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Published: March 17th 2007
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After returning to Santiago from Patagonia, we hit the bus (again) and headed north up the Chilean coast. A 7 hour bus ride got us to La Serena, a pretty beachside town in the region famous for growing pisco grapes for Chile´s famous and delicious pisco sours (pisco, egg white & sugar) - Ashleigh´s new favourite drink. That night in La Serena, we went to a local Chilean restaurant and had some more regional specialties including avocado stuffed with chicken and all kinds of things - avocados are absolutely everywhere here and they are bloody delicious! Plus you can get a whole kilo for less than the cost of 1 avo in Australia. Every restaurant seems to have a TV and there was a major soccer game between a Chilean and Argentinian team that night so we got to witness the South American passion for soccer first-hand which was fantastic - quite funny seeing the referees getting riot police escorts around the field!
The next evening we hopped on an overnight bus for the 16 hour trip up to San Pedro de Atacama in the very north of Chile, near the Bolivian border. Bus travel in Chile is suprisingly swish
and we were treated to fully reclining seats (like airplane business class) plus dinner & breakfast. It was only during the night that we read the Lonely Planet and discovered that there are no ATMs in San Pedro - and then realised we had no money left!! So in the middle of the night, luckily the bus stopped at some random town and Nath had to run through the streets of the town looking for an ATM - luckily he found one and we weren´t forced to beg in San Pedro for food & a bed.
We arrived at San Pedro in the morning - and what a change from the rest of Chile. Dirt roads all round, and all the buildings were low mud hut kind of things. You can walk through the whole town in about 5 minutes. It´s really mellow & chilled out, a great place to hang in for a few days.
The town is in the Atacama Desert which is the driest place on earth - it rains only a few times a year here with maximum 1mm of rain per year. So there is a massive water shortage and we discovered that
It was cold
That is our one and only fashion defence the hard way when attempting to have showers that night - the water in San Pedro is cut off from about 7pm until the morning so no showers, washing hands or even flushing the toilet!!
There are heaps of scenery highlights around the town, so we did a tour one afternoon (it´s too hot to do anything earlier in the day) which took us to massive sand dunes where we tried sandboarding. However that afternoon there was some freak weather occurrence in San Pedro and just as we were heading off, a massive storm hit with fierce winds which created a huge sandstorm in the town as everything is so dry and dusty. You couldn´t see further than a couple of metres away. Great conditions for heading out to the sand dunes! The locals were saying they´d never seen anything like it - there were even a few drops of rain - we have fantastic weather karma - rain in the driest place on earth!! Anyway, it made it all the more exciting but there were times standing on the top of the massive dunes that Ashleigh nearly blew away! And the sand blew against your skin like knives.
Yummy Llama Kebabs
Sometimes chewy, but always tasty It was great fun and Nath of course was a huge pro as he is at everything!!(?) Then we headed to some really cool salt caves, before arriving at Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley) for sunset. This is supposed to be the closest landform on earth resembling the moon; it´s quite surreal with strange orange formations carved by the wind. From the top of a big dune overlooking the valley, what a spectacular sunset!
The following morning we were up at the ungodly hour of 3:30am (Ashleigh handled that one really well) for a trip to the world´s highest geothermal field - a whole field of geysers at 4300m high which erupt each morning due to the volcanic activity (something to do with the lava under the ground heating the water and creating pressure which causes these things to spout water & steam up to 5 metres high). Two hours on a dirt road climbing over 2000m got us there just before sunrise, at a toasty temperature of -5C. The noise of these things erupting was awesome, the strong stench of sulphur in the air not so great. This was followed by a swim in the thermal springs
where the water temperature is around 40C. We got to visit a tiny local village on the way back where we ate llama whilst at the same time getting to walk through the village´s llama farm - something a bit wrong about that!
It was Nath´s 27th birthday so that night we had as posh a dinner as you can have in the middle of the desert. To our absolute delight and surprise we had food which was seriously 2 chefs hat standard and even better, including two courses and drinks the whole thing only cost $30!!
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Mel
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ATM's
Ummm.... yep.... I should have really warned you about the lack of ATM's in San Pedro.... I was OK there but discoverd that there are none once you get to the Bolivian side either. The photos and stories are fabulous! Brings back so many memories. So jealous!