Back to Chile again

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To quote my guidebook, San Pedro de Atacama is 'more Spanish Indian than is usual in Chile'. It's a small town in the middle of the Atacama desert, with streets lined with traditional adobe houses. It would be a lovely little town, if it weren't so touristy. The main street is just lined with ways to extract money from people...travel agencies, restaurants, bars and more. Or maybe that's just me being sour grapes - after Argentina, Chile suddenly seemed incredibly expensive, so I couldn't afford to go out. But having said that, San Pedro is quite a relaxed kind of place - apart from going on excursions, there wasn't a huge amount to do, so it was good for chilling out at the hostel and chatting to people.

One of the main excursions that pretty much everyone does is to the Valle del Luna (Moon Valley), in the desert about 12 kilometres from San Pedro. I was going to do the excursion, but then over breakfast on my first morning I met an English couple, Beth and Tom, who said they were going to cycle there, and I thought, why not? Our aim was to get to the Valle de la Luna for sunset (along with all the tour groups!) but stopping off to see a few sights along the way, including some caves and a canyon. The desert wasn't anything like I was expecting it to be. I think I was expecting it to be typical undulating sand dunes, but instead there were all kinds of surreal rock formations, covered in a layer of salt. The canyon was particularly beautiful and eery...I swear some of the shapes looked like people trapped in the sand (or maybe that was my overactive imagination).

As I said, we were aiming to get to the Valle de la Luna for sunset, but 12 km is a long way to cycle at an altitude of 2,500 metres. We just made it...sunset was at 6.20pm, and at 6.15pm we were huffing and puffing our way up a massive sand dune to the mirador (only to discover when we got there there was a much easier way up!). The sunset was beautiful, and the light over the valley made it look like something out of this world...quite moon-like, in fact. Having seen the sunset, and recovered our energy a bit, we had to cycle back, in the dark. Although I knew there was little danger of us getting lost, as there was basically one road, it was still a little unnerving to be out cycling in this vast desert, with no-one else around. So I was pretty glad when we made it back to the bright lights of San Pedro.

Lucy, who I used to work with, said that one of the best things she did while she was in South America was a 'star tour', run by a French astronomer, whose name I can't remember now, who has his own observatory in the desert about 6km outside of San Pedro. With a recommendation like that, I had to do it. The sky over San Pedro is incredibly clear, so you get an amazing view of the night sky. I have to admit to knowing nothing about stars and constellations, so it was a great chance to learn more, such as which is the star closest to the earth (alpha centauri, I think). After he explained a few things to us, like pointing out a few constellations and how they were named, we got the chance to look through the telescopes, to see things like other galaxies, nebula, and saturn with its rings. I even got a photo of Saturn! The tour finished with a hot chocolate, which we definitely needed - it's bloody cold in the desert.

This was only a flying visit back to Chile, as the next morning I was off to Bolivia, via the salt flats to Uyuni.

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Photos

Sunset, Valle de la Luna
My camera batteries ran out at this point, so I couldn't take many photos