Desert Meets Jungle

We left Rio and took a flight back to Santiago as its one of the main hubs in SA and decided to head north as unfortunately Patagonia was too difficult and expensive to get too!  We stayed in a really nice hostel, its was a very old building in the centre with lots of character and charm, for one night and the following day headed to the bus station to catch a bus to La Serena.

La Serena is Chile's second oldest city and had a nice vibe to it, small but it had character, with lots of churches and museums.  Funny enough X Factor Chile was going on whilst we were there, very weird.
The next evening we took a night bus to San Pedro de Atacama in the Atacama desert - the driest desert in the world!!  But yep it rained 3 afternoons out of the 4 we were there, just typical.  However, it did not spoil it and was actually quite refreshing.  We spent most of our time in the desert walking and taking in the sights.

We saw the cactus valley, flamingoes, Valle de Luna.  One of the highlights of the day for me, was spending a couple of hours walking through the cactus valley, over the rocks and through the water falls. After this we went to a great spot to wait for the sun to set.  It was one of the greatest sun sets I have seen. Another morning we were up at 4am to drive up to 4300m and see the El Tatio geysers.

We were hoping to get to Bolivia next and take a tour over the salt flats from San Pedro to Uyuni but the weather was too bad and tours had stopped or were missing loads of good stuff out.  So we changed our plans and decided to head into Peru instead and take a trip down the Amazon - what a great choice!

The Rio Amazonas was just amazing - but first we had to get there from San Pedro.  We had a fair bit of travelling to do, a 10hr night bus followed by a 2hr taxi ride across the boarder, one flight to Lima then another flight to Iquitos. Iquitos is a crazy place with nothing but motorbike taxis and motorbikes the noise is immense.
After a well needed sleep we were met by our tour guide, Walter, at 9 am for a tour around the local market 'Belem'.  Belem Market is interesting to say the least! We saw everything from  plants, fruits, natural medicines, chickens, turtles, socks, clothes and even a giant catfish with it's head cut off but heart still beating (gross) pretty much anything you could ever want!!

Our tour guide Walter is from a small village in the Amazon but now lives in Iquitos and loves the jungle as it's his home. He spent most of the time with us trekking through the jungle chopping everything out of our way with his machete whilst keeping his eyes peeled for snakes (of which we encountered an extremely dangerous one!! Not good) iguanas, frogs, monkeys, spiders, birds, dolphins, sloths, lizards etc.

The jungle lodge we stayed in was really good with a great hammock room to chill in after a morning in the jungle. It also had a few resident guests - two macaws Ara & Azur, Te-Wan the Toucan, two eagles, a cayman and a deadly snake amongst all the wild frogs, cayman, snakes, spiders etc which just live in the jungle.

We spent 4 nights and 5 days in the jungle and got to see a couple of neighbouring villages where the locals live - a real eye opener to these people & there way of living.  Most of the food they eat is grown locally by them or taken to Belem market & sold for them to buy other food, as well as fish they catch.

We spent a morning fishing for Pirahna, which was great, and whilst I don't want to bragg I did catch the biggest one of the day!  That evening we got to taste our delicious catch.  I had never eaten Piranha but it was actually quite nice.  J was not too happy as he only managed to catch a small Piranha on the day..

On our last day in the Amazon we were taken to Oran, the next village along, to get our boat down river to the tri-boarder of Brazil, Peru and Columbia. After 8hrs we arrived in Santa Rosa to get our passports stamped and a quick boat ride to the Colombian boarder town of Leticia. We have one night here and then onto Bogota tomorrow the capital city- Columbia here we come!!