San Pedro de Atacama

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San Pedro de Atacama is in the north of Chile and is the driest place in the world. We arrived into a little town that was straight out of the wild west... ed expected a gun fight to break out at any minute. It's a lovely little town if a wee bit dry and dusty!! We spent the first day wandering around town going to the many (they are everywhere..) tour operators working out what we were going to do with our few days there. At 11pm the first night we went to a place about 15 mins just outside of town to visit a French guy´s (ALain) house. He gave us a tour of the skies!!! He gives an astronomy guide, he has 7 or so telescopes and he brings you through how to read the skies, shows you different types of stars etc, we even got to see Saturn through the telescopes and Ed got his photos. It was a really really entertaining night. Alain is incredibly knowledgable, passionate and highly entertaining about the stars and the skies. I would highly recommend anyone who finds themselves in San Pedro takes a night out for this.

We also decided to go and visit the geysers, so up again very early one morning and we found ourselves on a 2 hour bus journey on the coldest bus ever. We got up to the gesyers which are up over 4,000 mtrs, we walked around and saw steam, water and mud geysers....mad things altogether. It was cool to see especially as neither of us had ever seen anything like this before. We then had breakfast (bolided eggs cooked in the geysers) and I don´t think I have ever been as cold in my entire life...fingers & toes were beyond feeling at one stage. We then headed over to a pool of hot springs and thou Ed didn´t get in, I braved the cold again and had a quick dip....at least at this stage the sun was up and there was a little warmth in the air. Well worth the trip but bring loads and loads of layers.

Another day we went to visit the Lunar Valley, basically named so as the terain looks like what you would imagine the surface of the moon would be like. We had a lovely afternoon just visiting a few sites and walking through the valley. We then climbed up the top of the Sand dunnes and watched the sun set. While we watched the sun set in front of us, we then turned around and watched the sun set across the Andes Mountains, the changing of the colours was fab.

So all in all we did a fair bit in the little town of San Pedro... but it was time to move on and to the much awaited and anticipated Salt Flats in Bolivia.

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