A quick stop off and some very fine bread!

An Oasis in the land of dried out bread
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After rather a long boarder crossing from Bolivia to Chile where we were made to stand on disinfectant sponges and have our bags rummaged through, we arrived in San Pedro in the middle of the Chilean desert.

The town itself is quite small and seems to revolve around the masses of tourists that pass over the border from Bolivia and then the other way. Most people use San Pedro as a stop off in transition, just like we were going to do! Or so we thought.....

the most beautiful Boulangerie ever!!

Mmmmm, what good food
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We needed to travel across to Igazu in Argentina in the next 5 days in order to catch our flight to Buenos Aires. Quite a lot of distance to cover and we needed to move on from San Pedro quickly. However, we hit our first bit of bad travel karma. It turned out there were only 3 buses a week to leave San Pedro for Salta in Argentina and we had just missed one. The next bus to leave would be on the Friday, 4 days away and after that the Sunday, both buses' were also fully booked! This just didn't work for us and we weren't sure what we were going to do. Luckily as we were asking around it seemed that there were a few of us that all needed to get to Salta as soon as possible. With a 20 strong team we headed over to a travel agent and within an hour we  had chartered our own bus, what's more is that it didn't cost much more than the local bus would have, fantastic!

And a pleasant garden cafe
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So with a departure time of 3pm we had just enough time to say our fairwells to Ali (she was off to Peru), exchange some books and find some food and Chilean money. Our luck had changed and right next to the ATM was the most beautiful Boulangerie ever!! It had the freshest baguettes, loaves and croissants, all of which had been lacking from our diet in Peru and Bolivia. Two Olive breads and a couple of croissants later we had our packed lunch for our travels!

Our coach arrived no problems but Callum ended up straining his back lifting his very full rucksack on to the roof and spent the journey in pain, not even Olive bread would help! After crossing the border in to Argentina and changing vehicles we finally arrived in to Salta at about 2am.  Not wanting to search all over town for a hostel at that time of night we went with the drivers suggestion, not fantastic but it would do.........and poor Mel had to share a room with us!! Oh well we had made it!!