San Pedro de Atacama, a frontier town of the Atacama Desert, was supposed to be a base from which to visit the Bolivian Salt Flats in Uyuni. The day before we were due to depart on our Uyuni adventure, we ran into a bedraggled Dutch girl who related her tales of woe on the very trip we were about to undertake. She and a number of other tourists had been taken hostage for nine hours by a rabble of drunken miners in San Cristobel who were striking in demand for electricity, running water and other such luxuries. How unreasonable, we thought. Apparently the disgruntled miners threw rocks and (presumably empty) booze bottles at the tourist vehicles, the passengers of which only managed to escape when the rioters finally fell asleep in a boozy stupor. Well, we didn't fancy that so much. Postponing our Salt Flats trip, we were forced to find other, hopefully safer, activities to fill our time in San Pedro. We took an excursion to the Valle de Luna, a spectacular moonscape that resembled the location of a Star Wars film. Next we took to the saddle again, this time to the neighbouring Death Valley. I mean, I like horses as much as the next woman, but riding along narrow, crumbling ridges didn't do my vertigo any favours. Not least when my rogue steed resolved to gallop off up a rock in the opposite direction to where Matty and our flowing-locked guide were heading. Once the praying and cursing had subsided, the trek was quite spectacular actually. The arid, mountainous desert vistas were truly something to behold and proved a worthy distraction from clinging on to my saddle and wailing like a tantrum-stricken toddler.
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