Mega-Post: Salta (Argentina); San Pedro de Atacama (Chile); Uyuni (Bolivia)

It's a big couple of weeks in this update as we bid goodbye to the big, flat Pampas and Chaco and say yo to the long, tall Andes and Altiplano.

Salta
Last time on theTravellingWoods we were larging it as best we could in Asuncion. From here we bus it to Resistencia in Argentina, and thence to Salta in the North-east of the country. At first look it's just another town, another grid of one-way streets, another set of churches. Our first stop is the municipal camp-site next to a council estate. There's a horrid empty lido next to the horrid wonky tents that are already pitched on horrid dirty ground. And people are living here: gypsy kids run riot, the bath block is disgusting.

We're disheartened, and return to the town centre to find a hostel. From this point on, things look up. There are lots of tourists like us about, and that means there are bars and restaurants aplenty. The main square is quite charming, even when taken over for a farmers' demonstration, and the churches are actually pretty cool too. There's even a cable car (or 1070 steps) up the hill.


- Splendidly ostentatious churchery in Salta

But the main event is out of town. We take a car and guide, the feisty Raul, for a day-trip up into the mountains, following the route of the now defunct Train of the Clouds. Wow! The valleys and passes are breathtaking ... at 4100m we're reeling about feeling more than a little nur. Out come the coca leaves: a wad in the cheek does seem to do something for us, and keeps the queasiness bottled up until our lunch in a pueblito on the high plain.

El Mojon is a one-llama town, with a solar oven (a great big reflecting mirror on a gimbal), a globe of wires hooked up to the town's only mobile phone, and a tiny greenhouse where chilli, celery and even vines are growing. The restaurant is charming, with salt-block tables and cactus-wood doors and ceiling panels. We eat the only llama, on tagliatelle, and a mug of coca tea washes it down. Show us more! There's a nice salt-flat (although nothing to what comes in Bolivia), then a majestic high pass where vicuña roam and a Chilean lorry has beetled onto its back. The colours of the rocks in the Vale de Huamahuaca are entirely amazing, and seemingly uncapturable on camera.


- Cactile fun


- First taste of the high life. Dizzying stuff


- Lunch: tagliatelle with Llama sauce, cactus-wood bread-bowl, salt table


- The cutest church in the Altiplano


- A bendy bit of road which goes on forever

On the way back into Salta, Raul turns to politics, and explains why the Falklands are Argentinian territory (they even get a mention on the weather forecasts), recounting with unerring accuracy the background, crucial events, dates and numbers of casualties of the conflict in '82. Raul is 25, half-Chilean, drives a fiat 600 and wants a proper sound system for it. We quickly put war-talk behind us

San Pedro de Atacama
From Salta, it's a 10-hour bus ride into Chile, through the high Paso de Jama and tracts of extraordinary desolation, in the daytime for a change. The Chilean and Argentinian border posts are 160km apart, such is the lack of anything up here.

San Pedro is, indeed, in the Atacama desert. It's a low-rise town of adobe buildings. We again try our luck with campsites, but one is just a dust-bowl, and the other is truly squalid: two tight lines of tents ranked either side of an open culvert. We find a hostel instead. San Pedro is all about the tourists, unlike the picture painted in the recent "Tropic of Capricorn" programme on the Beeb. There are hundreds of grubby Europeans and Americans here, getting hot and bothered about geysers and sand-boarding, and spending wads on flash food and pisco sours. It's the most expensive place we've been by far.


- Adobe style in San Pedro, outside our favourite restaurant


- Inside our favourite restaurant. Love and Pisco!

We get out of town on foot and bicycles. Riding (well, mainly pushing) one's bike through the Vale del Muerte is exhilarating and extremely knackering: low oxygen levels, a relentless sun, and lots of sand are the norm, but the views are splendid. We also hike up to a nearby ruin of a pre-Incan civilisation, Pukara, sensibly positioned on a steep little hill. From here one can really see why anybody chose to build in this unpromising bit of desert, for there is a running stream, and an oasis of trees and shrubs.


- Heading off with hope into the Vale del Muerte. About 5 minutes later we started pushing


- Now, what do you think this means? Aliens? Sign at the entrance to Pukara


- Up in Pukara, the oasis of San Pedro and great big volcanoes in the background

Into Bolivia, to Uyuni
From San Pedro there is but one way to get into Bolivia: on a 4x4 tour. We travel with four others: a tall Swiss couple, a spiritual Frenchman, and a Belgian teacher. Our driver is the taciturn Bolivian, Sr. Toro. He looks a little like Harvey Keitel, with one cheek a-bulge with coca leaves. His steering wheel is emblazoned with a golden, slinky, girl motif and he wears an F1-style boiler suit. From time to time he removes the ignition key, while we're moving, to spool a music cassette. His favourite is an 80's mix tape, that he plays repeatedly. Eventually, we're reduced to fits as Kim Wilde fires up yet again. We convince him to play some latino beats instead.


- Bo-liviant!

This is a truly spectacular business, taking three days, and visiting some of the most unearthly places on, well, Earth. We're talking green lagoons, hot springs and bubbling mud, red lakes coated with borax and studded with flamingoes, snow-capped volcanoes, deserts, wind-sculpted rocks, enormous salt flats. The nights up here, at over 4000m, are freezing cold, and turning over under the heavy blankets leaves one breathless and headachey, with or without Coca leaves. Hard to descibe adequately, so here are some snaps.


- The famously otherwordly Laguna Verde


- Hot springs at 4000m


- The gorgeous Laguna Colorado where we stayed for a frightfully cold night


- wearing all of our clothes. Bloody freezing, it being 4600m up, with a gale blowing


- Bubbly, stinky stuff at 5000m


- The stone tree, wind-sculpted for your pleasure


- Just swinging in a tumbleweed rail-town


- Dreaming of stowing away

Eventually we cross the immense Uyuni salt lake. We should be listening to a symphony in salt-flat, instead we get Dire Straits.


- The Salar de Uyuni is the perfect place for silly pictures like this. There's 12,000 square kilometers of the stuff


- We were chased off this cactus island in the salt-lake by a man on a bicycle and his dogs

On the far side of the Salar we are dropped in the tiny railroad town of Uyuni, the next step to La Paz, more of which later...