Afternoon all,

Since we left Potosi, we went to the Salt flats in Salar De Uyuni. This was a 3 day tour taking in the salt flats, obviously! and various lakes, Flamingoes, volcanoes and the world highest desert as we made our way to the Chilean border point at San Pedro de Atacama.

The tour was good, great great sites marred by crap accomodation and an idiot for a guide ..oh and two rude Slovak people, but nevermind it was worth the hassle and Salt flats are definately our highlight of Bolivia.

We arrived in San Pedro after a sleepless night, scoffed at the fact that Chile is about 100x more expensive than Bolivia and Peru and then promptly booked ourselves on a sunset tour of the Atacama desert. This was very good and the definately worth a look if you happen to be in the area. So, still tired after the night before we decided the most logical thing to do was to hit the town abit and moan, in a very british way, about the price of beer in this country. After lots of whinging we hit the sack at about 3 am.

We left San Pedro a couple of days later on a 23hr bus ride down to Santiago where we met up with a friend from our African tour. Santiago was nice, we savoured our first Chilean Steak ( damn good) and our first Chilean wine ( even better!) and had a nosey about the city for a day or two. It´s very nice, not exactly world class, but not bad. Unfortunately the earliest bus we could get to the south of the country was at 11.45pm, so we had an extra day in the city and watched a couple of films, Rob´s recommendation of the week is "Valkyre"

Our 15hr (getting the jist? Chile is a long country) bus ride to Pucon was fine and we managed to get a nice room at a german guesthouse in the town. The town could be any alpine town, it's strangly familiar to anyone who´s been skiing in the alps. We had hoped to climb the active volcano that is here but cloud cover over the next few days was too bad and no trips were going up the mountian. Only once we had bought our ticket out of there did the clouds begin to clear!..but still not enough for us to go up so we left Pucon safe in the knowledge we hadn´t missed to much...and anyway it wasn´t like it was spitting out lava or anything so why bother going up in the first place...it's just a mountain ( funnily enough there are lots around this neck of the woods and one does really begin to look like another...we think its called the Andes)

From Pucon we headed over the border to Argentina to a town called Bariloche. Very nice it is too. The drive over the Lake district area of the andes was great and as Bariloche is slap bang in the Argie side of the Lake district and we were stuck here for a day longer than expected so we hired a car and headed out to see the "7 Lakes"...it´s not quite as dramatic as it sounds but a lovely drive and glad we did it. We tasted some great great Steak here and manage to nail two bottles of Malbec ( thanks for the tip everyone).

After a bone crunching, mind knumbling boring 30hr bus ride we arrived at El Calafate. A nice enough town ( Steaks not quite a good as Bariloches) but the main draw here is the massive Perito Merino Glacier. The only advancing glacier in the southern hemisphere bar antartica. Great chunks of it cleave off every hour or so and it´s great to hear one crash in to the lake. You never see any of it of course, because as soon as you back is turned or you switch off you camera it happens, the cheeky b´stard. Definately a top five destination for patagonia.

We left there a few days ago and have just got back from a day tour around the Torres Del Paine. Once again more mountains but they are defiantely the best we have seen in this part of the world, if not the entire trip. We started out with bad weather and didn´t get a great view of the three main Torres towers but as we progressed it cleared up and the views of the rest of the park were great. A very beautifull park that you could easily spend a few days here.

Tomorrow we head to Ushuaia, the southern most city in the world. We are both looking forward to it and will give us time to rest a bit before getting our flight to Buenas Aires and then the Brazilian beaches.

Sorry for the abruptness and bad grammer ( like our other are perfect!?) but Rob´s bored of the computer and is hungry.

Take care

Rob and Steph xx