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Published: April 14th 2015
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After a pleasant flight and nice few hours around the main square of Salta, we departed on an overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The bus was comfortable enough for a decent nights sleep, and we woke up somewhat short of breath at the Chilean border. We already got our first taste of high altitude there, since the border was at 4600m, and later crossed a pass at 4800.
San Pedro lies in the Atacama desert, in the north of Chile. Normally the driest place on earth, the Atacama desert had 2 weeks of rain till a few days before our arrival. As you may have seen in the news this has lead to massive floods in parts of the desert close to San Pedro. Luckily for the people in San Pedro, as well as for us, San Pedro itself was not affected by the floods.
From San Pedro there are many things to see, so we chose to spend quite some time here and see and do most of them. We visited one of the world's largest geysers: El Tatio, situated at 4800m. An early rise lead us to see the
geysers at sunrise, followed by a bath in thermal pools nearby. In addition we visited Valle de la Luna (Valley of the moon), a rugged landscape of peaks and valleys , with some places where the wind collected sand against the ridges forming sand dunes.
One unexpected highlight was sandboarding on those sand dunes. It turns out that with some off-piste snowboard experience you can get a long way. Luckily we had some lessons as well so that we could both enjoy. It was a bit tough walking up the dune, but completely worth it: not only did you get to slide down but there was also a beautiful view!
The absolute top experience for us there was climbing the Lascar volcano. The crater of this active volcano lies at an altitude of around 5500m. The plan was to start hiking at 4900 by driving up there with the car. But at 4600 the car got stuck in the snow (due to recent rain/snow mentioned above), so after getting the car unstuck we decided to hike the extra 300m up. After a challenging 5 hour hike we reached the crater, with large stretches of
our path being hacked out in the icy snow by our guide Carlos. The last part was the toughest, due to the lack of oxygen at altitude but also the mixed in sulfur fumes coming from the crater. The crater was raw and massive. Standing at the very edge we could not see the bottom; though we could see sulfur fumes coming from parts of the crater wall. A euphoric moment, which also reminded us very much of our Kilimanjaro climb. With the adrenaline of having reached this beautiful crater, the descent was easy. We made it down in 2 hours, with an amazing view of the valley below and surrounding volcanoes. Incredible!
Now we are in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia and we also still want to write an update on our trip through the Uyuni Salt Flats. To keep the posts manageable, we will write that in a separate post.
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zweiindians
Tulika
Great photos!
Wow these look amazing! sandboarding! I missed valle de Luna.