Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina again, Bolivia and Chile

Yes, these last few days have been rather hectic! Well, we have to say that we only actually spent half an hour in Brazil, while in transit from Argentina to Paraguay...
So we left Puerto Iguazu in Argentina for Ciudad del Este, in Paraguay, a strange and dark town which felt like it was crawling with underground activity. A guy in a t-shirt and baseball cap stamped our passports, laughed at me when he saw I was French (we had just lost 4-1 to Holland in the euro 2008) and litterally gave us the thumbs up to cross the border.
From there we took buses, overflowing with passengers and stopping every 5 minutes to let someone on or off, and frequented by people selling socks, sunglasses, lottery tickets or "chipas" (a kind of cheesy bread which quickly became our staple), sometimes aged 7 or 8, who board the bus, work their way round the pasengers and get off at the next stop.
We visited some Jesuit ruins in Jesus and Trinidad (trinity) near Encaranacion (incarnation) in the South of the country, before going back up to Asuncion (ascension), the capital city. The town itself is a mixture of modern hotels, colonial buildings and shantytown districts. Paraguay is the second poorest South American country after Bolivia, and the gap between rich (living in mansions surrounded by electric fences) and poor is immense.
From Asuncion we were intending on carrying on towards Bolivia via the rough plains of Northern Paraguay, called the Chaco, but the prospect of spending 4 or 5 days on buses to reach our destination, Uyuni in South Western Bolivia, cooled us down a bit.... Yes, we chickened out of it and decided to take the comfortable, safe and quick route via Argentina. It proved to be a fantastic decision (albeit a bit of a random one) as we reached Uyuni in 48 hours and via an extremely scenic route, as we ascended towards the Andes, leaving behind modernity to enter the world of square mud houses, herds of llamas and women in bowler hats and colorful skirts and shawls. From Asuncion we took a bus to Resistencia, in Argentina, where we arrived just on time for the night bus to Salta, which we reached just in time for the morning bus to the Bolivian border. We walked the border between La Quiaca, at the Northern tip of Argentina, and Villazon, at the Southern tip of Bolivia, and found a hotel with hot water (a comodity that we really missed in Paraguay, where it was freezing cold.... the winters here in the tropics are dry, sunny and cold) where we nursed our bouts of altitude sickness. The symptoms include headache, dizziness, nausea, insomnia and breathlessness, especially when walking around with a big pack on the back!
The next day a bolivian bus (read : quite rusty and creeky, but at least it wasn't taking any more passengers than seats) took us the 200 km to Uyuni in... 8 hours! Let me explain : only 5% of Bolivian roads are paved, and they are all around La Paz, the capital city... Our road was the dustiest, narrowest, rockiest, bumpiest, most dangerous and most breathtakingly scenic I have ever encoutered. We thought our last living moments had come a few times as we drove along ravines with buses charging towards us, when the bus had to do a three point turn on a hairpin bend and backed incredibly close to the edge, when we passed tunnels at great speeds with about 4 inches either side, and when the back wheels on one side went off the road and over the drop for a split second.. That said in eight hours we saw so many different and beautiful landscapes, from mountain peeks to altitude plains where goats and llamas with colourful pompons sewn to their wool graze peacefully, then a sandy desert turning into a salty one at our arrival in Uyuni as the sun was setting. Then we found a 4WD tour leaving the next day and giving us the option of crossing over to san Pedro de Atacama, in Chile, so we booked ourselves on it and went to bed.
The next day we climbed into a jeep with Jose, our ever smiling guide, and four English girls just arrived from La Paz, and went off to explore the "salar" or salt flat of Uyuni, a vast dazzlingly white desert which deforms perspectives. We saw a rocky island covered in thousand year old cacti (they grow about 1cm per year!) and a strange (and illegal) salt hotel... The second day we reached altitudes of over 4000 metres, admiring snow capped smoking volcanoes and lunar landscapes, encountering along the way groups of vicuñas (another wild llama cousin, doe eyed and frail) and vizcachas ( which look like a rabbit crossed with a chinchilla). Insomnia and my camera struggling to cope with the altitude were a small price to pay to see the colourful lagoons filled with flamingoes that we reached that afternoon.
Our very basic accomodation that night didn't really isolate us from the freezing cold( temperatures drop as low as -20 celcius in winter) encountered at this altitude... luckily it was a short night, the wake up call was at 5 o'clock the next morning, to go and see some geysers at 4870 metres high and then have a dip in a 35 degrees C thermal pool before breakfast... not a bad start to the day!
Our trip in the South of Bolivia was nearly over, as jose dropped us off at the border crossing to Chile, a concrete shack between two snowy peeks, on a dirt road, with a couple of foxes and some seagulls for company, about 4600 metres high. From there a bus, appearing out of nowhere, took us straight to San Pedro de Atacama, 2000 metres lower in Chile, via a lovely smooth tarmac road (we were starting to miss them!)
Here prices are high (being in the middle of nowhere, in a tourist hotspot and in Chile) and so are temperatures during the day, but nights are still chilly. Tonight a bus is taking us up North towards Bolivia where we are headed, after stopping off en route to see a few things. ¡Hasta luego, amigos!