Desert oasis of San Pedro de Atacama

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After the high altitude of Bolivia, we headed to the coast and back to Chile. A little way in to bus trip we got into the police station and have our bags searched pretty damn thoroughly and our passports stamped. As a lot of cocaine gets in from Bolivia I guess they need to be thorough, but i'm not sure poking holes in my underwear was going to give the officials anything they were after.

The descent into town is monumental. From 5,000m above sea level to just 2,400m above sea level to the town of San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in the middle of the Atacama desert. The air is great, I can breathe properly again for the first time since I landed in Cuzco. We check into our nice hotel and our bags and clothes continue to gather dust, no point washing just yet! We walk into the centre of the tiny ramshakle town and get pizza (which was about the only option) and check out the town plaza and its nice little church. We are also encouraged not to waste water at the hotel as it has not rained in San Pedro de Atacama in three years! Looking at the surrounds, I believe that.

We join our Moon Valley tour (Valle de la Luna in Spanish), which features one very enthusiastic tour guide who starts the tour in three languages but ends up doing the tour in just English as everybody understands it which is a nice change. He gives us a pretty good geology lesson on how the formation of the Atacama desert occured why the landscape is the way it is - with the Nazca plate and the South American plate colliding and creating the Andean mountain range. Years of erosion and landslides have created impressive steep sand dunes where we see some people sandboarding down. We walk up to the top to get great views of the red sand of Mars Valley.

Our guide then decides that we will not get the bus back down but run down the steep dunes and meet the bus at the bottom. He instructs us to take off our shoes and socks and start the descent. Most of the 30 or so of us on the tour think he is joking as it is pretty damn steep but then, he takes off his shoes and socks and takes off in a very funny pogo style. Once again South American safety provisions apply and we take off barefoot on the burning sand trying to avoid sharp rocks.

I spend the next ten minutes on the bus trying the regain feeling in my flat feet which were burned badly from the hot red sand. The tour takes us to moon valley a spectacular landscape of rock formations and sand that looks like the moon surface. We climb around for a bit before taking a vantage point to watch sunset where it suddenly gets cold.

The sunset is amazing as the landscape turns purple and pink and many tourist buses witness the sunset from this point. We loved San Pedro de Atacama and could have stayed another day in the dust bowl full of adventure and life but we were happy to get getting out of the dust and heat to somewhere more temperate.

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Photos

Edge of the Nazca plate
The cause of the Andes mountain range

Mars Valley
Popular for sandboarding - which doesn't burn the feet as much!