Awesome Desertness

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In a city called Arica now. It is on the Peruvian and Bolivian border in the north of Chile. Arrived here last night from San Pedro de Atacama.
Since I last wrote I have been on 37 hours of bus rides, eaten by weight in empanadas and have had more sand in my shoes to fill a child´s sandbox!
Stayed in a little hostel in San Pedro off the beaten path. The city itself was actually super bizarre. In the last ten years, it has really boomed with tourists, so that is pretty much what the city is all about. There were more tourists in the streets than locals and every corner had internet cafés and nice restaurants. I am really glad I visited because there is a good reason that people flock to this desert city, but I was also glad to leave because everything was overpriced and who likes to be in a tourist mecca anyway?
Took a bus to Arica last night and worked out my visa for Bolivia today. I leave for La Paz, Bolivia tomorrow morning.
Won´t write too much more because there are a ton of pictures with captions and that is all what you guys want to see anyway, right?

Love to you all.

Cassandra

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Photos

Valle de la Luna
Watching the sunset at Valle de la Luna near the town of San Pedro de Atacama could be one of the most popular things to do here. I was obviously very excited to be there to witness this beautiful daily occurance.

Reflection
After thumping around the geysers for a bit, we stopped at some really beautiful places, this being one of them, on the way back into town (San Pedro de Atacama).

Geysers del Tatio
About 2 hours from the town of San Pedro de Atacama. They say that this is the highest geyser field in the world. We saw at least a couple dozen geysers.

just liked the light in this shot
Took this near my hostel.

Close to my hostel in San Pedro de Atacama
The dusk cast such a beautiful light and such long shadows in San Pedro de Atacama that I was snapping left and right.

Flamingos
Kind of hard to see in this shot, but there were about 5 or so flamingos snacking in this pond like body of water. They weren´t super pink like we are used to. Maybe they are not eating the same brand of shrimp.

6am Spouting Geyser
Went on a tour to check out the Geysers del Tatio. The bus came to my hostel at 4am to pick me up. It was a two hour ride to the geysers and we wanted to get there by sunrise. We made it in time, but it was actually a tad too cloudy to see the sunrise. Oh well. Still a pretty incredible place to be!

Geyser at Rest
Some of the geysers go every 90 seconds and some every few hours. At any given time at this geyser field a geyser can just start spurting out extremely hot water straight into the air. It is funny because there were no fences or boundries, you just have to sort of watch yourself. I am so used to such strict rules and precaucions in the States that I am still not used to the lax attitude here in South America.

Sunset Somewhere in Chile
I can´t remember where I took this because it was from the bus. Oops!

Nothingness for Ages
This picture, beautiful, but not much there, illustrates what I saw out of the window of multiple buses for roughly 20 hours in the north of Chile.

Me Seriously Freezing
The Tatio Geysers are fairly high up and we were there pretty damn early in the morning. Therefore, it was abut -5 degrees celsius (ok smart ones, figure that out in fahrenheit, I am too tired and hungry at the moment to think...).

Bike racks
So, SF can´t seem to put enough bike racks on city streets but Chile figures out how to put bike racks in the desert!
Everyone rides bikes through the small town of San Pedro de Atacama and it is also popular for tourists to rent bikes and ride around the desert.

Comments

[rose Costello]

Ha! I love the picture of you squishing people. And the one of you at sunset is awesome, I made it my desktop background. miss you hermana, xx hermana