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Published: November 19th 2008
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Day 575 (24.10.08)
Nothing much to say for today as we had a whole 26 or so hours of travel before reaching our next destination. A quick hop back to Santiago from the coast and then a all day, all night journey to the Atacama desert where we´d arrive in San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town, at about 9am the next day. The semi-cama bus seats (half bed) were pretty comfy and we managed to get a fair amount of sleep overnight as well as making good progress with our books and watching some excellent ´Just for gags´ episodes on the coach TV.
Day 576 (25.10.08)
We arrived into the dust of San Pedro and immediately liked it there. This tiny little town used to be a stop on the andean cattle trail and is now pretty much a tourist town. That said it still has a great feel to it with its narrow grid of hard dirt streets and small rustic buildings. With Kayla, a Canadian lady we´d met on the bus, we found a place to stay for the night and freshened up ready to explore the town.
The town is easily walkable
from end to end and we spent the next couple of hours pottering around the shops and markets selling amazing brightly coloured local crafts and knitwear, checking out the stunning little San Pedro church and just wandering the streets.
Long journey tiredness hit mid afternoon and we retired for a siesta - an excellent local tradition. Feeling refreshed we went for another wander around town as the heat of the day started to recede. Although our hostel had a kitchen we weren´t allowed to use it to cook in as seemed to be the case in all other hostels in town. So as evening drew in we went for another walk to find something for dinner. Kayla had heard of a veggie place and we went off in search, we couldn´t find the place but spotted an interesting menu on the door of a cute little restaurant with crazy hats all over the walls and decided to go there. We chose one of the meals and also got a salad starter and a fruity pudding áll for about 3 quid - this had to go down as one the best restaurant finds we've made.
Stuffed to the brim
we meandered our way back to our pad and slept like the unconcious.
Day 577 (26.10.08)
After swapping hostels to a cheaper option we all went and hired some bikes for the day. There are many tours that can be booked from town to explore the wider countryside but for the budget concious there are plenty of cool options within reach by bike. Hitting the dusty desert roads we were destined for Tulor, which has the exposed foundations of a native community rising out of the sand. It was quite an amazing sight tucked into the desert landscape with volcanic peaks rising in the distance. We also checked out the reconstruction buildings to see what the area would have looked like and cooled down in the shade before making the 11km cycle back to San Pedro.
Taking a leisurely lunch and another siesta to escape the heat of the day we collected ourselves together in the afternoon for the biggie of the two cycles for today. We had planned a 39km round trip out to the Valle De La Luna to catch the sunset, a must-do activity in San Pedro. The way there was mostly uphill and
with the evening desert wind doing its best to hold us back it made for a pretty tough ride. As we neared the Valle the open landscape became more rocky and we passed canyons and beautiful jagged rock formations making the ride well worth the effort. We eventually arrived to join plenty of others who'd, perhaps wisely, gone with the bus option! We climbed the sand track to the view point and marvelled at a spectacular sunset as it took the sands and cliffs around us through an ever changing spectrum of colours.
The only trouble with cycling almost 20km into the desert to watch the sunset is that you then have another almost 20km ride back to town...in the dark. Thankfully it was mostly downhill on the way back and armed with our headtorches we made it back to town safe, sound and utterly exhausted! We´d had a fantastic day and topped it off with another great meal at our little restaurant, La Triba. Whilst there we met another traveller, Jason, who joined us for dinner and plenty of laughs.
Day 578 (27.10.08)
It was back on the bikes again this morning and whilst our butts
were none too impressed with this idea after yesterday there was more to explore before we left this evening. Jason joined our cycling trio today and the four of us were soon on our way to Valle de las Muertas (the valley of the dead). Once we were off the main road we tackled some interesting terrain which ranged from bumpy rocks to thick sand to make our way up through an incredible rocky valley to where we found some vast sand dunes. This was our goal as today we were going sandboarding, like snow boarding but on the dunes.
We spent the next couple of hours making the legbusting climb to the top of the dunes and trying to perfect the difficult techniques required to go further than a few metres in one go wihout having to stop to rewax the board. Chrissie with her efforts at 'bumboarding' definitley picked up the most speed of the day but Mark, Kayla and Jason all with snowboarding experience also had some excellent efforts standing up! Feeling hot and tired we headed back to town pleased to jump into the shower to wash sand from the many many places it had
managed to get to.
After a last meal in our favourite litte restaurant we went back to the hostel, picked up our bags and caught the night bus to Arica on the Chilean border. It turned out that, with a little tweaking from us all, our plans matched those of Kayla and Jason for a while so we were glad to continue travelling with them as we were having a lot of fun.
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