San Pedro de Atacama: Dances with llamas

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There is a nice element of poetic circularity to this blog, as given my lack of commitment to my writing over the past month, I sit here writing about San Pedro, once again IN San Pedro. I have come down from the sunny climes of northern Peru to visit my brother on his World Challenge trip to Chile, and have spent the last 4 days or so back in the desert, following a 40 hour bus journey from Máncora. There´s brotherly love for you! But that´s a story for another time. Let´s rewind the clock back 2 months, to my first arrival in the Atacaman oasis of San Pedro.

We arrived after dark, and joined forces with a few travellers from our bus in an attempt to find a hostel. All four of them were French, although Audrey, with whom we spent much of our time in the area, and indeed the first four or five days in Bolivia as well, had lived in England for several years, and as a result spoke utterly perfect English, which was useful in not excluding Katie from the group conversation! We checked into a quaint little place with a hammock-strewn courtyard and outdoor showers, and had a quick dinner in a tiny spot next door, full of boisterous locals who were delighted to speak to us in Spanish. Back at the hostel, we had a quiet evening chatting into the wee hours with our new friends over a few beers.

The next day we lay in rather late, and woke up to find that Audrey, up since the crack of dawn, had researched and organised the following 3 days activities, and all that was left for us to do was cough up the cash! We stepped out into the street for the first time in daylight, and never in my life have I felt more like I just walked onto the set of a Hollywood production. With its parched, dusty streets and whitewashed adobe buildings, it does not require huge powers of imagination to picture yourself in the midst of Clint Eastwood´s Wild West. Short of a few tumbleweeds and swinging saloon doors of course. The climate is also somewhat peculiar. I have never been anywhere where the difference in temperature between the sun and the shade is so marked. So hot that you can quite easily burn in the sun, the minute you step inside or into the shadow of a building, the temperature simply plummets to incredible levels. Real hat and scarf stuff. It makes simply walking around quite a task, having to put on and take off more clothes in one afternoon than your average New York Fashion Week model. During the day the streets are filled with dozens of backpackers and even more touts trying to sell you everything from "happy hour¨ coupons to tours into Bolivia. Indeed, tourism is almost the sole raison d´être for San Pedro (well, it´s certainly not agriculture!) and its bustling, tiny streets are jam packed with agencies, internet cafés, artesan workshops and restaurants, making it a most extraordinary sight in the heart of the driest desert in the world.

Our first afternoon was spent browsing the various market stalls around town, and that evening we jumped into a minibus bound for the famous Valle de la Luna, a surreal, lunar landscape 13km outside of San Pedro, carved into startling rock formations by millenia of sand and wind erosion. The main attraction in the Valle is the sunset, a stunning sight which suffuses the landscape with intense shades of purple, red and gold. At least it would have been stunning but for our incompetent guide. Amazingly, as we stood on a hilltop expectantly looking in the direction of the sun (as you would, during a sunset spectacle!) she failed to point out that the main show was actually behind us! So it wasn´t until the sun was nearly below the horizon that we turned around looking for the supposed ´sunset of a lifetime´ and saw the rich colours disappearing at the peak of the mountains behind us. Naturally we were ever so slightly frustrated with our guide, and returned to town feeling somewhat cheated. After a quick dinner (and absolutely NO alcohol, or so our tour guide insisted) we went to bed early in preparation for a 4am start, and our first trip above 5000m to the El Tatio geysers, located around 90km from town near the Bolivian border. Time for an anecdote. In preparation for our first exposure to serious altitude, we made our first cup of coca tea, which locals swear is a great way to fight off soroche, or altitude sickness. Not the world´s tastiest beverage, we thought we´d sweeten it up with some sugar, at which point Audrey tipped half a cup into her tea... only to find after a deep gulp that it was in fact salt that she´d administered. Cue general hysterics. One of those ¨had to be there¨ moments perhaps!

After a groggy wake up before dawn, we hopped in a bus to the geysers, but not before stopping to pick up some other tourists at their hostels. Cue the moment our trip changed forever, as, disregarding all warnings, a group of 7 lads jumped on the bus, pissed out of their heads having not even gone to bed the night before. Initially I admit I wasn´t overly predisposed towards their drunken antics as I fought off sleep and altitude sickness at 4am, but as it turns out Adam S, Aussie Adam, Tom, Mark, Robbie, Ali and Joe were to prove stellar company over the next 3 weeks or so of our trip. I still occasionally run into one or two of them. The trip itself was fantastic, watching the geysers steadily build up pressure and explode into the air in a hiss of steam and boiling water, and then jumping into a nearby hotspring at an outside temperature of -2 degrees! We then visited a tiny little mountain village, where we took some stunning photographs and ate llama for the first time from a little old man grilling kebabs at the side of the road. It was perhaps the most remote place I´ve visited since Renchinlumbe in Mongolia, with a population of no more than a dozen or so, and only one dusty main street leading up to a cute, whitewashed church overlooking the village. It looked like a place where the pace of life hasn´t changed in centuries, although that first impression was betrayed as I discovered solar panels hidden behind several of the thatched cottages! We were back in town by lunchtime, and almost immediately we were whisked away on another tour, this time to the nearby salt lakes. With twice the salt content of the Dead Sea, these small lakes are ideal for floating in, that is if you can bear the sub-zero temperatures. We got some hurried, but great photographs, and then drove to the ¨Eyes of the Desert¨, two freshwater lakes ideal for washing off the salt sticking to our skin. We then sat and watched the sun go down over the mountains with a glass of pisco sour and some nibbles, and I must say it was twice as spectacular as anything we saw in the Moon Valley.

We returned to San Pedro for dinner, and bid goodbye to our 3 French companions, as the next day we were off on a four day journey in a 4x4 over the Salar de Uyuni and into Bolivia. And although we didn´t know it at the time, we would be joined by a certain group of lads, making for the trip of a lifetime.

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