San Pedro de Atacama

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Monday 09-06: After leaving Arica at 10pm, I arrived in San Pedro the next morning around 11am. This day I didn{t feel like doing anything active so I settled down in a laid-back hostal (San Pedro lives on tourist-incomes so it can get quite expensive..) and booked some tours for the following two days also I reserved a place to go star-watching the same night, unfortunately, this didn{t go through due to clouds.
In the afternoon, I was watching Netherlands vs Italy which I really enjoyed!

Tuesday 10-06: At 9am I arranged a trip into one of the valley´s to go sand-boarding, but when I got to the agency it turned out that I was the noly one going that day, so Sam (the agency-guy) and I took mountain-bikes with a motor, hmz motor-bikes? and sand-boards on the back and went to go sand-boarding, which is absolutely great fun.
When we eventually came back at 12.30pm I went out for lunch and afterwards I went to Valle de la Luna with Sam, to see the sunset, basically I had a great day and found in Sam a good guy to talk and laugh with. After the sunset we needed to get back on our motor-bikes, which are of a chinese brand so basically the quality of the bikes were terrible and I´m just happy to be alive. Imagine: going in complete darkness on a bumpy road with holes etc.. on a motor-bike which sometimes suddenly turns off: new experience:p.
When we finally came back in San Pedro I directly went to the Star-watching agency for I knew that they had a tour for 10pm so I wanted to confirm that I was coming, however, when I came there it turned out that they were going at 7pm.. So I didn´t have time to eat and went with the group to Alain (an astronomer). I have to say that this star-gazing experience was already on my list of highlights before coming to South-America, so you can imagine that I had a great night. I´ve seen a close-up of the moon, saturnus with its ring, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, Nebulae etc.. What even made the tour better was our knowledgable guide Alain, who explained a lot in quite a short time, I really got the impression that he knows a lot and the sweetest thing actually was that the wife of Allain who knew that I didn´t had dinner yet, made me a sandwich and gave me a cup of tee with it, so basically my night couldn´t get spoiled anymore, not even by the extreme cold which we had to survive standing outside looking through the telescopes.

Wednesday 11-06: I took on a challenge: coming out of bed at freaking 4am to go to the Tatio-geysers: the highest geysers in the world: 4321m or somethings. Well the time was terrible but I´ve never seen geysers before so again I´ve seen some new things, but the freezing tempreature was almost unbearable. On the way back from the geysers we stopped at a village were I ate Llama-sate and a cheese-empanada before moving on again to San Pedro. Really good meat..
When I got back in San Pedro it turned out that my tour for the afternoon was cancelled due to a lack of people, actually I was quite glad about this because I wasn´t feeling like being active or anything, after having slept 5 hours the night before..

All in all, I have been doing a lot since Tuesdaymorning and finally have time now to relax, unfortunately, the sun isn´t shining so I am thinking about drinking some wine to warm up a little bit, hmmm chilean wine..

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