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Published: June 23rd 2009
San Pedro de Atacama is a really strange little town in the middle of the driest desert in the world. Although it gets points for having sandy streets, the backpacker atmosphere here is overwhelming and this desert oasis is filled with tourists who think they are better than other tourists becuase they carry their worldy posessions on their backs instead of wheeling them around. Many people here are using this town as a jumping off point for a tour into the salt flats of Bolivia, which was my plan as well, so I spent my couple of days here researching and arranging that trip and exploring the area a bit. The sunsets in this desert are beautiful and if you find some high ground you can watch the perfectly shaped volcano that watches over the town change into shades of orange and pink and purple at dusk. One night I watched this happen from some pre-Inca ruins, which made it possible to imagine the indigenous peoples of the region worshipping the sun from the same place I was.
The most worthwhile thing I did in San Pedro was an astrological tour just outside of town where an eccentric French man
showed freezing Northern Hemisphere-ians the sky. We looked through state-of-the-art telescopes to see Saturn's rings perfectly, as well as the Milky Way and even other galaxies more brightly and clearly than I ever had before. We learned about constellations as they are seen from the South in both the present day and as the Incas considered them. You can learn a lot about a culture by what they see in the stars and our host was able to make it all fascinating. When the moon came up at about 11 p.m. we examined that and even got to take photographs through the telescopes. It's amazing how just looking up at night without any of the light pollution of civilization can make you contemplate things and evaluate what is really important. We should all probably stargaze more frequetly to give some perspective to our lives.
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Uncle John
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memories
Your stargazing experience brought back some pleasurable 33 year old memories of a backpacking/mountaineering trip in the middle of the Olympics in Washington State. I was helping to lead a group of teenage boys and girls on a ten day cross country expedition. We spent one evening enthralled by the stories of the stars shared by a shy, geeky 14 year old boy who knew both the science and the mythology. It was fascinating. And it let us get to know this otherwise very quiet boy.