San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

The trip from Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama was the longest bus journey I have taken in my life and lasted 23 hours. I expected it to be tough and I tried to buy one of the Executive seats that can recline fully, but I got on the bus and found out I had an ordinary seat. I had bought a bottle of Chilean red to open 'in case of emergency', but luckily the journey turned out to be a lot less painful than I expected and so the bottle didn't get opened until my second night in SPDA.

SPDA (I am not going to write it out every time!) is in the Atacam desert in northern Chile, which is apparently the driest desert in the world. I am not too sure how this was worked out, but as a result it is home to a few observatories that could be seen from the bus on the way in. It is at an altitude of around 2600 metres and therefore I am now starting my three or four weeks up high. I will be Uyuni in Bolivia in a couple of days and it is about 1000 metres higher, so SPDA is a good stopping point on the way up.

SPDA is a small town with less than 2000 inhabitants, according to a sign on the way in; and it only takes about ten minutes to walk from one side to the other. The town is several hundred years old and it looks old due to the stone and clay, one-story buildings that fill most streets. Tourism is big business here though and most of the said buildings are home to tour companies, restaurants, bars etc. The only development it lacks is good ATMs. It only has two and they are both unreliable.

SPDA used to be, and I guess still is, a bit of a hippy retreat. As it is small and quiet it is a good place to just sit about, which is what I have done with most of my three days here. I did go jogging today, which was easy despite the altitude, but it was yesterday I exerted myself the most with a bike ride out into the desert.

I went through a path called the "Cordillera de la Sal" (which roughly translates into 'Salty Hills'). This path was flanked by steep, red walls of dusty rock, sand dunes and the occasional little pit of salt. It was very tough to ride through because the sand was up to three or four inches deep at times. This, combined with the blazing sun made it difficult; especially on a large stretch of hill that was basically like climbing up a sand dune. I couldn't cycle on that part and so I had to push the bike up and stop regularly to get my breath back. It was annoying when I reached the top and found that there was a fairly solid stone path that wasn´t too steep on the other side. I wish I had gone in the other direction. The way back was along the main highway so I enjoyed a nice tarmac road. I also enjoyed some good views over the desert and the town from a few viewpoints along the way.

The afformentioned bottle of Chilean red got opened that evening. I shared it with an American girl in my room as I didn't want to have the whole lot myself when I was in the hostel. In return for a free drink, she showed me a few stretches for my now-chronic groin injury. I am sure this sounds like there was more to the evening than just a bottle of wine, but this wasn't the case. She happened to be a physioterapist and I was only after some medical advice!

The American girl left at 10 pm to watch the lunar eclipse that was happening that evening and I had planned to just stay in the hostel. I ended up going out too though as my Scotland top sparked a conversation with a Scottish girl (the 10th Scot I have met here in over two months - I wish more of us would travel) and she invited me to join her, an English girl and a Chilean guy for a walk out into the desert to watch the eclipse. We stopped by the shops on the way out and I ended up drinking a bottle of wine out in the desert, which defeated the purpose of me sharing the earlier bottle. Still, at least I had company rather than drinking alone, which would have been bad.

The lunar eclipse was incredible; just like our fortune. Lunar eclipses don't happen every week and, by chance, we were in the best place on earth to observe the sky. When the moon disappeared the sky quickly filled with thousands of stars and the Milky Way could be seen very clearly. It was great to sit at midnight chatting and drinking wine in the cool and quiet of the desert and it was one of those times that are just impossible to fully describe. I couldn't capture it on camera either as digital cameras just aren't capable of picking up such a sight. When the moon returned, it was red for a while before turning white again and this was another great sight.

I am leaving SPDA tomorrow morning to start a 3-day tour of the desert, which will finish in Bolivia. I have put the photos I have taken onto Facebook and it has just occurred to me that I can put the links in my blog: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28199&l=6956b&id=603086503.

---

---