Lizzie and Keith in South America

Jeep Tour - Day 2

Up bright and early! The second day saw us travel through more spectacular scenery. We stopped at a stunning lake, filled with flamingos, for a very nice lunch and then continued on to a little village for our second night.

Packing the jeep

The stone tree!

A little mountain rabbit.

Changing a flat tyre on one of the other jeeps.

Keith

Flamingos

A really great lunch with the jeep group.

A bed for the night in a Bolivian family´s home.

San Pedro (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia) Jeep Tour - Day 1

Keith and I had the most incredible 3 days travelling by jeep from Chile to Bolivia. We spent the majority of the trip stunned by the beautiful scenery. Day 1 began with a short bus ride to the Bolivian border. The photo above shows the border office.

The jeeps were waiting at the border. We had heard many horror stories about the tours that follow this route, with drivers being constantly drunk or falling asleep and dreadful food along with cold and nasty sleeping arrangements. We had therefore carried out a lot of reserach before booking with an agency and were quite relieved on meeting our guide, Alexandro, who had been driving for the company for over 10 years and seemed to take his job very seriously. He spoke no English but with the help of Keith´s improving spanish skills and a Brazilian guy in our group we were able to understand everything he explained to us.

A very remote outide toilet!

On the first day we quickly climbed out of San Pedro to the Bolivian mountains at 4500m where we got our first real taste of trying to breath at high altitude. Over the next few days we discovered that standing up to fast, sleeping and even taking a deep breath could leave you breathless at these altitudes.

We visited several vividly coloured lagunas nestled in amongst the mountains. High concentrations of different minerals cause the lagunas to be bright red, green, white or blue. We also travelled thorough several huge desert valleys scattered with huge wind sculptured rocks and saw countless flamingos.

Our jeep group - 3 Brazilians, 2 English and 1 Scot!

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Bubbling mud geysers at our highest point - 4970m

The stunning Laguna Colorada with 100´s of flamingos!

After visiting the lake we returned to our basic hostel for the night (6 to a room!) and had a lovely dinner. Unfortunately this was the night that the altitude really hit Keith and I and we were really sick for most of the late evening and throughout the night. Both of us had really terrible migraines and no painkillers would help. Luckily we woke feeling a lot better and by lunchtime of the second day we were feeling back to normal.

Despite the altitude sickness the first day was amazing!!

San Pedro de Atacama - Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley)

After a great tour of the geysers in the morning, we spent the evening in San Pedro de Atacama exploring the Moon Valley. The tour took us through the salt mountain range which is a 20 minute ride from San Pedro. The wind and atmospheric conditions have created a landscape which is said to resemble the surface of the moon. It was incredibly beautiful.

Death Valley

San Pedro de Atacama - Geysers & Cactus Trek

Following a 24 hour bus ride from Santiago we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama in the north of Chile. The following day we were up at 5am to get a minibus to the Tatio Geyser field 90km from San Pedro. It was freezing (minus 6) and dark as we made our way around the different geysers but the view was quite amazing.

Spectacular

After a couple of hours walking around the different geysers we were able to bathe in the hot pools. At 4200mt this was the highest altitude we had been at and we both felt quite breathless. Unfortunately Keith started to feel really sick so we skipped the pool.