We are experienced long-distance-bus-travellers buy now but on our way from Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama we were still practicing, which might explain the following.
But don’t worry, after about 24 hours we arrived safe and sane in San Pedro where we were greeted by a totally different landscape and a familiar French face.
San Pedro de Atacama is a small little desert town at about 2500m altitude with dirt roads, clay buildings, an unreliable hot water system and an even more unreliable ATM. The temperatures in winter are about 20 degrees during the day and 3 at night. We didn’t know much about the town before we went there and hadn’t planned to stay long, but San Pedro is surrounded by massive volcanoes (some more than twice as high as the one we had climbed in Pucon), beautiful lakes, salt flats, geysers, hot springs,… So much to do for the healthy traveller!
But we stayed in San Pedro for over a week due to these reasons:
- We ran out of cash and so did the one ATM in town. Therefore we had to wait for it to be filled up again before we could leave for Bolivia.
- We got sick and since the next leg of our tour was taking us up to 4200m we wanted to make sure that we are as fit as possible.
Unfortunately I had picked up some kind of flue in Valparaiso but luckily my body didn’t want it, so I quickly passed it on to the boys … Karim was still feeling OK at first, therefore we went on a little tour to look at some of the amazing water sights in the driest desert on earth whilst Rich commuted between bed and hammock.
The Laguna Cejar, a lake with a salt content of 30% (apparently this is more than the Dead Sea) was the first stop and we enjoyed some floating about. Interestingly the water there is freezing up the top and warm further down, so we discovered that in order to stay warm the best technique is to just float like a cork. Other popular floating options include the following:
From the Laguna Cejar we drove to the Ojos del Salar. Two perfectly round fresh water lakes that are so calm that they act as mirrors of the beautiful landscape.
We watched an amazing sunset at the Laguna Tebinquinche, where again the landscape was mirrored in the crystal clear water.
The next day both Ritchie and Karim were out of order, but in another coincidence we stayed in the same hostel as Mel and Mike (my brother’s friends who we had run into at some hot springs 2,500km further south) and Mike was keen to come for a ride through the Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley).
The Valle de la Luna seems to consist of sand and salt, which have been shaped in many different ways by wind and weather.
We also crawled through some salt caves, using the camera flash to figure out which way to head next…
But not only sand, salt and water make some stunning sights in the desert, another highlight is the night time sky. The stars are just amazing! And not only tourists but also astronomers have found out about this. An international group is currently building the largest array of radio telescopes about 30 minutes from San Pedro de Atacama. These 66 telescopes will have a diameter of 7-12 meters each! On a smaller scale, a French astronomer has set up about 10 ‘normal sized’ telescopes in his backyard and offers stargazing tours. Our own Frenchman Karim had seen a documentary about him and convinced us that this is the best way to see the stars. How right he was!
The next day we got money! This probably sounds trivial but for us this was a big achievement. In another big achievement, Rich and Karim got over their flu, so we set out to do a ‘must do’ of one year of winter: We went boarding. Since snow was rare but sand abundant, we settled on the latter and went sand boarding in the beautiful Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley).
LordsOfTheSand from Charly and Rich on Vimeo.
After we had distributed tons of sand to every inch of our bodies we went to the Valle de la Luna so that Rich and Karim could have a look at the salt caves as well – this time with flash lights!
Once we had found our way out of the caves, we climbed up one of the salt/sand mountains to watch the sunset over the ‘amphitheatre’.
Now that we had money and health, we were able to leave this charming little desert town behind to head off on a three day tour to Uyuni, Bolivia where Rich was convinced we would loose both money and health right away….. but more about this next time.
More photos (by the amount of photos you can tell how much we liked it in the desert…): https://picasaweb.google.com/109362659982164453049/SanPedroDeAtacama?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKDYkfam9I6GOA&feat=directlink
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