Ronan is in the blue jacket

Lunch was an interesting affair prepared by our driver in the back of the jeep and eaten by us standing in the windy, sandy desert, with mice waiting on the sidelines for our scraps! Our lodgings for the night were finally reached around 5pm and this was a hotel made from salt. Everything from the walls to the floors to the table and chairs were made of salt! This was our luxury night as we had our own room (shared bathroom though), could shower and had facilities to charge electronic devices until the generator switched off at 10pm. We were promised it would be warmer but it definitely wasn't, if anything it was colder! There was another group staying here so we felt we couldn't inflict our singing on them so had to be civilised and pass the evening chatting. We were all in bed for 10pm as the electricity went off and the fire was almost dead. It was another freezing cold night so I was just clinging to the fact that we would be in a warm bed tomorrow night!

Wednesday was the day we had all being waiting for, what the whole tour had been leading up to! We finally reached the salt flats! First stop was Cactus Island where we climbed on what can only be described as a huge mound of rocks in the middle of nowhere but boasted amazing views of the salt flats and we saw more cacti than anyone would ever want to see!

The next stop was the actual Salt Flats!! The middle of nowhere. You can see the blue sky meet the white plains of the salt flats with literally nothing else obstructing the view. It's as if we could see the curve of the Earth. As expected we took some time here to do the cheesy, typical photos but it was amazing. I was looking around in awe and couldn't believe we were actually here! It was amazing and definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far!

Me!

Ronan!

Ronan holding me (ignore water bottle)

Kate holding me and Alice

The rest of the day was basically lunch in another salt hotel and just taking in the view from the awe-inspiring salt flats before arriving to the Bolivian town of Uyuni at 2.30pm.

We were glad to have made it out safely especially as the driver told us horror stories of fatal crashes on the route in the past few weeks - not surprising really when we saw the driving styles of other tours so our good research definitely paid off!

Extreme adventures in Chile!

7th - 12th August 2012

We left Sydney at 9.30am on Tuesday 7th August and after a 16 hour flight, we arrived in Santiago, Chile on Tuesday 7th August at 11.30am! The flight was fine apart from no sleep again so we were wrecked arriving in Chile. In particular, I think the strange change in time zone really affected us as we ended up going backwards and gained a day!

Our hostel had our room ready when we arrived so we decided to get some sleep first of all. When we were shown to our room we were each handed a pair of earplugs which we figured didn't bode well for our stay!! Our room was right beside the kitchen so it was noisy during the afternoon but it turned out we were nearly always the last ones to bed so it was quiet enough at night! We set our alarms to wake up at 5pm but ended up sleeping through them and not waking until 7pm. Such a waste of the whole day! As we were so tired and didn't want to hunt out a decent restaurant we took the lazy way out and went out to a lonely planet recommended restaurant and it was only after we went in and sat down that we realised the whole menu was in Spanish! This would be tough enough on a normal day but coupled with jet-lag, made it impossible! Ronan decided to go for spaghetti bolgenese as it was easiest whereas I went for a dish with two words I thought I recognised - pollo (chicken) and broqueta (thought it was related to bruschetta) but turned out to be a chicken skewer thing which was yummy but Ronan didn't fare so well! After the fantastic food experiences we had in Asia it looked as if South America wasn't going to come close.

We went back to the hostel after dinner and I had a couple of drinks while we got chatting to a few others who were staying there. We were all interested in doing snowboarding so we decided to make a hostel day out of it with our new friends of two hours Sophie, Matt and Sol on Thursday. This seemed to be just the way South America is!

Wednesday morning we got up just in time for breakfast.  Breakfast in South America is a much more sociable affair than it is in Asia where we sat chatting to everyone else in the hostel for at least an hour before eventually heading out sightseeing. We mostly just walked around the city before getting the funicular up to a catholic shrine at the top of San Cristobal hill. After visiting so many sites of different religions over the past few months it was nice to be around our own religion for a change! It was really peaceful on top of the hill and had an amazing city view and view of the Andes

The steep funicular up to the top of the San Cristobal hill

The shrine at the top

Us chilling at the top appreciating the view

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On the way down we saw a dog using the funicular to get up and down the hill aswell, it´s amazing how it learned to do it!  After grabbing some lunch we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city and various markets. We spent most of the evening packing for snowboarding, getting stuff for lunch and having a few drinks with the others in the hostel. We had an early-ish night considering we were getting up at 6.30am tomorrow.

Even though breakfast isn't usually served until 8am, the hostel owner said he would do it for us early as we were leaving for snowboarding at 7am. It was just that sort of a place where they did anything they could to help! Although some of us who ate the eggs were feeling a little dodge so not sure if he actually did us a favour!

So the five of us from the hostel headed off at 7am and eventually arrived at the place where we were getting our equipment - snow jacket, trousers, gloves, snow boots and the snowboards. It took a while to be measured and get sorted but we were finally ready to hit the slopes at La Parve (beginners slope) at 11am. We had a group lesson for 10 people for two hours. To be honest I was actually rubbish and the instructor got a impatient with me! Apparently 'white girls are always so much trouble' according to the instructor. Nice! Towards the end of the lesson Ronan and Matt started showing me how to do it and I started to get it so just wish I had more time and less people in the group. Ronan was really good and got it super quickly. He was flying it until he fell and hurt his ass and decided he had enough! He gave it a really hard bang and it was so sore. We had all fallen on our asses so many times but think this was a particularly bad one!

Looks like a pro doesn´t he!

This is how I spent most of the time - on  my arse!

The hostel gang!

It was funny cos we had worn layers and then rented snow jackets thinking it was going to be absolutely freezing but once we started doing the snowboarding we were roasting!  Both of us want to do it again anyways but we were pretty happy that our first experience of it was in the Andes! We spent the rest of the afternoon after our lesson finished around these slopes and visiting another slope, Valle Nevada, which is a full proper ski slope for non-beginners. By the time we went to Valle Nevada we had given back our rented ski clothes and were absolutely frozen! It was proper cold as it was further up the mountain.
We eventually got back to the hostel around 7pm totally wrecked! The other guys were talking about going out but myself and Ronan were wrecked so he decided he wanted to cook dinner so we had a very civilised hostel dinner with vodka penne, bread and wine!! Totally yum! Everyone was too wrecked to go out so it was another few drinks in the hostel that evening!

Dinner cooked by Ronan

The next day was Friday which was our last day in Santiago so we did something I really wanted to do - a tour of the Concha y Toro vineyard which boasts the Casillero del Diablo brand as its most famous product. After another long leisurely breakfast we took public transport out to the vineyard and arrived a few minutes late for the tour so had to wait around until 2.30pm. At first we thought this would be annoying until we discovered the really nice restaurant where I was able to get a cheese plate and glass of wine while sitting out in the courtyard in the sun, sheer bliss! Totally different to yesterday spent in the snow in the mountains!

Vineyard Concho y Toro

Enjoying cheese, wine and sunshine!

On Saturday morning we were flying to San Pedro de Atacama. The buses were all booked out for the days we wanted and it turned out it was only €20 more expensive to fly and avoid a 24 hour bus journey! We actually had to fly to Calama which is an hour from San Pedro. When we arrived to Calama the tight backpacker-ness came out in us again when a dude tried to charge us $10,000 pesos (€16.60) but we had read it should only be $2,500 so we refused to get on the bus. All of a sudden the whole carpark of the airport emptied and we were left standing there with no one around and no idea what to do! We decided to get a taxi into the town and then try to get a bus from there. When we got to the bus terminal we realised that we had missed the bus and had to wait 2 hours for another! We were sitting in the waiting room with another woman  who had piles of bags beside her.  Her boyfriend came back and they gathered up all their stuff and headed down the street. Ronan decided to follow them in case they found another bus which was going earlier. So he stalked them down the street until they eventually turned around and asked him whether he was looking for a bus to San Pedro, he said he was so they brought him to the bus station to buy tickets for a bus that was leaving in 15 minutes! We got some of the last seats on the bus so it was good going and saved us so much time. The fact that we wasted so much of this extra walking about San Pedro trying to find our hostel is neither here nor there! When we finally found our hostel we discovered a male Chilean Alainn lived there! He was so cute and had the same mannerisms as Alainn so I felt like I was cheating on her hanging out with this other cocker spaniel!

The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth - some weather stations there have never recorded rain! San Pedro is at an altitude of 2,400m which means it has 30% less oxygen than we normally would have at sea level. We had to be careful to eat little and often, drink loads, avoid alcohol and walk slowly.

On the Saturday afternoon after we checked into our hostel, we got into the town and just went for a walk around. It's a really pretty town and looks really old fashioned as the whole town is UNESCO protected.

Just a normal day with a llama in the local shop

Pretty little heritage town

That evening we had booked a star gazing tour in the desert. This started at 9pm and while waiting for the bus we met Willy and Sarah, a couple from Killenny who were on the same trip. Turns out they were doing more or less the same trail as us for the next few weeks so we meet them on and off again loads of times over the next couple of weeks! As most of you know neither myself nor Ronan would be particularly big into astronomy but this tour was really good and I've honestly never seen as many stars in my life. It was crazy cold despite all the layers I was wearing so they gave us blankets to wrap around us! We saw things like the Southern Cross that we had never seen before as the sky looks different from the Northern Hemisphere. There were 10 telescopes pointed at different things like Saturn, different constellations etc. At the end we got cups of hot chocolate to warm us up before being dropped back into town around midnight. It was really good but we were so wrecked and only fit for bed afterwards!

The get-up of me in my warm Inca clothes!!

Sunday morning we decided to have a sleep in before heading into town to buy supplies for the three day tour we were starting the following day. We had to buy fruit, snacks like cereal bars, cream crackers, peanut butter etc. We also had to buy warm clothes like jumpers, gloves, woolly socks, scarves and warmer pants. We were warned that the salt flats tour was freezing so to wrap up! So we spent the morning shopping for supplies (spending all the cash we had!) before going on a 3pm desert tour to see the Valley of the Luna. This was basically going out to the Atacama desert to see various stone and sand formations carved by the wind and finally to a high viewing point to watch the sunset.

Valley of the Luna

Ronan´s arty shot!

Afterwards we went back into San Pedro and tried to go to the ATM. There were only two in the town and both were out of order! Due to our shopping spree earlier on we were completely out of cash! And we hadn't even had dinner yet! We tried to change some euros we had left but of course the only money exchange in town was trying to screw us with the rate! We ended up finding a restaurant that took credit card for dinner or else it would have been peanut butter sandwiches back at the hostel! It was annoying as we needed cash to bring on the tour. Anyways there was nothing we could do about the cash situation this evening so we headed back to the hostel after dinner and a few drinks to pack and get ready to leave.

How to get through Asia in 69 Days

During the first part of our honeymoon (bringing us as far as Sydney) we have travelled in excess of 28,874 kilometres
* 22,600km on planes
* 2,020km on trains
* at least 3,750km by road in buses, cars, tuk-tuks, motor and pedal rickshaws, etc...
* 500km on the back of motorbikes
* taken 11 boats, 4 bicycles, 2 kayaks, an elephant,  a funicular, a cable car, a toboggan, a quad bike and an unmeasurable distance walked or hiked


Here's a quick snapshot of what we've seen, learned or experienced :

* If you've got a horn - just beep it - you don't need an excuse!!

On the back of every truck in India

* Rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for dinner...
* China no prawn crackers (or manners)
* Their love of the forgotten classics from the 90's and early 2000's (so buying the best of S Club 7 when we get home)
* Moving from 5star treatment to struggling to come to terms with paying a tenner for a night's accommodation
* Goodbye to hygiene standards when it come to our culinary expectations

Footpath or chopping board???

Typical kitchen

* Sleeping on a bus for a night is a better option than travelling by day - don't miss a day and free accommodation!!
* Whatever you're buying it probably only costs 1/4 of the asking price (watch out Tesco I've gained mighty bargaining skills)
*  100's of uses for rice
* Whatever you have it'll fit on the back of a motorbike

Still alive

* Meeting other tourists and being best friends until tomorrow as we're unlikely to ever meet again (to borrow a term - "moment friends")
* If you can eat it you can roll it

* Even though most of our cheap stuff at home (especially clothes) is 'made in China' it's next near impossible to buy them over here as cheap!
* A 6 hour journey - "sure it's only over the road"
* What's health and safety?? It's not harming the Asians - there's billions of them!!
* Even someone who looks like a monk could be out to scam you - Never trust a Monk

Creepy monk statutes

* Plans can will and probably should change along the way - opens up more opportunities to see amazing parts of the world
* Discovery Channel rules! More often than not the only English we'd hear for weeks apart from each other!
* The excitement when you have more than the discovery channel in English
* How 8am is considered a sleep in even though we're on holidays - everything is best visited in the early morning (plus you dodge most other tourists)
* Many major Chinese tourist sights are somewhat dubious - ancient walls that have been rebuilt, 1000's of statutes that were stumbled upon by farmers (terracotta warriors), forcing animals that just want to be extinct to eat and have sex for survival (poor pandas)
* Not knowing what we're doing or where we'll be in 2 days time...
* I never figured out what happened to everyones hearing or why they all shout so loudly ALL DAY??
* A simple smile can break down any language barrier
* Knowing we will be back to see the rest (bar China of course)!!