After landing at Santiago we caught a bus to Valparaiso. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Valpo (as the locals call it) developed as an important and increasingly affluent port town, although it's prominence quickly diminished following the opening of the Panama Canal. Now Valpo is known as the legislative and cultural capital of Chile. 

The city consists of dozens of hills, each forming a separate neighborhood with a unique personality. The common theme is lots of colorful mansions, steep stair cases, street art, narrow alleyways and century old funiculars. This mix has earned Valpo world heritage recognition and somehow complements the city's otherwise gritty (read dirty) feel.

The Valpo walking tour came highly recommended, and we found that it was the best way to get our bearings before embarking on our own self-guided walking tours. 

For Cindy, one of the highlights of her time in Valpo was the best coffee she'd had since she'd left Melbourne, which appropriately enough came from a cafe called Melbourne that was owned by a Aussie and featured plenty of photos of our former home. We also enjoyed a really nice dinner, complete with a spectacular view of the city, with a Swiss friend we met on our salt flats tour.

While in Valpo we visited its more glitzy (but less interesting) neighbor, Viña del Mar, which features more modern buildings and white sand beaches (but not much else).

Next stop was Santiago, which to be brutally honest was the most disappointing place we've visited so far (even accounting for the fact that we had tried to temper our expectations on advice from other travelers). The postcard scene of a sun kissed metropolis surrounded by snow capped mountains is extremely rare, in large part due to the thick layer of smog that often covers the city. There are some nice old buildings and streets, but they are relatively scarce. It's also not a foodie's paradise, with quality and value generally lacking. It does however host one of the best museums either of us have visited, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which reflects on the still very controversial Pinochet era in a tasteful and respectful way.

The highlight of our time in Santiago was enjoying a four-hour lunch with one of Cindy's friends, his brother and his sister-in-law. Another highlight, having spent the previous month in countries not taking part in the World Cup, was seeing that there is a lot of excitement and anticipation in Chile about the Mundial. There's also a fair bit of nervousness as Chile has been drawn in a group featuring not only the two finalists from the 2010 World Cup but also the footballing superpower of Australia. In all seriousness though, the Chileans we met were all very polite about the socceroos, even pretending to be worried that they could cause an upset in Chile's first game.

Given the time of year and Cindy's general dislike of all things cold, we decided not to go further south to Patagonia (which admittedly offers many of Chile's main attractions). Instead we headed across the Andes to Argentina knowing that we'll have to come back to the south of Chile another time.

The town of Uyuni is about a six hour bus trip away from Sucre and doesn't have much to offer downtown. As with most travelers, what brought us there was that the town acts as a gateway to the largest salt flats in the world.

Three-day tours from Uyuni, through the salt flats and the Bolivian part of the atacama desert, finishing in Chile, are less than $200 each and are actually the cheapest way to get to Chile from Bolivia. The advantage is that you get to see some spectacular scenery along the way.

We chose one of the most reputable and most expensive companies for our tour. There have been plenty of tourists who have died on cheaper tours because of drunk guides/drivers so we were happy to give them a miss. Even then, as a couple we met in La Paz told us, this is Bolivia and some of the better companies can be dodgy. The altitude of the tour varies between 3600 and 5000 meters, and the girl we met had got quite sick. Her tour operator gave her aspirin without telling her what it was and when she got an allergic reaction he refused to drive her to hospital (despite being told by a doctor that she'd die otherwise) until her husband, together with other kind tourists, produced a $400 cash incentive.

Luckily our tour wasn't that eventful. We started in Uyuni early in the morning before heading to a nearby town where locals took salt from the flats to make salt bricks (for building houses) and table salt. Although no permits are required to extract the salt (apparently they have more than they know what to do with), it's not a particularly lucrative business; large salt bricks are worth 15 cents each and packaging a metric tonne of table salt in one kilo bags earns locals less than 10 dollars.

We spent the rest of the first day on the massive salt flats themselves, taking lots of silly perspective shots (Sam thought a few too many) and enjoying a stunning sunset. We were able to get a great view of the scale of the flats from the central Inca Wasy island, a rocky hill full of cactus and petrified coral (a reminder that thousands of years ago, before the water evaporated to leave just huge amounts of salt, this area was part of the ocean). Our first night's accommodation was at a modest hostel here the walls, bed frames, chairs etc were all made out of salt bricks.

Day two started early as we drove from the edge of the salt flats to the neighboring desert. Over the course of the day we traversed the Bolivian side of the Chilean border and saw plenty of flamingos, unusual rock formations, volcanos and lagoons. At sunset we visited a field of geysers near the top of a semi active volcano, which at over 5000 meters was the highest we'd ever been. It was also the coldest part of our trip. At our hostel only a few hundred meters down the hill Cindy put on five layers of clothes before crawling into her sleeping bag, layering on blankets and complaining about still being cold. It didn't help that we had to sleep with the door open because of the scarcity of oxygen.

On the third day we visited one last lagoon before catching a bus across the border to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. Although San Pedro is a rustic little town, we quickly realised we'd crossed into a more developed country. Almost all of the cars in town had been built this millennium, many of them in Europe. Unfortunately, prices were substantially higher, with very average meals costing more than Bolivian fine dining.

Tourists use San Pedro as a base to take day tours featuring geysers, lakes and all sorts of other things we'd already seen plenty of in the preceding couple of days on our way across from Uyuni. One unique sight is the Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), a rocky red desert valley that really looks, as the name suggests, unworldly. Seeing the sun set over the valley was a particular highlight. After a couple of relaxing days in San Pedro de Atacama we took a short bus ride to the larger, but unremarkable, town of Calama to catch a flight to Santiago