Salt flats continued...

Day 2 of the salt flats was just a massive driving day. which was exhausting on the bumpy roads. We drove through different coloured deserts and stopped at 3 different lagoons to see Flamingos which was pretty cool. That night at the hostel we played card games and scattegories then we set off Antheas fireworks. It was another beautiful clear night but much colder.

We had to be up at 5.30 again to get to the geysers. it seems they are at their best before the sun rises because they are stemay, once it heats up you can´t see the steam anymore. They were very impressive, the first one we visited was just a 20cm diametre hole with steam shooting out of it and we were able to leap through it which was good fun. Although the steam made your clothes feel damp which made us feel even colder. Then we went over to the main geysers which from a distance just look like a massive cloud of steam but you can walk all through the bubbling mud pits and at some points the path gets very thin between to boiling pits, and apparently some people have fallen in before because they weren´t paying attention. While we were wandering around the geysers the sun came up from behind the mountains.

From here we went to the thermal pools, they were on the edge of a hot water lagoon, it was dam hard getting changed and geting in the water cos it was soo cold outside but it was great once we were in. After the geysers we had a massive pancake breakfast and we also had this odd mix of cereal, yogurt fruit and bon bons (they´re chocolates) which i was told was very nice but i just ate pancakes cos i love them.

From here we had to hurry to the border cos we were running late for our transfer to Chile. The transfer took us to San Pedro and it was so nice to drop in altitude because the geysers were at 4800m and that is exhausting. At the immigration office i was a bit worried because a hostel i had stayed at in La Paz had emailed me telling me i hadn´t paid my bill and they´re going to report me to immigration, the police and blacklist me at other SA hostels. But i had paid my bill and i emailed them to tell them that and they never replied. So at immigration the man spent like 2 minutes looking from my passport to a list of names on the wall but eventually he stamped my passport and let me through. Then we had to get our entire bags searched. But we all got through without a problem and arrived in San Pedro de Atacama.

San Pedro has been really nice, we haven´t done alot yet, just wandered around the town, soaked up the sun and had a few meals out. It been great to feel warm again, to be at a lower altitude (around 2500m) and to sleep in. And i finally got a hot shower after over a week of cold showers in Bolivia. The girls warned me that the guys in Chile are the hottest in all of South America and they are not wrong. We went out for drinks last night and our waiter was gorgeous.
We then went to another bar and we found the drinking rules in San Pedro are quite weird. You have to remain seated when drinking and there always has to be food on the table so on every table you can see a dish of pasta that no one will ever eat. The bars can be fined if they don´t follow these rules. So 2 hippies claiming they were following the seated rule invited themselves over to our table and just wouldn´t stop talking, one of them told me i had beatiful hair and another told Katrina she was the most beautiful girl in all of New Zealand. We couldn´t get them to go away so eventually we left. Which was a shame cos the hot waiter had just arrived at this bar too :p

Today we´re going horseriding and then tonight we´re going star gazing with telescopes in the middle of the desert, so it should be a good day.