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Published: October 28th 2009
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Our guide drawing in the sandDay 3 I got up at 7:15 to shower. At 8 I went to get breakfast in the main building of the hotel. They had a really good breakfast. I had a banana, yogurt, toast w/butter, ham, and cheese, and some omelet. There was also juice, tea, cereal and lot of types of bread, yogurt and fruit. Everyone was really happy with the hotel breakfast. A lot of people made ham sandwiches to eat later. The bus picked us up for the archeological tour at 8:30. Our schedule said 8 am but I think they moved it back since we were really crabby and tired the day before.
We went to Tulor and Quitor. First we went to Tulor. Tulor was an ancient settlement. Now all you can see is the tops of what used to be the walls of homes. The sand has buried them over the years. There are a couple replica houses so you can see what the homes would have looked like. There is a path and a platform so you can look over the area and see the town. It wasn´t real exciting. Our tour guide talked for a while near the replicas and then we
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Hayley and I got to walk out to the platform and look.
Next we went to Quitor. Quitor was a city on the side of a hill. We didn´t talk a lot about the history of Quitor but we got to climb the hill and explore the ruins. The view was breathtaking (but I say that about every view). I feel like(almost) every place we went we would have wandered around for hours if they would let us.
The exception of where we wouldn´t wander around for hours would have to be the museum that we went to after Quitor and Tulor. The museum is actually in the town of San Pedro de Atacama so the bus dropped us off there and we walked back to our hotel when we were finished. Outside the museum was a stop light that told you how high the UV rays were that day. The day we went to the museum it was in the middle at orange. We wandered around in the museum for a bit. I like to just look at stuff more than read about all of it. There were a lot of artifacts in the museum and it reminded me of all of
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little hut Grandpa Hershey´s arrowheads and stone things. There was a bunch of gold stuff. Our tour guide couldn´t come in with us otherwise I´m sure it would have been more interesting. There was a group getting a tour in french while we were wandering around. It was kind of interesting but we were really antsy to enjoy the sun outside. Later our tour guide realized the museum wasn´t part of our tour package and we paid him since he paid for our entrance tickets out of his pocket.
We returned to the hostel not too long after we were dropped off at the museum. We decided that we all wanted to go swimming. The pool at the hotel was so cold that it was more like sun bathing with the occasional brave person that jumped in screaming and got out as fast as they could. It felt like they just kept filling up the pool with the coldest hose water. I think it probably had something to do with trying to keep the water from evaporating. The water wasn´t so bad once you got used to it. I compared it to taking an ice bath. I managed to work my way
in and swim around a little bit but I never got my head wet.
After swimming, a group of us walked downtown to eat lunch. I had a plate of meat, potatoes, and rice plus a pop for 2250 pesos ($5). It was really delicious and cheap. After lunch, Christina, Hayley and I wandered around the town a little bit. We walked through a big gallery and checked out the church. We went back to the hostel because the tour bus was going to pick us up again at 4:30. We went to Toconao.
Toconao is a little town where there is an oasis. We walked around on weird little paths through the woods. There were little doors and gates every so often with big locks on them. I guess they are all peoples farmlands and gardens. There were lots of pretty flowers. We had a lot of fun wandering through the woods. Christina kept poking people with sticks and grass. It was funny. We finally made it to where our guide wanted us to get to. It was a just a place on the edge of a cliff where there was a nice view. After that we just walked
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the buried huts back to Toconao. When we got to the city there was a random street parade going on. They were playing music and dancing. One group had really colorful uniforms.
After Toconao we boarded to bus to go watch the sunset at the Salar de Atacama. The salar is a national reserve for flamingos. It was really neat to see the flamingos in their natural habitat. They weren´t as pink as I expected but beautiful nonetheless. We were basically in a salt lake basin. There was some water but lots of dried up salt around. I took so many pictures of the flamingos and the sunset. It was awesome. After the sunset we returned to the hotel.
At the hotel I had a little snack, took a shower and then sat around outside chatting. Some people were going to a party out in the desert but I for sure didn´t want to go since we were getting picked up at 4:30 am to go to the geysers. When I went back to the room, Hayley was as hyper as I had ever seen her. She even did a backflip, even though I told her not to, haha. The next day someone
had complained about noise but I think it was from when we left at 4 am, not from the night before. Better yet, they complained about all the rooms in our building that had students in them which is funny since one room was empty because the boys went to the party and the other room of girls had went to bed a 10 p.m. The rooms weren´t very sound proof but I´m pretty sure people didn´t like us because we were loud, American students. Oh well! (Not all the photos show up on the page with the blog so click on photos to see more!)
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