We arrived into San Pedro de Atacama around lunch time and checked into our extremely quirky accommodation, just a short walk from the border crossing. There were three cats, skeleton heads, cacti paraphernalia and a weird dolls house but the accommodation itself was comfortable and gave us the chance to unwind and get away from the chaos of the main street.

It didn’t take us long to figure out this was not a town for us. Overrun by tourists, the main streets were buzzing with travel agents, overpriced restaurants and a noticeable lack of ATMs. We arranged to meet the rest of the Uyuni tour group that night as it was the Hottest 100 back at home and the Aussies were keen to celebrate. Unfortunately, the night didn’t go exactly to plan with the bar which was the meeting point being closed when we arrived. Bryan, Adam and I managed to find the only bar that would have us if we weren’t eating and we sat in the noisy club, had one drink and we were all done. The sleepless nights in the Uyuni had caught up with us.

We had luckily only booked 2 nights’ accommodation, so we spent our days planning for what was next on the agenda. We couldn’t decide between heading to Salta in Argentina by bus or heading to Santiago by plane. We headed to the bus stop to get some prices and to our surprise our decision had already been made for us. For the first time in our whole trip, there were no buses to Salta for 6 days. So, we were off to Santiago.