From Pucon I caught a bus 6 hours further south to Puerto Montt which is the main jumping off point for boats around Patagonia. I'm going to have to come back here another time to go further south through the lakes to the Tierra del Fuego and the Perito Moreno glacier as I'd love to see more of Patagonia. However, it requires a number of things I don't have right now (time, money and thermals being the most important). So, from Puerto Montt I took the trip acr...

Over the course of 2 days in Santiago we took a red bus tour of the city like proper tourists, wandered round barrio Bellavista, took a very bumpy and slightly worrying cable car up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal and saw the huge white statue of the Virgin at the top, explored the old town centre, Plaza de Armas, frescoed Catedral, National Congress Building and the Mercado Central where we had lunch at one of the many fish restaurants (squid in garlic butter)...

Mendoza is the centre of Argentina's wine making industry so as soon as we arrived there, Amerjit & I signed up for a trip round two bodegas and to taste their wines. The first was medium sized and the second was a small family-run place which exports all of it's wine to the US, to Kentucky to be exact, which the Americans in the tour group found amusing as residents of Kentucky are not known for their wine appreciation. Anyway, I've now decided that I real...

I arrived in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile on Wednesday 19th November with the crowd I'd been with on the Salt Flats trip and had a few lazy days there. Over the next few days I tried sandboarding, visited an observatory and ate a number of fantastic empanadas (130 different flavours). The sandboarding was really good fun but a lot more knackering than I'd anticipated. Going down the hills on the sandboard was the easy bit, it was climbing back up to the top of...

In Uyuni I hooked up with a bunch of other people who were looking for the same tour I was - the 3 day trìp across the salt flats and the Atacama desert. Eventually we settled on a tour guide, had celebratory pizzas and drinks and then set off the following morning in two 4WD jeeps. Our first stop was at the locomotive graveyard. The trains were brought over from the UK in the 1800's for use at the many gold and silver mines which existed nearby. When the mine...