San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

We arrived in the little town of San Pedro de Atacama where we had to go through passport control and got another stamp on our passports. Then we had to get our rucksacks off the bus and bring them into a little office to be passed through the scanner.
After some confusion as to which direction we had to go and having to walk through the hot sun, we eventually found our lovely little hostel, Hostel Tatais, where we were staying for the night. After having a little rest and getting ourselves sorted, we headed into the town. The beautiful white painted buildings had the feeling of being on holidays in a Mediterranean country.
Because we were only in Chile for one day and to avoid the fees for withdrawing money from the ATM, we went to a Casa de Change to exchange our leftover Bolivian Bolivanos for some Chilean Pasos. After separating apart our accommodation money, we were left with around €7 spending money to 'splash' out on food and snacks. We went to the local shop and bought some supplies for the bus the next day. We went back to the hostel for lovely hot showers and dinner before trying to settle the bill with the hostel. This was when we realised we had made a boo boo in our calculations. The hostel hadn't added in the tax the initial booking so we actually had less 'spending money'. We frantically went scrambling through our purses to see how much cash we had and how much was left over. When it came down to it we had to scrap the planned taxi trip to the bus station the following morning and instead went on foot.
Our Andesmar bus to Salta in Argentina was due to depart at 9am however we sat on the bus for an hour before leaving. While waiting we were given so called 'breakfast and lunch packs' for the journey. Inside the brown paper bags were multiple cakes and sweets, great healthy food indeed!
We eventually arrived at the Chile/Argentina border at midday, where again there was a lot of waiting around. It look us two hours to get out passports stamped and to put our bags through the scanner before we were finally were on the way to Salta along the apparent 'most beautiful road' in the road, so we sat back and enjoyed the views!Read more