Well i know its been a while since an update but with the whole of Bolivia seemingly all connected to the same 512k Internet connection combined with a lack of patience and laziness means not much has resulted.

From Machu Picchu we went to Lake Titicaca to look at the reed islands and to have a home stay with a Peruvian family. The home stay with the family was very weird....i say family we ended up with an old guy who lived on his own and didn't speak a word of English so with just our limited broken Spanish it made for an entertaining evening! The one good point was that we played a football game against the local guys with team GAP winning hands down....not bad seeing as we were playing at nearly 4000m.

We then had a bus to La Paz in Bolivia. Driving into the city is quite an experience, La Paz is situated in a valley and they've pretty much built houses on every piece of land possible (built is probably to strong a word when talking about houses in Bolivia though). Not a particularly nice city but it gave us a chance to ride down death road which was brilliant. Basically 46km of downhill on a mountain bike with a 600m drop on one side of the track.

From there we went onto Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosi and onto the salt flats at Uyuni. The salt flats were really cool, you may have seen some photos from there with just a vast white expanse where the lakes have dried up over thousands of years and just left the salt behind. This was a 3 day 4x4 trip across picking up the various sights on the way. It also gave another chance for team Gap to defend their unbeaten football record when playing some more locals and our drivers. We prevailed again.

This was the point where we crossed over to Chile to a town called San Pedro De Atacama. A very laid back place that looked a bit Mexican, which might have explained why a German film company decided to use the place as a Mexican backdrop, they even changed the Chilean border crossing with Mexican flags. Money talks i guess. With the cloudless skies and no light pollution the area is very big on star gazing with many big observatories near by. We visited a smaller one to learn about the stars and have a closer look at a few. The guide had a laser pointer that he used to pick out certain stars in the night sky which was pretty cool. He wouldn't part with it though.

Next stop was Chile's largest northern city called La Serena. You could almost be in Europe now, large shopping malls, good food, buildings that look like they've been built to last longer than than the next big gust of wind. Managed to watch the new James bond movie here which was in English, we didn't think much of it (don't believe the pictures of the Bolivian bus driving on a paved road....they don't exist!)

We're now in Chile's capital Santiago, which is a very nice city. We did a wine tour today at the famous Conchay y Toro vineyard, which we thought was a must as we're getting to this part of South America. Also looking forward to the steaks and wine in Argentina. We've worked out we're in Buenos Airies for a Boca Juniors football match so we're trying to sort that out as well which should be amazing.

Thats all for now folks, I'll upload some photos tomorrow.