Just deserts

After dawdling in Chile for an awfully long time we decided it was time to clock up some miles and took our first long-haul bus in the shape of a 23-hour journey from the capital, Santiago, up to San Pedro de Atacama in the north.

The name gives it away, San Pedro is in the Atacama desert which - as fans of Prof Brian Cox will know - is the driest desert in the world. This and the fact the town lies at 2,400m above sea level meant a perfect storm of morning dry mouth - yum! But it was only once we began our three-day journey higher into the Atacama (peaking at more than 5,000m) through Bolivian salt flats that the significantly lowered oxygen levels became obvious. Fortunately we were both just our of breath and not ill, unlike some unlucky friends in our tour group who were also taking altitude sickness pills!

San Pedro pretty much exists purely as a gringo launchpad to the many sights of the surrounding desert and this longer trip which we did, and deciding between tour companies was the hardest thing. There is a huge number, all of them offer more or less exactly the same thing and, annoyingly, all of them seem to have received good and bad reviews online. Basically, there is almost no way of choosing. We went for one that was recommended in Lonely Planet, but this by no means meant it was spotless - it had a lot of bad feedback online, too. But it was a good price ($70,000 or US$140 for three days including all food and accomodation) and we felt comfortable with the staff.

We chose Estrella del Sur and had an amazing experience with them. We can´t fault our driver Peter or trip, but this is essentially down to luck - another carload in our same trip had a driver who drank at every available opportunity...

Anyway, the journey was out of this world. After a few dodgy minutes getting Chris across the border into Bolivia without a small and flimsy but vital bit of paper, every minute of the three days held a new unbelievable sight. We saw vividly multicoloured mineral lagoons - pure white, swimming-pool green (thanks to a mouthwatering combination of arsenic, sulphur, copper and magnesium) and Heinz-cream-of-tomato-soup red. We swam (and crocced) in a spring like a bath. At what could have been the surface of the moon we saw gurgling geysers bubbling up grey mud and letting off steam like nobody´s business. We saw thousands of three kinds of wild flamingo - Chilean, Andean and James - all equally graceful, pink and lovely. We saw the Milky Way, shooting stars, the two Magellanic clouds and an electrical storm 100km off - and that was all just on the first day!

Our Toyota Landcruiser group was six Brits (the tour company took it upon themselves to split the travellers up into British, German and French groups) and we were all very tired after the first day and the shock of the altitude. The first night we slept at over 4,000m, which helped us adjust better by the second day.

Driving through the desert we saw countless weird and wonderful rock formations, a 1,000-year-old plant that looks like plastic greengrocer grass and grows at 1cm a year and a fantastic desert rabbit. He was bigger than a normal domestic rabbit, a dusty brown colour and sported huge droopy black whiskers like some sort of Chinese emperor and an extremely long tail with big tufts sticking up along it.

That night we stayed on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, which at 4,086 sq miles is the world´s largest salt flat. In places the salt is 15m thick, and we slept in a hotel built entirely from salt. Salt bricks, salt mortar, salt tables, salt chairs and naturally salt flooring, which we succeeded in dissolving a hole through thanks to a three-litre water bottle leak. Whoops.

A 4.30am start the next morning meant we experienced the salar for the first time as the sun rose over it.  It is a very strange thing; it looks like snow and crunches like snow but of course snow could never stay as pure white and flat. It´s the ultimate photographer´s studio because there is virtually no sense of perspective and so, after a trip to Isla Incahuasi - a cactus-covered island in the middle of the salar where Chris finally saw his first hummingbirds - we set about doing the only thing we could do in the situation ... we took silly photographs.

SARAH