Advertisement
Published: September 20th 2008
As we said in the previous blog the difference between Bolivia and Chile hit us the very second we crossed that border... the landscape is pretty much the same just on the other side of the mountains but the roads, houses, food and most noticeably the price could not be more different.
San Pedro de Atacama is one of the main routes in or out of Chile and most people just use it as a cross point to get up to Peru or Bolivia or further down to Chile or Argentina which is exactly what we were doing. In saying this, there is a farily major attraction close to the town and that would be the start of the driest place in the world.. The Atacama Desert, in some places this desert have never ever seen any rain which is amazing.
We spent our first day there just getting taken in by how lovely the town was and how upmarket all the restaurants were, we were literally open mouthed at the difference in the quality of the food and town itself. It is such a pretty little town with a beautiful white church in the centre by the plaza
and you could easily get caught up in its charm and spend a long time here.
The prices however scared us a little, especially considering we are nearing the end of our South American part of our trip and therefore our budget so we booked ourselves on the first available bus to Salta which was on Tuesday morning giving us only one full day to enjoy what San Perdro de Atacama had to offer us.
There are many many trips you can do here.. the Valley de la Luna, Geysers, trekking, horse riding etc but we choose to do Sophie´s favourite activity of bike riding.. hooray! Dale was keen to visit the Valley de la Luna so we hired a couple of bikes for 1/2 day and set off on our way to this mysterious landscape just outside the town.
The ride actually wasn´t too bad because it was fairly flat and along a nice tarmac road which made it easier on the behind. Sophie´s confidence had also grown since that dreaded first ride on the Worlds Most Dangerous Road so she found it almost enjoyable! It was very hot though and we had soon worked up
a sweat flying along the road when we reached our first off road opportunity...
We left the main road and cycled along a dirt track towards some caves that were crying out to be explored. These caves are found at the bottom of the strange moon landscape rocks and Dale jumped at the opportunity to climb up them with Sophie watching over in case he came crashing down again and someone had to go and call for help. With the caves nearly fully explored.. not totally because there were some tunnels that even Dale wasn´t going to be silly enough to try to go down with no idea of where they may lead... we set off again back to the main road to continue our adventure futher into the unknown.
The Valley de la Luna is so called because it really does resemble something you would imagine seeing on a different planet, the rocks are a strange sandy red colour and form all sorts of shapes and sizes you probably won´t find anywhere else. The best formations though were another 5km or so futher on where it looked like a scene straight out of Star Wars or Superman.
In some places the rocks had strange crystal shapes which really reminded us of Supermans home on planet Krypton. There really were proper crystals in some places too which Sophie unsucessfully tried to free up by kicking them with ideas on making pretty necklace.
You could climb up, in and over these rocks and we spent ages away from the dreaded bikes exploring all parts of it. There was one part though that Sophie got a little scared in when she ventured off on her own and it led to a really black tunnel and you couldn´t see the end. She ran back to Dale to help her explore it properly and pushed him in first in case the creature from the cave decided to attack and she could be the one to run for help because she is obviously the fastest ;o) !
Back on the bikes again we went further into the park until we reached quite a steep hill, it was just so hot and we both had to get off and push as we passed dramatic sanddunes to each side. By the time we had gone down the other side and approached yet another
hill we both agreed that it was just too hot (and we´d nearly ran out of water) to carry on so made our way back to the town.
Most people go to the Valley de la Luna in the late afternoon to watch the sunset but we really can´t understand why because you get the best out of it by going in the bright sunshine and having the time to explore everywhere without rushing before it gets dark.
We both thoroughly enjoyed our solo biking day and would recommend that if anyone is thinking of going this way to hire the bikes out yourselves rather than go on a tour which would restrict what you are able to see.
So we´d sent 2 days in San Pedro de Atacama and although it is a really nice town and we would have loved to stay longer it sadly isn´t ideal for the low budget backpacker so we had to move onto our next stop of Salta back in Argentina. This means steak for Dale and wine for Sophie so neither of us were sad at the thought of returning to this great country....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.057s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0345s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Neece
Denise
Chile or Argentina
If I come to South america and don't get to Chile but visit Argentina and Patagonia, do you think I'd be missing much?? we have 14 days only/